At 3:55 AM -0700 4/11/04, Bill Stewart wrote:
The biggest problems are all at layer 9.
Exactly. And, I would claim, that because of book-entry settlement, the latency thereof, the need to send someone to jail if they lie about a book entry, and the unavailability of bearer transaction settlement, we need lawyers and politicians to effect our network transactions, and the more bandwidth involved, like those between tier 1 interconnections, the more politicians and lawyers you need. At the top of the network lurk the most expensive "switches", again. As I've said before, geodesic networks need geodesic transactions. Book-entry transactions, are, by definition (look at a chart of accounts in a company's books...) tree-like. Cash and bearer transactions are, inherently, geodesic. There are only three parties to a bearer transaction, the underwriter, the buyer and the seller. A book entry transaction requires up to seven participants, in, guess what, a hierarchy, with a single route through the network. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- 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'