(micro)payments for anonymous routing in Tor?

[Daniel Williams]

> The basic idea is a scheme for micropayments between relays in the Tor
> network that does not create any new attacks on anonymity than already
> exist against Tor.  Obviously we wouldn't want a network that forced
> people to pay to use it, but maybe if relays gave slightly higher
> priority to payed traffic, it would be an incentive for more people to
> run relays?  (running a relay would earn you faster service from other
> relays, basically)

Besides all the possible threats on anonymity which are there if you have
to pay for something, (how do you actually pay for something anonymous 
without coming close to money laundering?): which entity shall collect the
money and re-distribute it to the operators? How do you deal with international
money transfers? And (as somebody else already pointed out): how do
you assure that everything remains fair, i.e. that paid traffic is prioritized.

All these academic publications make is building castles on sand - the most
difficult part is actually to have a  working system for international payments
which has a small enough overhead that it can be used for these kind of transactions
AND is privacy friendly AND is accepted.

> What are some other objections?  Would people be opposed to seeing
> something like this in Tor?

I guess not. There is already a Tor network clone which is for paying customers
only.
Maybe, making Tor a paid solution would even help because the money could
be used to handle the overhead which is created for the operators due to all the
idiots abusing the network. Maybe it would even keep the idiots off the network :)

But then: IMHO it is not possible to make it work anyway...

    Daniel


      
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