-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <Pine.SUN.3.91.951016011355.2241A-100000@eskimo.com> Wei Dai said: "Maintaining anonymity requires that communications be done through special untraceable protocols." I think it is important to keep in mind exactly what we mean by anonymity in these discussions - there seems to be a bewildering array of flavours. Take three situations where anonymity might be useful: 1. The State Authorities come and take you away for subscribing to a publication advocating the end of socialised medicine. 2. The State Authorities come and take your assets away to pay for socialised medicine. 3. The Private Hospital comes and takes your assets away to pay for your lifesaving operation. [Avoiding 1 is (in my opinion) an unmitigated good; avoiding 2 is obviously desirable; but avoiding 3 could well be counter-productive.] This points to two categories of anonymity: Meat anonymity - there is no way of knowing which human is responsible; and Asset anonymity - there is no way of linking a particular human, transaction or activity to any particular asset, or vice versa. The point being that sometimes one will be desirable without the other. Concentrating on meat (or combined?) anonymity, there are (at least) two sorts; Legal anonymity - where the split between asset and meat is the result of the interposition of some legal structure (eg. Trust, corporation etc), the ultimate owners/controllers of which are unknown; and Digital anonymity - where the identity of the actor is mathematically unknowable (at least, at the limit). Obviously, these sorts can be layered, with legal entities transacting as digitally anonymous parties, and the owners of those legal entities protected by digital anonymity. In addition, we can distinguish between digital anonymity that allows no link between separate transactions (anonymity proper[?]), and digital anonymity that does allow links to be drawn between separate transactions or activities (pseudonymity). Similarly, we can distinguish between the various anonymous properties of transactions: A. Private Transactions. Each party to the transaction knows the identity of the others, but no third party can know who is transacting with whom. B. Unilateral Anonymity. One party to the transaction is known, but the other is unknowable. An example might be subscribing for a digital security with ecash - the issuer is known, but the purchaser is anonymous. C. Bilateral Anonymity. The identities of both parties to the transaction are unknowable. This might be the case on a cypherpunk stock exchange... "The current state-of-art (i.e. RemailerNet) adds several hours of transmition time to each message to achieve effective untraceability. Contract negotiation, for example, becomes very difficult under these circumstances." My experience of contract negotiation is that a delay of hours would be immaterial. Don't forget that email, fax machines, and even the telephone are relatively recent phenomena (not to mention the photocopier and the word-processor). Most super-tight deadlines are self-inflicted. "If these costs remain high, but anonymous markets develop regardless, it will be interesting to see how these costs affect the structure of the markets. Will special protocols for contract negotiations develop to minimize the number of round-trip messages?" Doubtless. In areas where complex transactions really have to be entered into at short notice, a lot of the negotiation goes on in advance, often by trade associations. ISDA, for instance, is forever producing standard terms and appendices so that all manner of arcane derivative transactions can be more or less negotiated over the phone. Cheers, Dm -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMISijFlo3j8JHzalAQENEAP/UJTSvhAR534mh1KUQZQC1JYxZeROUaDf 6Nd42yxCmLbbSa72dEAB69jdfDHBj2sj6Jf6jL+HAGTrfG6I/dNJuKu9MaaCw64z MKe0efTCmD2caehOv9lf5tI2uJ0vAql8UdCC5gj3NhkxKr/uEAvcbIlt/Z60mmEu 4P2hxCv1u/o= =U8gP -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- [Palmtop News Reader - Beta Version 3]