Abstract
Our position is that incentives are fundamental to anonymous communications and censorship resistance; they have been largely forgotten in practice despite being investigated on many occasions over the years. A history of the need for incentives in anonymous communication networks is given, and discussed in the context of deployed networks. We consider privacy from an economic perspective of supply and demand: First, there has to be servers that supply computational power needed to privacy-enhance traffic in return for rewards; second, there needs to be paying users to create the demand to provision those rewards. We present twin hypotheses that run counter to much of the current research in anonymous communication networks such as Tor as well as censorship resistance: the use of a tokenized incentives will create a population of servers to supply anonymity while users in countries such as China can adapt protocols where decentralization powers the demand for uncensored network access. Finally, we sketch how the Nym mixnet is exploring these hypotheses.
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Notes
- 1.
This proposal led to a flurry of coding work, with Adam Back coding the first attempt http://www.cypherspace.org/eternity/.
- 2.
- 3.
The technical details of the incentive scheme are out of scope of this paper but available [6].
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Halpin, H., Serjantov, A. (2023). Incentives and Censorship Resistance for Mixnets Revisited. In: Stajano, F., Matyáš, V., Christianson, B., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXVIII. Security Protocols 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43033-6_7
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