Making Money in Digital Money

[Tim May]

On Saturday, April 26, 2003, at 06:41  AM, Adam Shostack wrote:
> I've said it before, but I'll say it again: Law enforcement was not
> the large problem that you predicted for ZKS.  The large problem was
> that the problem we were solving was that most people don't understand
> the privacy threat from internet monitoring.  They don't understand
> how it works, they don't understand what can be gleaned, and so
> they're not really all that concerned.  Related to this, what people
> think they know about internet privacy mostly revolves around cookies,
> credit cards, and identity theft, and thus Norton's personal firewall
> with a cookie manager sells well.

I don't believe ZKS ended up targeting the remailer niche ("space") we 
are interested in. In the years that Freedom nyms were being sold, how 
many were used to post to this list? How many were used to post to 
Usenet? A set nearly of measure zero.

I assume _some customers_ were using Freedom...I just don't recall ever 
receiving a message from any of them, or seeing any of them on the 
lists and groups I frequent.

So the uses I expected would expose the owners of Freedom to 
investigation for (just as operators of remailers have been exposed to 
being shut down for) never materialized.

We will never know whether ZKS would have faced pressures when it was 
used for song-swapping or extortion threats or child porn, as the 
customer base never got large enough.

(I still check in on www.zks.net occasionally to see what's going on. 
Stuff about firewalls and viruses.)


--Tim May