Re: Remailers and ecash

[Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>]

On Sat, 27 Sep 1997, Anonymous wrote:
> 
> There also seems to be an idea that there is some big R&D investment
> in adapting a remailer to use e-cash.  There isn't.  You have to open
> an account at Mark Twain Bank.  You have to figure out how to call the
> Digicash executable from within a Perl script.  (Since nobody has
> corrected me on this, I am becoming confident that it is really as
> easy as I think.)  Why not try it?  Worst case, you lose a little
> time.  Best case, you get rich and the remailer network takes off.

There are a number of technical reasons why you really don't want to call
the standard commandline Ecash client from a script to add/retrieve Ecash
from Mixmaster remailer packets. The biggest problem being that you can
fit only a few coins into the packet header as specified. There is
no feature in the standard Ecash client that allows coin level
control. DigiCash firmly resited and continues to resist adding it. A
$0.25 payment could be paid as three coins or as 25 coins. The user has no
control over this. For this and a number of other reasons, DigiCash's
software is unsuitable for the task.

You certainly could use DigiCash's software with Type 1 remailers. Though
why anybody would want to pay for a service as insecure as Type 1
remailers is beyond me. Type 1 remailers should be removed from service.

Furthermore, the barrier to entry is too high for the consumer. All these
problems are about to be solved by third party software. Perhaps then we
will see for-pay remailers.



 -- Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> PGP encrypted email preferred.
   "Tonga? Where the hell is Tonga? They have Cypherpunks there?"