Re: Remailers and ecash

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>At 03:18 AM 9/27/97 -0400, Anonymous (Monty Cantsin) wrote:
>>Just out of a curiousity, why is it that no remailers accept ecash?
>>
>>The brutally simple way to do this would be to generate an ecash
>>certificate, made out to cash, and tack it at the beginning of a
>>message which is then encrypted for the remailer.
>
>The answer to your question may be to first recast your questions and
>ask why would someone want to attach ecash?  I assume you are trying
>to "pay" for the email you send.  This goes against the general model
>of the internet.

We are solving a different problem.

The reason I want to attach ecash is to get good reliable service and
to encourage many other people to offer good high quality remailing
services.  Let's a remailer operator can make $200/month by handling
messages at 25 cents each.  (That's 800 messages a month, hardly
overwhelming.)

You might not go public on that much revenue, but you might use your
desktop machine as a remailer.

>Unlike the phone company, the net peers freely with no
>interconnection charges, so inter lata charges do not have to be
>tracked and collected.  This allows for a flat rate pricing scheme.
>For remailers, this flat rate is generally zero dollars, i.e. free.

Free usually doesn't work very well, and it isn't working well now.

Use of ecash in the remailer network means there is no tracking and
collecting or a final bill.  This would somewhat defeat the purpose of
using remailers, would it not?

>There are remailers of various types who offer services for a charge
>of some sort.  This is generally a flat rate fee, either per month,
>or per year.

Really?  How does this work?  (And which remailers offer these services?)

If implemented naively, each message must carry some sort of
identifier.  Even if the owner of the account isn't known, all of his
messages are easily linked.  This is undesirable.

A more sophisticated implementation would use something like blinded
credentials.  But, that's the functionality ecash provides anwyay,
right now, this day, without any work.  So why not leverage off it and
take advantage of the payment features as well?

>There is likely no desire to price on a per item basis.  If there
>were, I would think it would be in the millicent range of pricing.

Given the existing infrastructure, per item pricing is the easiest to
implement while retaining full anonymity.  Digicash and Mark Twain
Bank already did the hard work!  They already have a bank set up!

All we have to do is make use of it.

As for millicent pricing, we'll see.  Once things get rolling, the
price should fall below a quarter.  But it will have to be high enough
to make running a remailer worth the trouble.

There also seems to be an idea that there is some big R&D investment
in adapting a remailer to use e-cash.  There isn't.  You have to open
an account at Mark Twain Bank.  You have to figure out how to call the
Digicash executable from within a Perl script.  (Since nobody has
corrected me on this, I am becoming confident that it is really as
easy as I think.)  Why not try it?  Worst case, you lose a little
time.  Best case, you get rich and the remailer network takes off.

Here's another reason why this is important to cypherpunks.  We would
really like to see wider use of e-cash.  It is a great product and it
respects our privacy.

The way ecash will catch on is that a small group of people will start
using it regularly for services and trade within their loosely defined
community.  Once things start rolling, more people and services can be
added.  Once things catch on, they will snowball.

The place to start is in this group with the remailers.

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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On Sat, 27 Sep 1997, Anonymous wrote:
> 
> There also seems to be an idea that there is some big R&D investment
> in adapting a remailer to use e-cash.  There isn't.  You have to open
> an account at Mark Twain Bank.  You have to figure out how to call the
> Digicash executable from within a Perl script.  (Since nobody has
> corrected me on this, I am becoming confident that it is really as
> easy as I think.)  Why not try it?  Worst case, you lose a little
> time.  Best case, you get rich and the remailer network takes off.

There are a number of technical reasons why you really don't want to call
the standard commandline Ecash client from a script to add/retrieve Ecash
from Mixmaster remailer packets. The biggest problem being that you can
fit only a few coins into the packet header as specified. There is
no feature in the standard Ecash client that allows coin level
control. DigiCash firmly resited and continues to resist adding it. A
$0.25 payment could be paid as three coins or as 25 coins. The user has no
control over this. For this and a number of other reasons, DigiCash's
software is unsuitable for the task.

You certainly could use DigiCash's software with Type 1 remailers. Though
why anybody would want to pay for a service as insecure as Type 1
remailers is beyond me. Type 1 remailers should be removed from service.

Furthermore, the barrier to entry is too high for the consumer. All these
problems are about to be solved by third party software. Perhaps then we
will see for-pay remailers.



 -- Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> PGP encrypted email preferred.
   "Tonga? Where the hell is Tonga? They have Cypherpunks there?"

>There also seems to be an idea that there is some big R&D investment
>in adapting a remailer to use e-cash.  There isn't.  You have to open
>an account at Mark Twain Bank.  You have to figure out how to call the
>Digicash executable from within a Perl script.  (Since nobody has
>corrected me on this, I am becoming confident that it is really as
>easy as I think.)  Why not try it?  Worst case, you lose a little
>time.  Best case, you get rich and the remailer network takes off.
>

The only way ecash is likely to catch on is if there's something useful to
purchase with it.  Remailers are a great way to create that opportunity,
fisrt with CP and then with the wider Net community.

>
>The way ecash will catch on is that a small group of people will start
>using it regularly for services and trade within their loosely defined
>community.  Once things start rolling, more people and services can be
>added.  Once things catch on, they will snowball.

Just like PGP.

>
>The place to start is in this group with the remailers.

Yes, and with client SW.  The main technical reason remailers aren't in
general use is a lack of simple to use, uniform feature, remailer clients
(yes, I know about Private Idaho).  This would best be either plug-ins for
the many email clients, but simpler yet a browser applet so any platform
can use use it and no explicit download is needed.  Such an applet has been
prototyped by Geoff Keating and is online, needing mainly Type II and ecash
support.  There might even be a hybrid step to create an adaptor plug-in
connected to the browser applet (if the sandbox permits this
intercommunication).  In any case, Java is definitely the way to go for
client SW.

--Steve


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At 06:38 PM 9/27/97 -0400, Anonymous (Monty Cantsin) wrote:
>The reason I want to attach ecash is to get good reliable service and
>to encourage many other people to offer good high quality remailing
>services.  Let's a remailer operator can make $200/month by handling
>messages at 25 cents each.  (That's 800 messages a month, hardly
>overwhelming.)

Let's assume you want to setup a remailer for profit.  You could use a
spare machine on your desktop and share a phone line part time by using a
PPP connection.  But I take it this is not what you are suggesting.  I'm
assuming you want a commercial quality service.  You'll need a machine,
colocation space, UPS power, a router to separate from the rest of the
internal network, a  phone line for complaints and administration, a domain
name, and a person who can do programming, server administration, and
administrative work, perhaps 20 hours per week.

	Machine	$2,500
	Router		   800
	Domain		   100
	              ------
Startup costs        $3,400

	Colocation	$  700
	Phone line	    45
	Salary		 3,750
                     ------
Recurring costs	$4,495 x 12 months =	$53,940
Fixed costs					$ 3,400
						
This makes an estimated business cost of $57,340 for one year, or $4,778
per month, or about $159 per day.  based on 4,000 messages per day that
gives a base cost per message of less than 4 cents.  Actual operation costs
would be higher, but even at triple that price, if there is a demand for
the service (which I have my doubts) the 25 cent price would make a profit.

>Free usually doesn't work very well, and it isn't working well now.

What about the free system does not seem to work well?  A free remailer's
lifespan even if shut down after a few months or a couple of years does not
seem to be to much different from that of any other startup business.
4,000 messages per day on the cracker remailer is not based on the
machine's capacity, but is based on actual total worldwide demand today.
(at least this is about the highest per day count that cracker has had)
I'd be interested in how you think any full time remailer like the Cracker
service is inadequate and how making it a pay service would resolve this.

>Given the existing infrastructure, per item pricing is the easiest to
>implement while retaining full anonymity.  Digicash and Mark Twain
>Bank already did the hard work!  They already have a bank set up!

I'll admit that I really have not used DigiCash.  Maybe someone here can
tell me some experiences with it.  I found two problems.  Last I checked,
the bank account reuired to have digicash had a service fee of about $10
per month.  Secondly, when I participated in the cybercash trials, I
changed ISPs and was never able to get my money transferred from the old
email account to the new one.  Their customer service wasn't able to help
me get it done.  Can anyone else tell me about better experiences with ecash?




  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
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