From: db@Tadpole.COM (Doug Barnes)
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 95 14:34:50 PST
To: sandfort@crl.com (Sandy Sandfort)
Subject: Re: for-pay remailers and FV
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950109130413.5497B-100000@crl.crl.com>
Message-ID: <9501092235.AA15387@tadpole.tadpole.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Sandy --

I for one read your proposal and thought, "yep, that's how it
should work" and considered the problem solved. Not being a
remailer operator (yet) I didn't want to get involved until I
was or I had a more concrete proposal (e.g., "I am now accepting
$$ for E-stamps, of the form ...")

Also, there is no reason on earth to take FV for payment under
such a scheme, if one wishes to preserve anonymity, and not have
to deal with the fraud/reversal factors. (The stamp issuer 
would not know which blind-signed stamps were issued to the
turkey who reversed all his credit card transactions two months 
after buying them -- see various threads on this vis-a-vis
using FV to buy blinded digital cash and why it won't work too
well.)

However, for maximum anonymity, said consortium or other stamp 
issuer could easily accept money orders through the mail, with 
a disk with enclosed blind-signed tokens and the public key to 
be used in encrypting the stamps, which would be posted to, say, 
alt.anonymous.messages or whatever.

A little overboard for most, but effective at preserving
anonymity -- the stamp issuer could be the NSA, and it would
make little difference as long as they continued exchanging
$$ for stamps and redeeming stamps for $$. The stamp issuer
could also take checks, or, if the fraud and reversability 
of credit cards were factored in, accept credit cards directly
(possibly e-mailed using PGP.)  

I don't see any reason to get FV involved, unless one were so lame 
as to be unable to get signed up directly with the credit card 
companies as a merchant -- a process of appropriate complexity
to indicate the posession of at least one (1) clue, which is prob.
desirable in someone who's going to be handling remailer finances
 

Sandy writes:
> Gee, this sounds awfully familiar.  Maybe Eric will have more
> luck in getting you remailer folks to listen.  I hardly got so
> much as a peep when I suggested that a remailers' guild create
> or authorize one or more digital stamp issuers.
> 
> Damn, I hate being so far ahead of my time.
>