I'm thinking along the lines of #2. Thereby giving people an incentive to run nodes and expand freenet more quickly.
BTW, here is the best explanation I've found so far of anonymous, untraceable digital currency. It was at: http://www.freehaven.net/doc/oreilly/micropayments.txt (begin quote) Pioneering work on the theoretical foundations of anonymous digital cash was carried out by David Chaum in the early 1980s. [D. Chaum, Blind signatures for untraceable payments. Advances in Cryptology - Crypto '82, Springer-Verlag (1983), 199-203)] [D. Chaum, Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete, Communications of the ACM 28 (10) (1985), 1030-1044.] [D. Chaum, A. Fiat, M. Naor. "Untraceable Electronic Cash," Advances in Cryptology -- Proceedings of Crypto '88, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, no. 403, Springer-Verlag, pp. 319-327.] The electronic cash system developed is based on an extension of digital signatures, called blind signatures. A digital signature is a way to authenticate a message as belonging to a person, built upon existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). See the chapter on Trust for a greater description of signatures and PKI. A <i>blind</i> signature scheme allows a person to get a message signed by another party, while not revealing the message's contents to that party. Alice creates some number (the proto-coin) and multiplies it by a secret random number. She sends this resulting proto-coin -- blinded by the random number -- to the bank. The bank checks that she has a positive balance, and signs the proto-coin "this is a valid coin" with a denomination-specific private key. The bank returns this to Alice, and subtracts the corresponding amount from Alice's bank account. Alice then divides out the random number multiplier and finds herself with a properly minted coin, carrying a valid signature from the bank. As an analogy, Alice slips a piece of paper into a carbon-lined envelope, representing the blinded proto-coin. The banks only writes its signature across the envelope, which imprints a carbon signature onto the inside paper. Alice removes the paper and is left with a valid coin. Alice can then spend this coin with Bob. Before accepting it, Bob needs to check with the issuing bank that the coin hasn't already been spent, a process of online verification. Afterwards, Bob can deposit the coin with the bank, which has no record to whom that coin was issued. It only saw the blinded proto-coin, not the underlying "serial" number. [XXX Footnote: cut this? A bit of math. Chaum demonstrated a blind signature scheme implementation using RSA signatures: Alice has some message m she wishes signed. Bob has a public key (e,n) and private key (d,n). Alice generates some random r and sends x = (r^e m) mod n to Bob. The value x is "blinded" by r. Bob computes and returns t = x^d mod n. Alice can obtain the true signature s on m by computing: s = r^{-1} t mod n = r^{-1} (r^e m)^d mod n = r^{-1} r^{ed} m^d mod n <congruent> r^{-1} r m^d mod n = m^d mod n End FOOTNOTE] This digital cash system is both anonymous and untraceable. Its disadvantage, however, is that coins need to be verified online for double-spending. This has obvious performance effects. Chaum holds patents on his system, and founded DigiCash in 1990 to implement these technologies. (end quote) On Sunday 07 July 2002 12:28 am, Benjamin Coates wrote: > What is being paid for? Are we: 1) talking about a system to pay people > for publishing content, the way a lot of sites put up paypal buttons for > donations or paid access to special features, or 2) paying people for > running nodes? > > #1 is just anonymous, distributed digital cash, which I think is an > unsolved problem. > > #2 is easier since you only have to pay your neighbors and there's no need > for anonymity. One stab at a way of doing it would be to have a quoted > price for a successful request of a given htl--running a properly operating > node would be profitable under that system because you would pay the next > hop the slightly lower cost for a request with one lower htl, and > occasionally you'd have the data already in your datastore and could keep > the whole fee for yourself by serving it locally. > > I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea, but it seems like the only hard > part is how to transfer money between random people... they wouldn't need > to be micropayments, since you could settle accounts on a monthly or > whatever basis... _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
