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

[carlo von lynX <lynX@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks a lot for replying, Mo.

On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 07:45:00PM +0200, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> For some reason this seems to be a Hot Topic these days. There are quite

Where else is it? I was passed a link to a thing called TorCoin
but I think that operates very differently from what I had in mind.

> some unsolved research questions, for example how payment and path
> selection can be sufficiently separated to not endanger anonymity. In a

The method I was suggesting makes no change to path selection at all
and merely puts some pennies into each onion envelope for whoever does
the job. It would of course be very harming to your own anonymity if you
change your path selection habits in order to direct money into certain
pockets. Hmm.. that could be a problem.

> 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

The law proposal theorizes a next generation onion routing system,
potentially for worldwide use as a telephony anonymizing system. It
would in no way be connected to today's Tor. It would possibly not
even use much of currently existing software - depends on the telcos
how they solve the problem once the requirements make it into law.
The law says what features it wants, not how to actually implement them.
Did I mention its URL?

> 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

Indeed interesting. The topic is quite complex evidently. Will
have to consult the way the micropayment system works if it can
impede doublespending without risking the user's privacy.

> 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"),

Again, I wasn't talking about the existing Tor and so all the worries
about how it would break the existing Tor are not applicable. This is
about making a new telephone system which doesn't mess with human rights.

Maybe we could indeed run a telephone system on warm fuzzy feeling, with
donated relay servers and free telephony except for the price of the device.
I will mentally explore both options.

> 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

Sybil attacks can be taken care of by design and a large scale
commercial deployment would probably have to pick a design of
that kind, so it again would not be Tor as we know it.

> operators and get all the money (and traffic)"). The anonymizer JAP
> tried the commercialization route, and it mostly failed, even though

Another thing I should look at, thanks.


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