On the Economics of Anonymity

Decentralized anonymity infrastructures are still not in wide use today. While there are technical barriers to a secure robust design, the authors' lack of understanding of the incentives to participate in such systems remains a major roadblock. Here the authors explore some reasons why anonymity systems are particularly hard to deploy, enumerate the incentives to participate either as senders or also as nodes, and build a general model to describe the effects of these incentives. They then describe and justify some simplifying assumptions to make the model manageable, and compare optimal strategies for participants based on a variety of scenarios.