Stephen Whitaker-nym's resubmission ("whose watchin the watchers" 4:19 PM 11/5/95) of the very same material that I had posted last night suggest some questions about some aspects of nym theory. I hope the following isn't too naive, and I apologize if it is. When I saw issue 183 of GovAccess, Jim Warren-nym's remarks seemed suspect, but I didn't have a thorough enough understanding of the issues to judge them myself -- so I decided to vet the question with the Cypherpunks. I'm glad I did: the quick and knowledgeable responses clarified the error, and I forwarded them to Warren-nym so that he could correct himself promptly. The end result, as Warren rightly suggests I think, is that a better understanding of the issues has been propagated to his subscriber base. AFAIK, Warren-nym has an excellent reputation -- and that fact certainly encouraged me to provide him with the info he would need to correct himself quickly. OTOH, my actions garner no reputation for me -- neither for my True Name nor for nobody@REPLAY.COM. Of course, whether such actions merit any reputational shift is debatable: I contributed no knowledge of my own, just merely acted as a go-between. Still, the fact that GovAccess 184 quotes my response might suggest that I beat others to the punch; and were I able to act in such a capacity on a regular and consistent basis, and were I to do so in a field with higher stakes, I would surely garner a reputation. Granted, this is a lot of "woulda, coulda" -- but it leads me to conclude that it is not the shortcomings of my *action* that are the cause of the fact that I garner no reputational improvement in this instance. Stephen Whitaker-nym's resubmission of this material, OTOH, lowers his reputation in my eyes -- which is strange, because the only real distinction between what he did and what I did has to do with the fact that he sent mail to Cypherpunks without reading the Cypherpunks traffic. So his reputational shift is purely contextual. So why don't I, then? Well, for starters, the nym that the Replay remailer assigned to me is publicly accessible: anyone who uses this remailer in the way that I did will be assigned the same quasi-nym, nobody@REPLAY.COM. yet if, through some statistical improbability, I were the *only* person *ever* to use this remailer in this way, and I *only* ever used it to perform actions that would improve the reputation of a stable nym, then the public knowledge of Replay's functionality would neverthless serve to hinder any reputational shift that my actions had earned: people might say, "Every message I know of that has passed through Replay has been accurate, timely, and significant" -- but that would improve the reputation of the Replay remailer rather than of its sole user, myself, even though it was my actions -- *including* the use of the Replay remailer -- that brought about this reputational shift. So what is a nym if not a "True Name"? I distinguish "True Name" (in quotes) from True Name: a True Name is tied to a matrix of information extrinsic to the entity it refers to (a SS# has no *intrinsic* relation to the entity it designates), whereas a "True Name", though free of this info matrix, neverthless operates according to the same logic that a True Name does -- in terms of being tied to actions that garner reputational shifts. The point being -- I'm probably being pretty unclear -- that if the major distinction between a "True Name" and a True Name are links (or the lack thereof) to arbitary and external information (and maybe the disposability that the lack of links implies), then a lot of nym theory seems like it pretty much reproduces True Name logic and operations. Anyway, a lot of you understand this all better than I do, so I hope to learn from any responses I receive. Thanks.