According to current law in all nations (as far as I know), identity is meat. One person has one identity, and the identity is persistent and lifelong. All law is based on this assumption. Emerging in this forum and elsewhere is a different assumption, which is that identity is bits. If an entity has Alice's key, then that entity is Alice. Alice's person may be a different person this time, but only if Alice's last person was stupid or careless. And in this case Alice is probably better off with a different person anyway. Your dealings with Alice are still bound by the same guarantees of trust that you've always had with Alice: the laws of mathematics and the steps of the protocols. Alice's reputation and interests are likely to have changed with the change in person, but that's okay. Under the former assumption (Identity as meat) Alice transferring fortune and property to her son meant a change in the identity of the owner, and it was significant. Under the latter assumption (identity as bits) if she wants her son to now be the owner of all her stuff, she just hands her son the Alice keys and as far as anyone else is concerned nothing has changed. Alice is still the owner of the property, it's just that Alice now has a different person. Digital personas can be shared among several people, or handed off from one person to the other, without losing their integrity. This is one of their desirable properties. They can also be stolen, but so can most things of value. If your digital persona is the owner of several tons of gold in the form of digital bearer notes, and somebody else steals your digital persona, guess what? The ownership of those digital bearer notes has not changed. They are still owned by the same entity. You're just not that entity's physical person anymore. So if it is important to you that your identity remains "yours", guard your keys and audit your software, because on the net, identity is bits. If you want to impose an "identity is meat" assumption, you will have to pursue it in the meat world, where that assumption is valid -- thereby abandoning any hope of retaining the benefits of the net environment, such as anonymity or privacy. Bear