Feel free to CC me on such discussions, if you like. Google isn't against Tor. We just wrestle with the same abuse issues every other provider does.
As Mike Perry notes, targeted advertising doesn't actually know or care about your real identity. It just wants to know that user 1234 is more likely to click ad ABC than an DEF. And even for Google+, these days you can register with a pseudonym if you want, there are policies around proving that you really go by that pseudonym online so I don't know how Tor-compatible it is, but the intention is there. The goal of the "common names policy" (not actually a real names policy) is just to ensure users don't sign up en-masse with names like PinkPony84 and thus become a MySpace-style swamp of people who can't find or connect with each other. Anyway. As grarpamp notes, one of the problems with taking deposits is suddenly you're taking payments and that comes with a host of complicated accounting and legal issues. At least it does in the USA. I was thinking lately about an alternative approach. Instead of depositing some coins directly with the organization you want to upload content to, you could establish a nym by making a non-trivial sacrifice of coins to miner fees. By breaking up the sacrifice into multiple payments spread over many sequential blocks you can put together a proof of sacrifice that is hard to fake (eg, by mining your own transactions). The coins aren't burned, they re-circulate into the economy. Once that proof is assembled, the hash of it can be your new nym, and anyone who wants to accept it can verify the merkle branches included in your proof up to their own copy of the block chain headers. If a nym misbehaves, you can ban it/add it to a blacklist/etc. All the data needed for a provider to calculate the size of the sacrifice is easily included in the proof data. If somebody wanted to actually pursue this idea, as I said before, I'd do it by starting with MediaWiki. It's open source and widely used. If you can make wiki-spamming hard you have a solid example of what other service providers can do. You can use my own bitcoinj library to implement it in a simple manner. If you ask on the bitcoinj mailing list, or Bitcoin dev forums, I'll happily sketch out any design details that are unclear. Bitcoin and privacy is a complex topic perhaps best discussed in another time and place. Whether it's strong enough will be something each user has to judge for themselves, same as for Tor itself. Of course, using Bitcoin does not exempt anyone from their jurisdictions AML laws, and nothing stops a merchant demanding government issued ID in order to trade with them. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
