Incentives in Networking

[Rayservers]

On 11/23/09 15:08, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> ----- Forwarded message from Paul Syverson <syverson at itd.nrl.navy.mil> -----
> 
> From: Paul Syverson <syverson at itd.nrl.navy.mil>
> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:05:49 -0500
> To: or-talk at freehaven.net
> Subject: Re: The Case for Banning Reduced Hop Count Implementations
> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17 (2007-11-01)
> Reply-To: or-talk at freehaven.net
> 
> Thank you Lucky. I had been meaning to write something like your
> post.
> 
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 02:43:47AM -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Lucky Green <shamrock at cypherpunks.to> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> seeking higher anonymity. The end state, if lower than three hop
>>> implementations are permitted to use the Tor network, is that Tor's
>>> network performance will acceptable only to users of lower hop clients.
>> I presume you can back this assertion up with simulation results, at a minimum?
>>
>> I look forward to reading your paper.
> 
> Even if Lucky's basic points are eventually born out, you are right
> that more analysis of latency and incentives would be valuable.  To

Incentives in Networking

Too long has the community of anonymity software writers ignored the tragedy of
the commons. If each tor router could advertise a price for amount of megabytes
transferred, it would be a self healing system.

Nodes that are overloaded would raise their price. Nodes that had spare capacity
would lower theirs. Intelligent clients would be able to pick a route that best
suits their latency needs.

This quickly becomes a complex scenario like the travelling salesman problem
that Web 1.0 and 2.0 technology will not solve. The "semantic web" of Web 3.0
only makes sense in an environment where information is not centralized on an
RDBMS with a PHP front end.

The RDBMS has been a crutch for programmers who cannot search data in memory. It
is also a crutch of those who fail to dig deep into persistence. In an online
world, persistence to disk is a crutch and a danger to those that seek
anonymity. Better that your data is out there - like on Tahoe - encrypted to
your key, but in memory like Scalaris with intelligent spooling to encrypted
disks on nodes so equipped. Boot from CDROM. Look mama, no data on disk.

SMTP was the high point of Web 1.0 protocols. Why? Because it implements queues
and asynchronous messaging. It can be near instant, not much slower than a http
POST. It can be secure - and the anonymity high as in mixmaster.

What describe I call Web 4.0. It will enable Economically Viable Self Extending
Wireless Networks. https://freedom.rayservers.com/Web+4.0

Incentive Settlement

The other requirement of Web 4.0 is settlement. Since credit cards, there has
been a refusal to look at the problems of settlement. There was little
incentive. Digital cash did not make it not because the technology sucked, it
was because they did not look into settlement. Credit cards succeeded not
because they were wonderful, but because they caused promissory liabilities to
be created by both the buyer AND the seller. It was a God send for the official
scammer = the bankers. Settlement quietly centralized at the DTCC
[www.dtcc.com], where the Quadrillion Dollar figure is quietly touted on their site.

Ignorant of what settlement is, or how *they* caused the flood of promissory
checking account liabilities, the common people today are destroying the
promissory liabilities they created. "Crisis" by design. They have been entrapped:

http://www.rayservers.com/blog/generating-power-from-stupidity---the-harsh-truths-of-the-world-financial-system

You can only settle what you issue. This, put tersely is the problem. Each tor
node can issue tokens of megabytes of encrypted data transferred. Each can
settle its own tokens. It will have to accept tokens of other value issued by
other nodes in payment. No need for digital cash. Postage meters are enough. See
https://loom.cc/

Its cheaper than "free"

The cost of accessing the internet is not zero. A monthly charge is paid to the
ISP - either dial-up or broadband. People with a server on the web pay a monthly
hosting fee. If you are google, your monthly bill is not trivial. The sum of
these payment streams is what pays for the "free" services in some fashion.

Starving Web 1.0

The gang of 535 and their minders are busy creating "laws" that ISPs must
enforce rights in imaginary property so that no one focuses on the fact that
*they* stole all the real property in cohorts with the financial fraudsters.

Be that as it may, it will become cheaper for ISPs to offer "so many bytes" of
encrypted data transferred than to continue to amortize their running costs via
inefficient allocation of revenue streams from retail accounts.

It will become cheaper for those who adopt Web 4.0 DSL routers to access the web
as the ISP is freed of his obligations to monitor the content. This will take a
court case or two, but it will happen.

Tor will have to grow up. Web 4.0 will have to support asynchronous messaging.
Why? Because your PC is nothing more than a glorified dumb terminal - enabling
the centralized control of society. The pendulum will inevitably swing the other
way out of necessity. Low latency does not get better than your own PC for
"streaming media" such as videos.

SMTP Email has become a centralized database on a handful of NSA sites with
popular brand names. This will have to move back to a mixmaster style pay per
message system. No spam, or at least, they will have to pay your *ask price* to
accept an email.

The semantic web of 3.0 will have to become a reality as searching for
information will not be searching a centralized database like Google. Searches
will cost some money... again your total bill will be *less* than your monthly
broadband bill unless you are consuming HDTV movies. In which case, you can pay.
Suddenly RIAA is our friend. They can *sell* content, reverse auction style,
which is how it is anyway in the content industry. See RAH's rants somewhere.

Is the current code base of Tor going to evolve to achieve all this? I think
not. Code will have to be written with higher levels of abstraction.
Transactions will have to queue. MVC will yield to continuations.

The geopolitical outlook

It is not pretty. A bunch of scammers stole all the people's gold by fraud and
war. They have all the guns... Every "citizen" the world over is their
registered slave. Fathers and mothers gave their children up as chattel property
of the State [Register = give to the State]. It is fraud on a scale you cannot
imagine, yet it pervades the air so you do not see it.

An anonymous life.

A pseudonymous life for a writer may be attractive. Better yet, to construct
engines of wealth that run on their own. The old fashioned tools are
corporations. In the future they will be private express trusts. The only
difference is that the latter won't be "registered" with the official scammers.

People have begun to notice these scams. Some brave Americans are in court.
http://www.rayservers.com/blog/rodney-class-vs-us

This is the stuff of world change. Web 4.0 will be a part of it. You can sneer
from the sidelines or take part.

Cypherpunks write code... I hope to be one (of many in the future) who can pay
such people by creating an ecosystem for such code and bring about what is
needed. In the mean time, see you on https://freedom.rayservers.com/

Cheers,

---Venkat.