Pricing Mojo, Integrating PGP, TAZ, and D.C. Cypherpunks

dmolnar dmolnar at hcs.harvard.edu
Tue Nov 20 20:14:56 PST 2001


On 21 Nov 2001, Anonymous wrote:

> Supposing you and others were willing to pay Nomen a modest sum for this
> service, how could you do so using Paypal or Amazon, and allow him to
> retain his anonymity?

On the off chance that this isn't rhetorical, because at least one way of
doing this seems straightforward...

Some guy with a true name good enough to sign up for PayPal gets an
account, publishes a public key, and acts as a human "cash remailer."
Well, several people do, actually, and then we run a "payment MIX." Some
anonymous poster brought up the idea about a year ago IIRC and attributed
it to Ron Rivest. It sparked a short discussion which went into questions
of whether such an operation might run afoul of money laundering laws and
then sort of petered out. Or maybe I just stopped reading.

To spell it out, Nomen offers to do the service and picks an incoming
payment MIX plus a chain of MIXes. (N.B.: will use MIX to refer to a
member of the chain).  Publishes a "payment reply block" which has the
incoming payment MIX PayPal address in clear, plus a block encrypted with
the payment MIX's public key. The encrypted portion has the PayPal address
of the next MIX in the chain, plus an encrypted portion for that next MIX.
Eventually it decrypts to reveal Nomen's real PayPal account info.
Assuming everyone plays along, the money flows down the chain and ends up
in Nomen's PayPal account. I expect that's not such a great assumption
when dealing with "real" money.

You still have the BlackNet problem, though - Nomen1 and Nomen2 can both
publish public payment blocks. Which one do you pay? In this particular
case, though, you can address that (and the fair exchange problem) by
doing what Stephen King did -- Nomen does a little bit of the work first
for free, then continues iff enough people ante up for more. You use the
payment block signed by the same key which signed the current work.

Now that I think about it, you could probably take this down the route
Eric Hughes suggested in his "Universal Piracy Network" presentation at
DEF CON IV. That is, people pay Nomen and in return Nomen sends them the
new work first; they get 0-day access to the warezzz. Hughes had something
about "completion bonds" in his presentation as well, but I don't remember
at all what the particulars were, just that there was a rough analogy to
the movie industry. Anyone remember more details?

I have half a mind to sign up for PayPal just to try this. (Assuming I
won't be thrown in jail for money laundering, anyway). Anyone with me?

Nomen? :)

Although I feel compelled to point out that with only one MIX, it's not
going to be particularly secure for Nomen. Not to mention with no
provision for detecting MIXes who shave off the payment or eat it
entirely, this might just be me trying to make a few quick $$$. Of course
if this were large-scale, you could use reputations -- a MIX which eats
the entire $$$ now loses out on the possibility of shaving small fractions
of $$$ later.

Also, with provision for detecting MIXes who give good payments, there's
nothing to stop Nomen from alleging that I'm screwing him and ruining my
reputation. As a potential MIX, that bothers me. So there are issues here.

>
> An alternative solution is barter.  Nomen could agree to search certain
> years of archives, or certain topics, in exchange for other people working
> on other parts of the project, for example.  Information barter can be
> performed while retaining anonymity.  Maybe systems to facilitate barter
> could be developed if anonymous cash remains out of reach.

right, like the barter a Nomen is trying to do with Marc right now...and
which doesn't seem to be working too well so far. Although in that case it
seems like the problem was just that this Nomen set up the terms of the
barter without bothering to ask if the other party actually wanted to
trade. That's like this guy at Coney Island I met a few months back.

"You wanna throw a dart?? Here! Here! Free!"
<throw two darts>
"Now you owe me five dollar!"

(I paid. Yes, I'm a wuss. I got a cute fan out of it. I'm never doing
business like that at Coney Island ever again.)

-David





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