[freehaven-dev] RfC: "On the Economics of Anonymity" (draft)

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

http://freehaven.net/doc/fc03/econymics.pdf
(or http://freehaven.net/doc/fc03/econymics.ps)

"On the Economics of Anonymity"
Alessandro Acquisti, Roger Dingledine, and Paul Syverson

Abstract:
Decentralized anonymity infrastructures are still not in wide use today.
We (the community) must figure out how to change our approaches and
designs in order to build systems with a better chance of success. Here
we present some 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 systems are particularly
hard to deploy, enumerate the incentives to participate either as senders
or also as nodes, and build a general model to take into account these
incentives. We then describe and justify some simplifying assumptions to
make the model manageable, and compare optimal strategies for participants
based on a variety of scenarios.


We will be submitting this paper Monday evening EDT, so please get
comments to us by late Monday afternoon. Feel free to focus on the ideas
rather than flow/wording since time is tight.

Thanks!
--Roger