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Proof-of-Work as Anonymous Micropayment: Rewarding a Tor Relay

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8975))

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a new micropayments scheme which can be used to reward Tor relay operators. Tor clients do not pay Tor relays with electronic cash directly but submit proof of work shares which the relays can resubmit to a crypto-currency mining pool. Relays credit users who submit shares with tickets that can later be used to purchase improved service. Both shares and tickets when sent over Tor circuits are anonymous. The analysis of the crypto-currencies market prices shows that the proposed scheme can compensate significant part of Tor relay operator’s expenses.

Full version is available at http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/1011.pdf.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An option of payment via anonymous crypto-currency like ZeroCoin [17] will be discussed in Sect. 4.

  2. 2.

    For June – September 2014.

  3. 3.

    Revenue can be smaller when trying to exchange due to small market size.

  4. 4.

    These are of course very rough estimates: it’s not possible to learn the current hardware of Tor users, estimate the fraction of non-botnet Tor users, the number of Tor users which would be willing to mine, and the number of new (Bittorrent over Tor) users.

  5. 5.

    Our scheme thus also gives an interesting use case for the old mining gear which is otherwise obsolete. This might be the only way to buy lots of priority traffic on Tor relays.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Luxembourg, Walferdange, Luxembourg

    Alex Biryukov & Ivan Pustogarov

Authors
  1. Alex Biryukov
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  2. Ivan Pustogarov
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Correspondence to Ivan Pustogarov .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Rainer Böhme

  2. NTT Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan

    Tatsuaki Okamoto

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Biryukov, A., Pustogarov, I. (2015). Proof-of-Work as Anonymous Micropayment: Rewarding a Tor Relay. In: Böhme, R., Okamoto, T. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8975. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47854-7_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47854-7_27

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