> Also, what about the other half of my points? ;)
Oh, sure, sorry about that. Did you edit the post I replied to? It looks like I only missed two points:
> But it gets better. While you can use anyone as a relay, you PREPAY them before they do any work for you. This is claimed to solve the problem of nonpayment, but nobody mentions the opposite problem: I take your money and do no work for you. The money cannot be taken back - I own it now. cool.
Relays are sitting there burning their CPU while they wait for a customer to show up. This is a continual cost, which makes Relay/Proxy operation unprofitable unless they receive a steady stream of transactions. If they "take the money and run" they only pocket the initial payment, maybe as much as a couple kilobytes of bandwidth in tokens. If they "take the money and stay" they get a stream of payments from the customer. Therefore it's economically irrational for them to run -- the PoW's cost makes them boundedly trustworthy if they are economically rational.
(I sort of covered this in the /dev/null attack you proposed, as it's the same case except /dev/null has the attacker also uploading a bit of useless traffic. I should have been more explicit.)
> Oh, and if you thought this will provide INTERNET access, you are mistaken. Apparently HTTP w/ DNS only. As per whitepaper, exit nodes can filter based on domain. I am not even going to mention that running an exit node without a whitelist is idiotic (one user downloads CP, you go to jail). So everyone must have a whitelist? And just how big do you figure a typical "whitelist" of safe domains is? 100GB, 1000GB? Good thing you need to send it as a reply to Get Offers request.
Lol, yeah. Whitelists are dumb, but (as we seem to agree) not having them is dumber. I agree with your analysis. If they do become 100GB, etc we'll add queries to mitigate the size issue ("hey, do you support xyz.com?"), or any of the other relatively well studied solutions here (have I finally found a use for bloom filters? Unlikely.)
More broadly on the whitelist issue, my hope is that paying Proxies will result in actual "Orchid Proxy ISPs" springing up, which will have empty whitelists, actual legal protection as ISPs, etc. That's the beauty of real money being involved. Whitelists are there as a stop-gap while the market is being built.
Oh, sure, sorry about that. Did you edit the post I replied to? It looks like I only missed two points:
> But it gets better. While you can use anyone as a relay, you PREPAY them before they do any work for you. This is claimed to solve the problem of nonpayment, but nobody mentions the opposite problem: I take your money and do no work for you. The money cannot be taken back - I own it now. cool.
Relays are sitting there burning their CPU while they wait for a customer to show up. This is a continual cost, which makes Relay/Proxy operation unprofitable unless they receive a steady stream of transactions. If they "take the money and run" they only pocket the initial payment, maybe as much as a couple kilobytes of bandwidth in tokens. If they "take the money and stay" they get a stream of payments from the customer. Therefore it's economically irrational for them to run -- the PoW's cost makes them boundedly trustworthy if they are economically rational.
(I sort of covered this in the /dev/null attack you proposed, as it's the same case except /dev/null has the attacker also uploading a bit of useless traffic. I should have been more explicit.)
> Oh, and if you thought this will provide INTERNET access, you are mistaken. Apparently HTTP w/ DNS only. As per whitepaper, exit nodes can filter based on domain. I am not even going to mention that running an exit node without a whitelist is idiotic (one user downloads CP, you go to jail). So everyone must have a whitelist? And just how big do you figure a typical "whitelist" of safe domains is? 100GB, 1000GB? Good thing you need to send it as a reply to Get Offers request.
Lol, yeah. Whitelists are dumb, but (as we seem to agree) not having them is dumber. I agree with your analysis. If they do become 100GB, etc we'll add queries to mitigate the size issue ("hey, do you support xyz.com?"), or any of the other relatively well studied solutions here (have I finally found a use for bloom filters? Unlikely.)
More broadly on the whitelist issue, my hope is that paying Proxies will result in actual "Orchid Proxy ISPs" springing up, which will have empty whitelists, actual legal protection as ISPs, etc. That's the beauty of real money being involved. Whitelists are there as a stop-gap while the market is being built.