Re: Minion paper comments

[jbash@velvet.com]

> Well, really, my take is that ZKS operated a POP service without big
> legal trouble.  In fact, I don't think we had any legal trouble, but I
> could be wrong.  We did have economic trouble, but that came from
> building the system with paid network operators.

OK, I can't let that go by.

ZKS' financial problems with Freedom came from the fact that we were
building a system nobody wanted.

Nobody wanted it then, and I don't see who wants it now.

Had Freedom been wildly popular, paying the operators wouldn't have been
a problem. Given the level of use it actually got, the system would have
been a financial failure even if ZKS had been able to keep all the
money. There's some chance it could have been converted into a small
financial success by shrinking ZKS, or at least the Freedom-related
parts thereof, by a very large factor, but even then the anonymity set
would have been too small to be really interesting.

Not only that, but I doubt Freedom would have gotten much more use at a
zero price. I was under the impression that even prepaid users didn't
use it that much. Of course, if the system *had* gotten lots of use, it
would have been impossible to maintain it without paying the network
operators, so if a system with paid network operators can't survive in
the long term, then no heavily used system can survive in the long
term...  and a lightly used system is vastly less secure.

There just aren't that many users for strong, as opposed to casual,
anonymity, pseudonymity, controlled nymity, or whatever you want to call
it.  One of the two or three big reason that I haven't done anything
active in the area since leaving ZKS (OK, since getting tossed out of
ZKS as a drain on its then almost nonexistent cash flow) is that I just
plain don't believe the demand is there. I believe it less and less as
time goes on. And I don't see what's going to create it.

                                           -- jbash