On Tue, 5 Dec 1995, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
In terms of crypto-privacy, anonymous communication, and things like that, I agree completely. However, it's genuinely more complicated than that where money is concerned, because there are aspects of the translation between "bits and bucks" that have some extremely serious practical complexities.
A true geodesic structure is self-supporting and self-structuring. A cryptographic infrastructure can and should be similar, I agree completely. However, a *monetary* infrastructure needs convertability, and the points of conversion are always the best targets of attack for criminals. (I've been casting about for an analogy to physical geodesics, and it's hard to find one. The best I can come up with is to imagine that in order to convert a carbon buckyball to a more conventional set of carbon molecules, you had to do it through a service bureau that was capable of error, fraud, or subversion by outside criminals. This would ONLY matter if you ever wanted to do such conversions, but it would matter a lot then, especially if you had to suffer a serious financial loss if you got the wrong carbon molecules at the end of the process.)
I agree that conversion points are good targets for attack. Therefore whether conversion services are centralized or distributed will partly depend on the economy of scale in protection against criminals. I'm not sure how much of this economy of scale exists for conversion between electronic and physical monetary instruments. But if we're converting between one eletronic system and another, then cryptographic protocols reduce the cost of protection to nearly zero for even small organizations. Wei Dai