From: jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 95 17:37:08 PST
To: "L. McCarthy" <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: revoked transactions/guerrilla fee remailers
Message-ID: <ab3795a805021004bf21@[132.162.201.201]>
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At 8:15 PM 01/09/95, L. McCarthy wrote:
>- - From what I've seen so far, accepting payment would seem to make anonymous
>_operation_ of a remailer well nigh impossible. Anonymous operation with
>revenue would require a corresponding level of anonymity in the transfer of
>money. Until such time as conversion of funds from a net-liquid form to a
>conventional form becomes unnecessary (or just commonplace ?), financial
>traffic analysis can't adequately be thwarted.
>All this bodes ill, IMHO, for the prospect of guerrilla or quasi-guerrilla
>remailers charging for service any time soon. There's just too much
>infrastructure to which they'd need to be tied at the moment.

Well, that's certainly true, for the reasons you gave.  Right now, it's
enough of a chore just to get non-anonymously run remailers charging for
operation.  And it's not easy to set up an effective guerilla remailer
either.
I think the set of tools and environments that make it possible to run a
remailer anonymously and charge for it certainly aren't going to exist
until the component problems of charging for a remailer at all and running
a guerilla remailer at all are made easy.  I think once both of those
problems are dealt with, it won't be too dificult to deal with the combined
problem of guerilla for-pay remailers.  Or at least, exactly what things
are neccesary to solve that combined problem will be obvious.