Re: Remailers and ecash

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Matthew Ghio wrote:
>What people often forget is that these structures tend to evolve thru
>incremental changes rather than the immediate adoption of entirely
>new paradigms.  The 'barrier to entry', is often the deciding factor.

Good point.  I appreciated the following detailed discussion.  But, I
disagree on a few points.

>So, assuming that for-pay remailers are the goal, how do we get
>there?  If attaching chaum-cash to remailer messages were the answer,
>everyone would be doing it.

An economist was walking down the street and saw a hundred dollar
bill.  The engineer with him snapped it up.  Later, the engineer asked
why his friend hadn't taken the money.  "Well, the economist
explained, I knew that it couldn't really be there because if it was,
somebody would have gotten it."

>One potential scenario is "I'll let you use my remailer if you let me
>use yours," where people earn remailer credits by remailing other
>people's messages.  These remailer credits allow one to send
>anonymous messages via other remailers.  Once these remailer-credits
>become sufficiently valuable, they can be sold using whatever
>monetary system is popular at the time.

Think of ecash as "remailer credits", only somebody else has gone to
the trouble of solving all of the hard problems (including
infrastructure), and you can get remailer credits by doing any
productive activity for anybody in the world who will pay you in
dollars.  Some people will get ecash (i.e., "remailer credits") by
running remailers.  Others will get it by working for Microsoft and
converting part of their income to ecash.

Ecash suits the bill perfectly and it is available and working right
now.  It is actually easier to use ecash than to write some sort of
"remailer credit" system from scratch.

>Both of the above scenarios provide the desired end, which is that
>people pay for their remailer usage, and neither involves the
>(unlikely) model where people attach digicash to their remailer
>messages using the current system.

Again, there seems to be this idea that it's hard to get set up using
ecash.  If it were, long discussions about how likely it would be to
work with the remailers might be worthwhile.

But, the fact is, it isn't hard to get a remailer to accept ecash.
So, we should get a bunch of remailers accepting it and see how things
go.

It should also be quite easy to modify existing client software to put
ecash into chained messages.

Consider premail.  Raph would have to add a keyword to his remailer
description table which means "accepts 25 cents ecash".

Premail could have a command line option to add ecash.

The ecash itself could come from a file of blocks of ASCII ecash made
out to cash, which are automatically clipped by premail and then
pasted into the message.  Easy, right?  Nobody even has to interact
with the ecash application from the program.

So where do these files full of blocks of ASCII ecash going to come
from?  People with ecash accounts can generate them by hand or by
having a program call the ecash software to generate them.  Then they
can give or sell them to their less fortunate friends who don't have
an ecash account.

If you don't use up all the ecash ASCII blocks, they can be
redeposited.

It's that easy.  It will work.

Monty Cantsin
Editor in Chief
Smile Magazine
http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html
http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html

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At first I thought some of the stuff Monty Cantsin was discussing was
interesting, but it has gotten out of hand.  I've asked the question
before, Why would remailer operators want to accept Ecash?  After seeing
the conflicting messages coming from Mr. Catsin, I to rephrase it, why does
*Mr Catsin* want remailer operators to use Ecash?

The first answer I got was so that remailer reliability could increase.
The theory as I understood it was that remailers were run like a hobby, not
a business, so the money would be an incentive to bring in professionalism.
 So I proposed, and documented, that the minimum level to achieve this
would be a $50K investment over a year's time.  This is in fact, more or
less what the Cracker remailer takes to run.  Most of the resources are
donated in some way, but this is their equivalent retail value.  Even so,
with Monty's pricing structure and Cracker's current level of traffic it
would be enormously profitable.

Then Mr. Cantsin seemed to go back to the all you need are some spare parts
theory of remailer operation.  Enormous profits of $200 per month, or even
$5,000 per year.  Well, Cracker handles close to 25% of worldwide remailer
traffic of it's kind[1].  And it's not much.  I would say this is due
mainly to the user interface.  Making remailers more difficult to use by
adding Ecash is not going to increase traffic significantly.

  >I recommend that people start pricing at a quarter per message per hop

In my opinion, and I've been known to be wrong, this is a seriously messed
up comment.  A quarter per message is too much, much less a quarter per
hop. A price of 1/100 of a penny per message is closer to a proper
valuation. But the problem here is in the pricing model.  It should not be
transactional unless to encourage the very casual user.  A pricing model
should be flat rate.  One price for a month, or even a year's service.  The
net is based on a peering price structure, not an inter-lata structure.
Trying to compute or add charges at each hop is against the nature of
information flow for the net.

  >We are talking about how to get a working payment system up for
  >remailers which gets us great service and provides privacy and
  >security.

The point I have never gotten past is how you expect a payment system to
change the level of service?  The next point I'm still shaking my head over
is what about remailer services is not up to your standards?  The only
thing I have heard you mention is latency, which is a feature programmed
into the remailers.  If anything, people would pay to add latency, not to
take latency away.

  >Remailers are used by a small highly
  >specialized market of perhaps a few hundred people.

There is some truth in this statement.  But there are also remailers run by
a variety of companies such as hotmail, juno, and the like.  They encompass
millions of users.  Millions of users who want a remailer, but will not
tolerate the level of entry required for a Type-I or Mixmaster remailer.
Until client software can be improved and made as easy to use as an
integrated spelling checker, the "advanced" remailers will have no true
market share.  (Oh, I forgot.  Most of the world uses email clients without
integrated spell checkers.)

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cracker handles 27% of worldwide traffic based on adding all the stats
found at www.jpunix.com, though I would assume some remailers are not on
this list.


  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh@efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key

Robert A. Costner wrote:

> At first I thought some of the stuff Monty Cantsin was discussing was
> interesting, but it has gotten out of hand.  I've asked the question
> before, Why would remailer operators want to accept Ecash?  After seeing
> the conflicting messages coming from Mr. Catsin, I to rephrase it, why does
> *Mr Catsin* want remailer operators to use Ecash?

Cantsin feels that the remailers are too slow or too unreliable, and
believes that by offering a suitable financial reward, he can induce
someone to provide him with a more reliable service.  That may be so,
but this analysis neglects to account for a fundamental issue:

       Anonymity is one thing which you cannot have
       without also giving it to others.

In order for a remailer operator to afford himself the benefits of
anonymous communication by establishing and using a remailer, he must
allow others to use the remailer also.  This is why it is economical
(for some people) to operate free remailers.

It has been suggested that it would be possible to increase the number
of remailers by providing financial incentives to the remailer operators
in the form of a small fee per message relayed.  While that tactic might
achieve its stated purpose, it would simeultaneously reduce the number
of remailer users to those who were willing to pay the fee.  This
decrease in the number of users will serve to decrease the degree of
anonymity provided.  Consumers are unlikely to pay more money for a
service which provides less anonymity, thus making pay-per-message
remailers uneconomical.

That's the problem.  It has nothing to do with which payment system is
used.  The problem is the economics of the proposed pricing structure.



Monty Cantsin wrote:

> The ecash itself could come from a file of blocks of ASCII ecash made
> out to cash, which are automatically clipped by premail and then
> pasted into the message.  Easy, right?  Nobody even has to interact
> with the ecash application from the program.
> 
> So where do these files full of blocks of ASCII ecash going to come
> from?  People with ecash accounts can generate them by hand or by
> having a program call the ecash software to generate them.  Then they
> can give or sell them to their less fortunate friends who don't have
> an ecash account.

If that's how you want to do it, then just have the remailer make up
some ASCII blocks that it will accept as payment, and sell them to
people who sell them to their friends.  In fact I think Karl Barrus
ran a remailer with this setup a few years ago.  The question is,
what's the point?