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

[Aymeric Vitte]

I read the proposal (and your other comments), but sorry, without even 
talking about payment issues here, who can be the thousand of relays in 
city and millions ("If such a new Tor network had a millions of relay 
nodes") in your physical area (that you should pick up as you wrote "it 
would be reasonable and safe to pick all relays within my current 
physical area", leading to the conclusion that all hops are in your 
physical area) ?

That's why I was assuming that you were obviously talking about a P2P 
system, but following strictly the Tor network rules (except the 
replacement of the dir servers by a DHT based system, which indeed is 
not so simple but not so complicate neither), the example of peersm is 
not about js or about highlighting it, but about a P2P system based on 
the Tor protocol not behaving very exactly like the Tor network (and yes 
the site requires js, not talking about the app which is a js one...)

And I was assuming that the peers are not mobile phones only but any 
other devices that have an interest in the network ("allowing this to 
run phone calls or torrents").

But OK, the issue of "how to make pay an anonymous user for services on 
top of/or related to an anonymizer network without deanonymizing him" is 
valid for plenty of use cases, including mine, I have not taken a look 
into this for now.

Regards,


Le 02/09/2014 22:37, carlo von lynX a écrit :
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 11:20:02PM +0200, Aymeric Vitte wrote:
>> First question is: why do you want people to pay for relays? That's
>> probably one of the best way to deanonymize you.
> Because I want to destroy the necessity for telcos to identify my
> mobile phone as I walk down the street. So if paying for relays is
> a way to deanonymize myself, at least it would be the second best.
> But maybe there is a way to get it right, and I don't want to give
> up hope on saving humanity from digital doom as yet.
>
>> 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
> Looks like you understood something like the opposite of what I meant.
>
>> 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
> This website does not work. Is it trying to require Javascript?
>
>> [2] https://github.com/Ayms/node-Tor#anonymous-serverless-p2p-inside-browsers---peersm-specs
> Tor in Javascript? Thank you, but this is totally off-topic.
> Have you looked at the law proposal? It is about making a
> strong relay node network, not a P2P network.
>
>> Why your physical area? To give a chance to locate where you are?
> The first hop knows where you are. The third hop doesn't.
> With a thousand relays just in one city it should be
> reasonably difficult to trace where your packets went.
>
>> The latency of the Tor network is different from the latency of a
>> P2P system using the Tor protocol
> Yes, that's why P2P is out of the question here.
>
>> 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.
> Sounds like GNUnet, except for the word "just" that alludes to
> something being simple which I know it isn't.
>
>> 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
> Not applicable.
>
>> I don't think it needs a lot of research, everything is already
>> there (then please feel free to redirect EC to peersm).
> I can imagine telcos being enthusiastic at the idea that phone
> calls are relayed down from antennas to mobile phones just to
> come back to the antenna because the mobile phone is merely
> acting as a P2P relay... reasonable use of wireless bandwidth.
> Not talking of the benefits in latency.
>
>

-- 
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