The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot

[Jim Choate]

On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:

> At the June meeting I drew a graph which makes the point clearly. A pity 
> I can't draw it here. (Yeah, there are ways. My new Web page should have 
> some drawings soon. But this list is about ASCII.)
> 
> Plot "Value of Being Untraceable in a Transaction" on the X-axis. This 
> is the perceived _value_ of being untraceable or private. Start with 
> "little or nothing," proceed to "about a dollar" then to "hundreds of 
> dollars" then to "thousands" then to "tens of thousands and more."  (The 
> value of being untraceable is also the cost of getting caught: getting 
> caught plotting the overthrow of the Crown Prince of Abu Fukyou, being 
> outed by a corporation in a lawsuit, being audited by the IRS and them 
> finding evaded taxes, having the cops find a cache of snuff films on 
> your hard disk, and so on.)

Unfortunately the situation is more multi-variant than a simple two-axis
graph...

There needs to be at least a time axis added as well as splitting out the
'cost of transaction' from the 'cost of anonmymity'. By combining the two
a whole zoo of behaviours are ignored. Your graph, and any point from it,
isn't worth looking at in anything less thana 5-axis phase space.


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