Re: for-pay remailers and FV

[Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@nsb.fv.com>]

Excerpts from fv: 9-Jan-95 Re: for-pay remailers and FV db@Tadpole.COM (2073*)

> Also, there is no reason on earth to take FV for payment under
> such a scheme,

No reason on Earth?  Try any of the following:

1.  You can actually get paid, in real money, using a system that is
operating NOW. 

2.  It requires no special software for the user of the remailer
service, thus preserving a very positive feature of most of today's
anonymous remailers.

3.  You don't need to have a credit card merchant account (and the
technical arrangements for using it) in order to run a remailer service.

There are more, but those are probably the top three.

> I don't see any reason to get FV involved, unless one were so lame 
> as to be unable to get signed up directly with the credit card 
> companies as a merchant -- a process of appropriate complexity
> to indicate the posession of at least one (1) clue, which is prob.
> desirable in someone who's going to be handling remailer finances

Well, I could be wrong, but from the above paragraph I can only infer
that you've never actually tried to set yourself up as a merchant.

The hardest part is getting approved for a merchant account.  Unless you
already have an established business or money in the bank, this will
*probably* be a showstopper if you want to set up a remailer-for-pay
service.  Getting a merchant account is never trivial, and getting one
in a whole new industry is VERY hard.

Once you have a merchant account, establishing the right technical setup
to do the actual authorization and purchases is not rocket science, but
it certainly requires more than "1 clue" -- in particular, it typically
requires hooking up some special hardware, installing and configuring
some new software, and some serious thought about the implications for
your system's security.

None of this is needed if you use FV.

Also, as Paul pointed out, the requirement for reversibility applies to
ANY credit-card-based service, not just FV.  This is NOT an option, it
is required by law (reg Z).

Excerpts from fv: 10-Jan-95 Re: for-pay remailers and FV
Hal@shell.portal.com (2603)

> Perhaps you could charge some small amount for them, but require VISA
> payment, and check the names on the VISA cards.  (This doesn't hurt
> anonymity when the tokens are actually used because of the blinding.)  To
> get multiple tokens a person would have to commit some serious real world
> name trickery, a considerably higher barrier than making up a pseudonym
> on the net.

This is workable.  It also reinvents a big chunk of what FV does, if you
do it yourself. -- NB