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

[Aymeric Vitte]

First question is: why do you want people to pay for relays? That's 
probably one of the best way to deanonymize you.

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

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
[2] 
https://github.com/Ayms/node-Tor#anonymous-serverless-p2p-inside-browsers---peersm-specs
[3] https://github.com/Ayms/torrent-live


Le 01/09/2014 15:44, carlo von lynX a écrit :
> Hiya.. don't know if anyone has thought of this before:
>
> What if there was a sufficiently brilliant and lightweight
> micropayment system, that you could pay relay nodes for
> anonymizing your circuits?

You don't have to pay, if the P2P system is efficient, please see below.

>
> I don't care to turn Tor into a business - the point is
> to solve the incentivation question in case we would want
> to require onion routing as an obligatory feature for
> future commercial telephony, on a national or continental
> scale.
>
> Also I don't want to deviate the discussion on this list
> towards micropayments. I'd rather discuss that elsewhere.
> It's more about the idea of being able to embed OOB data
> into the circuits that pays each relay a microsum each
> second of use, allowing this to run phone calls or torrents.
>
> The next step would then be to allow applications to choose
> relays on a topological/latency-oriented basis. If such a
> new Tor network had a millions of relay nodes, it would be
> reasonable and safe to pick all relays within my current
> physical area.

Why your physical area? To give a chance to locate where you are? The 
latency of the Tor network is different from the latency of a P2P system 
using the Tor protocol

>   Concerning Tor's scalability, a new network
> would probably replace the directory servers with GNUnet-like
> mesh routing technology. It is sufficient for legislation to
> know that a technical solution can be found.

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.

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

>
> The intention is to anonymize the billing system in mobile
> telephony while also anonymizing and encrypting telephony
> itself. With such an architecture it would no longer be
> necesary for the mobile phone to identify itself as it
> checks into the phone network - thus it becomes commercially
> viable to not collect location data of the people as they
> carry a mobile phone with them.
>
> In other words I'm trying to save democracy from informatic
> totalitarianism, ironically by coming up with a business
> solution.
>
> It's a thought that hit me while going through the ideas
> about obligatory crypto and anonymization legislation that
> I laid out in http://youbroketheinternet.org/legislation/

Please see above (DHT and ephemeral IDs for peers), the P2P system 
should not mimic the Tor network, no guards concepts or such.

> and that I am discussing with members of some political
> parties today at 5pm in Berlin Schoeneberg, Crellestr. 33.
> That's like.. oops.. in an hour.
>
> If you agree that this is a viable concept and just needs
> a lot of research

I don't think it needs a lot of research, everything is already there 
(then please feel free to redirect EC to peersm).

If we forget about encryption/anonymity I think the peersm concepts 
could apply to bittorrent itself, those that are advertising/relaying 
something are not those that have it but might know someone that has it 
or someone that might know someone else has it, making difficult to know 
who is seeding what and who is requesting what.

And, despite of the fact that research seems to have wrongly given up 
with P2P studies, it appears (to me at least) obvious that even if some 
uses can be questionnable, the global strength of the P2P system can 
allow non questionnable uses, like legacy streaming, telephony, etc, 
without the need to pay anyone in the loop, basically the "bad use" is 
boosting the "good use"

> , then it is at the right stage for going
> into that legislation proposal.
>
> One could go further and allow a free marketplace among relay
> nodes but THAT I assume would be very very bad since then apps
> would come up that always choose the cheapest route and you
> know who has an incentive in offering the cheapest routes below
> market level. So that is something that cannot be permitted,
> the relay usage tariff would have to be standardized all over.
> In fact, it would probably even need a way to be enforced.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Best from Berlin, @lynXintl
>

-- 
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