[freehaven-cvs] a bit more cleanup

[arma@seul.org (Roger Dingledine)]

Update of /home/freehaven/cvsroot/doc/fc03
In directory moria.mit.edu:/home/arma/work/freehaven/doc/fc03

Modified Files:
	econymics.tex 
Log Message:
a bit more cleanup


Index: econymics.tex
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/freehaven/cvsroot/doc/fc03/econymics.tex,v
retrieving revision 1.51
retrieving revision 1.52
diff -u -d -r1.51 -r1.52
--- econymics.tex	22 Mar 2003 19:05:30 -0000	1.51
+++ econymics.tex	4 Apr 2003 03:07:11 -0000	1.52
@@ -29,9 +29,7 @@
 Decentralized anonymity infrastructures are still not in wide use today.
 While there are technical barriers to a secure robust design, our
 lack of understanding of the incentives to participate in such systems
-remains a major roadblock. Here we present new insights about how
-to align incentives to create an economically workable system for both
-users and infrastructure operators. We explore some reasons why anonymity
+remains a major roadblock. Here we explore some reasons why anonymity
 systems are particularly hard to deploy, enumerate the incentives to
 participate either as senders or also as nodes, and build a general model
 to describe the effects of these incentives. We then describe and justify
@@ -98,9 +96,8 @@
 Nodes must carry traffic from others to provide cover.
 %Yet those others don't want to trust their
 %traffic to a single entity either.
-The only viable solution is to distribute trust. Each party can choose
-to run a node
-in a shared strong anonymity infrastructure, if its incentives
+The only viable solution is to distribute trust. That is, each party
+can choose to run a node in a shared infrastructure, if its incentives
 are large enough to support the associated costs. Users with more modest
 budgets or shorter-term interest in the system also benefit from this
 decentralized model, because they can be confident that a few colluding
@@ -121,10 +118,11 @@
 others must use the same infrastructure. Anonymity systems use messages
 to hide messages: senders are consumers of anonymity and also providers
 of the cover traffic that creates anonymity for others. Thus users are
-always better off on crowded systems because of the noise they provide.
+better off on crowded systems because of the noise other users provide.
 
-High traffic is necessary for strong anonymity, which means that the
-incentives of several agents must find a common equilibrium. High traffic
+Because high traffic is necessary for strong anonymity, agents must
+balance their incentives to find a common equilibrium, rather than
+each using a system of their own. The high traffic they create together
 also enables better performance: a system that processes only light
 traffic must delay messages to achieve adequately large anonymity sets.
 %Thus better performance attracts users both for its
@@ -155,12 +153,11 @@
 mix-nets.\footnote{Mixes were introduced by David Chaum (see
 \cite{chaum81}). A mix takes in a batch of messages, changes their
 appearance, and sends them out in a new order, thus obscuring the
-relation of incoming to outgoing messages.} Here we discuss the
-incentives for some ``agents'' to participate either as senders or
-also as nodes, and we propose a general framework for their
-analysis. In the next section we consider various applications of
-our framework, and then in Section \ref{sec:alternate-incentives}
-we examine alternate incentive mechanisms.
+relation of incoming to outgoing messages.} We discuss the incentives for
+agents to participate either as senders or also as nodes, and we propose
+a general framework to analyze these incentives. In the next section
+we consider various applications of our framework, and then in Section
+\ref{sec:alternate-incentives} we examine alternate incentive mechanisms.
 
 We begin with two assumptions: the agents want to send messages to
 other parties, and the agents value their privacy. This value
@@ -1211,7 +1208,8 @@
 \item While there are economic reasons for distributed trust,
 the deployment of a completely decentralized system might involve
 coordination costs which make it unfeasible. A central coordination
-authority to redistribute payments may be more practical.
+authority to redistribute payments may be more practical, but could
+provide a trust bottleneck for an adversary to exploit.
 \end{itemize}
 
 \section*{Acknowledgments}

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