At 1:03 AM +0200 on 8/10/02, Some anonymous, and now apparently innumerate, idiot in my killfile got himself forwarded to Mr. Leitl's cream of cypherpunks list:
They will protect us from being able to extend trust across the network.
As Dan Geer and Carl Ellison have reminded us on these lists and elsewhere, there is no such thing as "trust", on the net, or anywhere else. There is only risk. Go learn some finance before you attempt to abstract emotion into the quantifiable. Actual numerate, thinking, people gave up on that nonsense in the 1970's, and the guys who proved the idiocy of "trust", showing, like LaGrange said to Napoleon about god, that the capital markets "had no need that hypothesis, Sire" ended up winning a Nobel for that proof the 1990's*. Cheers, RAH *The fact that Scholes and Merton eventually ended up betting on equity volatility like it was actually predictable and got their asses handed to them for their efforts is beside the point, of course. :-). -- ----------------- 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' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com