Fixing "Flooding" with Pretty Good Digital Postage

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Hal Finney writes:

> I wonder if this could be a concerted denial-of-service attack.  Julf's
> remailer has had the highest profile of any, and he certainly has his share
> of enemies.  Maybe somebody figured it was easy to shove a few thousand
> messages a day his way.  This makes the server slower and less convenient for
> others to use, as well as putting an extra load on the trans-Atlantic links
> just for anonymous messages.  It also could cost someone some money which
> could be blamed on Penet.  This could be an attractive strategy for an enemy
> of anonymity.

(Hal knows this, but for those who are new....)

Charging some small amount remailing effectively fixes this
problem...if someone want to flood a site with thousands of letters a day,
and each one costs them 10 or 20 cents, the remailer site makes a tidy
profit, which can then be used to buy more machines, a T1 link or two,
etc.

This "digital postage" could be a simpler subset of digital money,
e.g., collections of numbers which are bought it advance and which can
be used once and only once. Anonymity comes in various ways, such as
by trading with others (lots of issues here, but not unsolvable ones,
I think).

"Pretty Good Digital Postage" would solve a lot of these problems, as
well as making the remailer economy more normal, more market-driven.
(Ultimately, we want "Mom and Pop remailers," with incentives.)

No central authority needs to force this to happen, nor to set postage
rates. Let those who wish to remail "for free" continue to do so, let
those who set their rates too high be taught a lesson in market
economics, and let the invisible hand work its magic.

--Tim May


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