[tor-talk] Micropayment embedded in circuit building? New idea?

[carlo von lynX <lynX@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hiya.. don't know if anyone has thought of this before:

What if there was a sufficiently brilliant and lightweight
micropayment system, that you could pay relay nodes for
anonymizing your circuits?

I don't care to turn Tor into a business - the point is 
to solve the incentivation question in case we would want
to require onion routing as an obligatory feature for
future commercial telephony, on a national or continental
scale.

Also I don't want to deviate the discussion on this list
towards micropayments. I'd rather discuss that elsewhere.
It's more about the idea of being able to embed OOB data
into the circuits that pays each relay a microsum each
second of use, allowing this to run phone calls or torrents.

The next step would then be to allow applications to choose
relays on a topological/latency-oriented basis. If such a
new Tor network had a millions of relay nodes, it would be
reasonable and safe to pick all relays within my current
physical area. Concerning Tor's scalability, a new network 
would probably replace the directory servers with GNUnet-like 
mesh routing technology. It is sufficient for legislation to 
know that a technical solution can be found.

The intention is to anonymize the billing system in mobile
telephony while also anonymizing and encrypting telephony
itself. With such an architecture it would no longer be
necesary for the mobile phone to identify itself as it
checks into the phone network - thus it becomes commercially
viable to not collect location data of the people as they
carry a mobile phone with them.

In other words I'm trying to save democracy from informatic
totalitarianism, ironically by coming up with a business
solution.

It's a thought that hit me while going through the ideas
about obligatory crypto and anonymization legislation that
I laid out in http://youbroketheinternet.org/legislation/
and that I am discussing with members of some political
parties today at 5pm in Berlin Schoeneberg, Crellestr. 33.
That's like.. oops.. in an hour.

If you agree that this is a viable concept and just needs
a lot of research, then it is at the right stage for going
into that legislation proposal.

One could go further and allow a free marketplace among relay
nodes but THAT I assume would be very very bad since then apps
would come up that always choose the cheapest route and you
know who has an incentive in offering the cheapest routes below
market level. So that is something that cannot be permitted,
the relay usage tariff would have to be standardized all over.
In fact, it would probably even need a way to be enforced.

Thoughts?

Best from Berlin, @lynXintl

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