Re: Handling Abuses of Remailers

>In article <CypherPunksList.0606@arcticus.UUCP> tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C.
>May) writes:
>> * To handle _abusive volumes_ through remailers, charge for remailing.
>> Short term, this may be a problem, but this is the long term market
>> solution.
>
>  Quick but relevant question: Assuming a commercial anonymous remailer
>were set up tomorrow, with (don't ask me how this would be done, it's
>hypothetical...) provable anonymity -- what should it charge per message,
>or per kilobyte of message?
>
>> -Tim May
>> tcmay@netcom.com        | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
>
>Chris - Xenon

I don't know. That's for the market to decide.

This is not a glib answer. There is no "real" price for any service or
commodity, only a complicated emergent market price that typically evolves
and changes.

An anonymous remailer (the "Mom and Pop" remailer I like to cite) may
initially charge some price and find it is being undercut by others, or
others are not matching its price. Prices will change, evolve.

It is, however, that remailing prices will be much below a few pennies per
1 KB message, nor much above $2.00. I often use the crude estimate of $0.50
per remailing, suggesting that a 5-hop mailing will then cost about $2.50.

(But once the infrastructure for remailer hops is in place, then even a
single hop is basically enough--this may sound paradoxical, but think about
it.)

-Tim

--
Timothy C. May               | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com        | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409               | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA       | black markets, collapse of governments.
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Re: remailer price schedules

Tim writes:
>I don't know. That's for the market to decide.
>This is not a glib answer. 

While it is not glib, it is also not very useful for planning.

As a general rule of thumb, market minima are set by costs, and market
maxima are sent by alternatives.  Alternatives in this case are
alternate transport means, such as fax and snail mail, alternate
carriers undertaken pseudonymously, e.g. attmail with a fake id, or
free experimental services subsidized by academia and which don't work
quite right.

Costs are easier to calculate.  Cost of a net connection, hardware,
staff (i.e. your own) time, and financial transactions (i.e. Visa
fees).  Make a reasonable assumption that each message takes a certain
amount of time to be processed on a certain class of machine (or
measure it!), call some vendors (i.e. alternet).

My guess on all this is that you could make an awful lot of money at a
dime a hop for a less-than-10K message.  Sell hops only in packages
of a hundred, in order to reduce your finance charges.

Eric