From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 15:15:24 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash
In-Reply-To: <8f6805d079d5185626e98fff7b367aea@anon.efga.org>
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19970928031127.030c67e4@mail.atl.bellsouth.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh@efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key