You might find this interesting. Just sent it to the [email protected] list.
----- Forwarded message ----- 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 -- http://youbroketheinternet.org ircs://psyced.org/youbroketheinternet
