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

First question is: why do you want people to pay for relays? That's probably one of the best way to deanonymize you.
Second is: why apparently you only envision to use/scale the Tor network, and not the Tor protocol for a P2P system? Knowing that the Tor network is absolutely not designed at all for P2P capabilities, whether it's about torrents, telephony, etc
Corollary is: Peersm project ([1],[2]), a P2P system using the Tor protocol (and, marginally, the Tor network for non P2P exchanges, ie web fetching) 

Please see comments below.

[1] http://www.peersm.com
[2] https://github.com/Ayms/node-Tor#anonymous-serverless-p2p-inside-browsers---peersm-specs 
[3] https://github.com/Ayms/torrent-live


Le 01/09/2014 15:44, carlo von lynX a écrit :

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?


You don't have to pay, if the P2P system is efficient, please see below.



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.
Why your physical area? To give a chance to locate where you are? The latency of the Tor network is different from the latency of a P2P system using the Tor protocol 


  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.
Just replace it with a DHT based routing system where references to peers are ephemeral and the distance to peers have nothing to do with your location but allows you to detect compromised ones.
And make sure that the peers can not freeride (unlike the bittorrent protocol [3]), ie they must participate to the common P2P effort, which is the case for peersm concepts since you get referenced by others 



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/
Please see above (DHT and ephemeral IDs for peers), the P2P system should not mimic the Tor network, no guards concepts or such. 


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
I don't think it needs a lot of research, everything is already there (then please feel free to redirect EC to peersm).
If we forget about encryption/anonymity I think the peersm concepts could apply to bittorrent itself, those that are advertising/relaying something are not those that have it but might know someone that has it or someone that might know someone else has it, making difficult to know who is seeding what and who is requesting what.
And, despite of the fact that research seems to have wrongly given up with P2P studies, it appears (to me at least) obvious that even if some uses can be questionnable, the global strength of the P2P system can allow non questionnable uses, like legacy streaming, telephony, etc, without the need to pay anyone in the loop, basically the "bad use" is boosting the "good use" 


, 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



--
Peersm : http://www.peersm.com
torrent-live: https://github.com/Ayms/torrent-live
node-Tor : https://www.github.com/Ayms/node-Tor
GitHub : https://www.github.com/Ayms

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