From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 05:58:17 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash
Message-ID: <199709292133.XAA04564@basement.replay.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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Alex de Joode wrote:
>: 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.
>
>Basicly most of those 3400 message cracker handles daily are cover
>trafic,...

How do you know this?  If the remailer network works properly, you
should not have any knowledge of this at all.

>...a big chunk of the rest is from people "playing" around with
>the remailer, then there are those few that needs some form of
>anonimity so they can inform a mailinglist/postmaster/complaints
>department, and then maybe once a week or so there is that message
>that would be paid for if remailers were for pay.

This is like saying we should only encrypt messages which are really
secret.  You should encrypt all of your messages - then nobody can
tell when you have a secret.

If you are arguing that nobody wants their security, I hope you are on
the wrong list.  Many of us have gone to great effort to get some
security and to create tools for other people's security.  It is hard
to believe that it's worth a few nickels and dimes to us to expose our
traffic to Big Brother or anybody else.

>So in short, if remailers were to be paid for, traffic would halt.

Only if implemented in a foolish way.

Look, there's no need to say "my remailer is now a cash only remailer
no others need apply".  You can say, "people who pay cash get better
service."  Or even, "people who pay cash have a higher probability
of getting better service."

While I can't speak for the other remailer users, I certainly have no
problem shoving a little money towards the remailers.  Like many who
read this list, I am not poor.  I would like to be able to help defray
the expense of my traffic.  Hopefully other cypherpunks with jobs will
feel the same way.

The important thing is to get things rolling.  Are the remailer
operators going to get rich overnight?  Maybe not.  But we can
definitely get some market activity going and start generating some
real remailer traffic.

Let me now note that this dialogue has been somewhat surreal.  Am I
really begging the cypherpunks to use ecash?

It's a good idea to get ecash in now because it will be harder to
incorporate payment methods later when there is more infrastructure to
change.  (Look at the mixmaster problem.  It can't (according to
Lucky) be used for ecash without modification.)

However, it appears that part of the problem with the remailers is
that nobody uses them.  We should be making a concerted effort to do
so, and not just for cpunk traffic.  We should use them for
everything.  It won't take that many people to reduce the message
delays substantially.  It will also advertise the remailer network to
our friends who may not yet be cypherpunks.

The tools exist to do this.

It is somewhat ironic that we complain that Joe Sixpack won't use
tools that we will not (or even cannot) use ourselves.

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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