From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 93 10:05:26 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Handling Abuses of Remailers
In-Reply-To: <9303030915.AA21640@netcom.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <9303031802.AA18266@soda.berkeley.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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