-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 1:59 PM -0400 on 9/18/00, George@orwellian.org wrote:
A Yahoo wrote [about AMEX's "anonymous" credit card technology]: % What a load of shit.
That market dwarfs what ZKS/Anonymizer will ever get.
Again, boys and girls, barring unforeseen events, like repeals in the laws of physics, and/or human behavior, :-), the *only* thing that matters in financial operations is transaction cost, and certainly *not* financial privacy. The *only* way to get ubiquitous financial anonymity is for a technology, like internet bearer transaction protocols (blind signatures, MicroMint, small signed coins, whatever), to be *cheaper* than the alternative, which, for the moment, is internet-executed and proprietary network-settled book entry transactions: credit cards under SSL, cleared by VISA and MasterCard, settled by FedWire and/or SWIFT, modulo the odd ACH "check" transaction, bla, bla, bla... Book-entry transactions can *not* be anonymous, folks, because, of course, you couldn't send someone to *jail* if they lie about a book-entry, otherwise, right? I mean, if everyone could lie about a given book-entry transaction, and get away with it consistently, *without* going to jail, could you imagine that *any* book-entry transaction of that type would clear, much less settle, ever again? I thought not... Unlike internet bearer financial cryptography protocols, the non-repudiation "technology" of book-entry settlement is non-existent. Unless you count ballistic technology, anyway. :-). More to the point, a given inherently-private technology, like Chaum's blind signatures for instance, must be *waaay* cheaper, on a risk adjusted basis, ceteris paribus, whatever, than a public one, like SSL-encrypted book-entries. Like a thousand times cheaper, say. Which is, oddly enough, about the cost differential right now between book-entry transactions (like stock and bond trades going through DTC or CREST, or credit cards, or checks) and physical delivery of paper/metal bearer instruments (like "my Brinks to your Cage" delivery versus payment, or dollar bills, or coins or stamps). So, until people actually *do* get bearer financial cryptography protocols onto the net, and cheap enough (and believe me, people are working on it :-)), it is important to remember that *any* book-entry transaction is, almost by definition, a "public" transaction and not a private one. A "public" transaction "guaranteed" to be "fair" by a *government*, at the point of a gun. So, you shouldn't be surprised at all when, horrors, there's *no* financial privacy in the "mainstream" markets. None in the least. Moreover, that diminishing financial privacy will, um, increase, as Moore's law increases that cost-differential between automated book-entry, and its only current extant competition, which is, at the moment, *not* internet bearer transactions, but, in fact, *paper* bearer transactions. Paper bearer transactions which, if you'll notice, *nobody* wants to do anymore. :-). Contrawise, you should assume that almost *anyone* who offers you a "private" book-entry transaction is, for lack of a better word, lying, frankly -- okay, "marketing" :-) -- *especially* if they're promising to do it over the net(1). Hence the "safeguards" in just about everyone's "privacy" products, which amount to no privacy at all. Cheers, RAH (1) Okay, I *might* :-) excuse Mondex from this rule, I suppose, but only because the smart-cards themselves are physically swappable, and thus at the physical, card-to-card level, anyway, are bearer instruments, but I would only say so under a regime in which those cards *contents*, the balances therein, are exchangeable for, or better, denominated, in some *other* internet bearer instrument like Chaumian cash, which may, I'm afraid, defeat the economics of Mondex altogether. Obviously, Doug Barnes has pointed this out more than once or twice here and elsewhere. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQEVAwUBOcZylcUCGwxmWcHhAQFr2gf8DRr6R94+2u4swcn8eyrkwCq34tyfDtqn houDyMHBuoyqXjlsv1LguSWIIF6dvD7c/QkMH1/OSJ+mM3s/g52DOMF1EvxHLzMo qJ/WYO90MQb8+lFZF+ebTiGZ5mFGzYX1xMWWpgCzuJrjACe1ZfUuFd1/mCUM5Irl FM6+NQS4396lsQ1wGi/FSflDejs1ejE2ou2so9ryCwq4flXjLoImsiAiuMZpA7py ptE6JlsGQL8nKga3EVmQeejedHZqKyt40GxO9CcGf0/rHRrYw3abmzc/SANxa+XA ysi4zwQAguPoxRdo912rff0IXu68t1atNpXMT8Mhrr9MC/EWmf2iYg== =Y6Tg -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'