Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium (fwd)

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sun, Jan 18, 1998 at 02:53:54PM -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
> Forwarded message:
> 
> > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 12:02:34 -0800
> > From: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
> > Subject: Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium (fwd)
> 
> > There are alternative ways of paying for the service that do not in
> > any way depend on ecash, and after thinking about it a bit, they seem
> > more robust, as well. 
> > 
> > The basic idea is as follows:  The fundamental eternity service is 
> > free to readers, and is financed entirely by writers.  The writers 
> > supply the disk space, the network bandwidth, and possibly pay for 
> > the software to support all this.
> 
> It is clear that there are two diametricaly opposed models of payment
> mechanisms and who those costs should fall on; producers or consumers.
> I personaly have no faith in systems where the producers bear the burden of
> the costs since they have no clear mechanism to obtain the funds to finance
> the enterprise in the first place.

You must find the advertising business completely mystifying, then.

> Imagine for a moment that a couple of persons come into possession of a set
> of documents which would cause considerable political embarassment and legal
> difficulties for a head of the local government.
> 
> Why should these two individuals pay to have their data dissiminated to
> anyone who wants it? It certainly isn't going to improve their social,
> political, or professional standing since the server will anonymize the
> data. They then have two options, release it themselves and hope for the
> best (and hence reap the benefit of any economic benefits that might acrue)
> or do nothing with it.

You pay to have your data disseminated in a form that you can be later
paid -- for example, leave the juciest part of the data in encrypted
form, along with a public key through which payment options can be
negotiated. 

[...]
> I guess the question boils down to why the individual operator in running
> the server in the first place. I assume a priori that the goal of both the
> submitter and the operator is to make a reliable income from the users of
> the service since there are clearly many more consumers of information than
> producers of it.

Why on earth do you try to be an ISP, then?  You pay for disk drives 
for other people to store their data, and make it available to the 
world.  The eternity service is actually very similar.

Given a protocol such as I described, you could move to Data Haven
Island, and charge up front to supply pornographers with an entrance
to the eternity service, while John Young could wallow in righteous
ego gratification as he provides space for morally important documents
by donating his disk space to eternity.  You do it for the money, he
does it for the buzz -- there are all kinds of ways to get paid. 

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair			"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html