Re: Minion paper comments

[Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 01:09:52PM -0500, jbash@velvet.com wrote:
| > 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.

I pretty much agree with you here.  What I intended to say was that
our financial troubles with the network were made worse by the fact
that we were paying network operators.

A different model might not have made a difference for ZK's
willingness to keep running it, but we might have been able to take
advantage of one of the several folks who offered to take over the
core servers.  (It would have required much lighter directory servers,
etc.  Not an easy shift.)

But this raises an interesting question for mixminion.  What should
they learn from ZK's experience in building a new privacy tool?

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume