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

[Moritz Bartl <moritz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/01/2014 03:44 PM, carlo von lynX wrote:
> What if there was a sufficiently brilliant and lightweight
> micropayment system, that you could pay relay nodes for
> anonymizing your circuits?

For some reason this seems to be a Hot Topic these days. There are quite
some unsolved research questions, for example how payment and path
selection can be sufficiently separated to not endanger anonymity. In a
network where some people pay and others don't, you separate the groups
into subsets. It becomes even harder/easier to detect if you expect some
kind of return from your payment in the form of 'premium service'. Rob
Jansen wrote a nice roundup of current research papers:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-incentives-research-roundup-goldstar-par-braids-lira-tears-and-torcoin


I'm happy to discuss this further in person, but as a quick summary: I'm
not really happy about any of the ideas, for social reasons: If we lose
the social factor ("I run my relay because of the warm fuzzy feeling"),
we also lose the quite beneficial peer pressure ("I don't log or
manipulate stuff because Roger will hate me"). Financial incentives
cannot be the driving factor also because, even if you manage to include
all the "technical" diversity factors (you don't want all relays
concentrated in a couple of cheap places), and if you put a hard limit
on how much a single operator can earn, it is hard to protect against a
sybil attack ("I run 90% of the Tor network by simulating to be 100
operators and get all the money (and traffic)"). The anonymizer JAP
tried the commercialization route, and it mostly failed, even though
many argue that they had the better design. I don't think there's a lot
of money to be made in the first place, at the same time volunteers
might step away ("I'm not in it for the money, but now people can do it
for money, so why keep my relay running."), both also reasons why I'm
not really enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Moritz
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