The analogy between corporations protecting physical capital and anonymity protecting intellectual capital is interesting, and I will write a bit about it here. I don't think it quite works in all ways but it does suggest some ideas. Capital, as I use the word, means stuff which helps you be productive. Money can be physical capital, as can machines, computers, and so on, but generally not consumer goods. Traditionally, intellectual capital by the same definition refers to training, knowledge, experience, education - those mental skills and characteristics which help you produce. We have sometimes extended this notion here to reputation capital, which we often use just to mean your reputation itself, your good name. But if we are going to call it "capital" it should really be those aspects of your reputation which lead to productivity. To the extent that your good reputation helps you accomplish your productive goals, it can be considered capital. Particularly if you are a manager or performer in some other position where people's opinions of you make a big difference in how much you get done, you have a lot of reputation capital. Business reputations have many of the characteristics of capital, too. For some uses of anonymity it does make sense to think of them as protecting reputation capital. If you are going to send a message which carries a risk of harming your reputation, perhaps because it is terribly stupid or harsh, then anonymity can protect you in that way. I think some people do communicate anonymously for this reason. However there is another motivation, too, and that is fear of physical consequences. Some anonymous messages might lead to lawsuits or retribution in other forms, such as firing or blackballing. There is more involved in these cases than just loss of reputation capital. Physical capital is involved as well. So this is one way in which I think the analogy does not work. Another difference relates to the number of people involved. As I understand it, the motivation for the corporate veil of immunity from liability is so that people can safely band together in business. If there were no veil, and one harmful act by a member of the corporation could result in any stockholder being held liable, then few people would be willing to commit their assets to such an activity. The risk would be too great. The point is that this protection is oriented towards protecting large numbers of people. It does not make much sense for a single person to incorporate in order to try to protect himself from his own harmful acts, and in fact I understand that the veil can often be easily pierced in such situations. On the other hand, with anonymity we are generally dealing with single individuals. There is no apparent need for people to pool reputation capital in an endeavor, and have it be protected by the use of anonymity. The closest I can think of would be for a bunch of highly regarded individuals to announce that they were going to join together and create commentaries which would demonstrate all the insight, wit, and other traits which gave these people such a high reputation in the first place, but that the resulting missives would be released anonymously, so that if one of them ended up reflecting badly on the writers, there would be no way to know who had actually created it (it could be a fake created by an imitator). While I can't rule this out, it doesn't seem like a likely scenario, and it doesn't seem to offer the opportunities that corporations do for increasing productivity. Another issue is the different forms of anonymity, which don't have clear analogies with physical capital. Using a pseudonym you can build up reputation capital (or at least reputation) in the nym, but then you no longer have immunity from harm if it commits some gaffe. (Actually I suppose this is not too different from the corporation whose assets can be attacked but not those of the shareholders.) Then there are the limited pseudonyms discussed by David Chaum, where there are limits in how many pseudonyms of a particular type a person can create. You could have one "committed" pseudonym, unlinkable to your True Name, which you post under; but you'd only get that one. (You could post under other pseudonyms but they wouldn't be able to get that "committed" stamp.) You'd have to be pretty careful what you say via that nym, much as you are today with your True Name (which BTW a lot of people don't realize yet). Then people could filter so they only received messages from committed nyms, figuring that senders would be more likely to put meaningful content into these kinds of messages. Chaum's system of credentials also could allow you to transfer endorsements from one pseudonym to another. We have discussed the idea that such endorsements could be considered an embodiment of reputation capital. You could post a wide range of messages under different pseudonyms, collect the positive endorsements (and discard the negative ones), and attach them to your True Name or committed nym. This might encourage people to abandon their natural caution in making postings which will come back to haunt them years hence (again, this will be more an issue once people realize that this will happen). Hal