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

[Virgil Griffith <i@xxxxxxxxx>]

Two points.

> I don't think there's a lot of money to be made in the first place

The major proposals I've seen don't aspire to make operating a relay
profitable, but merely *subsidize* the money + time involved in operating a
relay.  I see it akin to automated, decentralized grants akin to the kind
that torservers.net provides.

Would this reduce your opposition (assuming the technical details are
worked out) ?

> 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.

A complementary proposal is to such that each circuit has a most one
incentivized relay, or additionally to forbid an incentivized relay from
being the guard node.  It also seems like a darn-good-idea that people who
run unincentivized nodes get special social recognition.

I used to think of incentivizing Tor relays as a big new idea.  But
increasingly I just see it as an automated way of doing what is already
done.  In the simplest case, say if instead of manually mailing operators a
t-shirt, we had an automated process which gave operators a token that
could be redeemed for a t-shirt, that would be fully sufficient for the
incentivization proposals.

That's all I got.
-V
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