Online systems are also guaranteed anonymous. Well, maybe, though traffic analysis may be a problem. I did hear of an interesting case of people paying for privacy in the real world. In Hong Kong, the Aberdeen tunnel has drive-through smart card readers for tolls. The problem is, these cards don't use a privacy- protecting protocol. And many folks there are worried about what will happen come 1997. So there's now a resale market -- stores buy toll cards in quantity, and resell them over the counter, for cash. This underscores what I've said in the past about anonymous digital cash: it's not going to go anywhere unless folks are willing to pay a premium for privacy. There are too many sound reasons for keeping audit trails (debugging, fraud detection, marketing analysis, etc. -- and note that the first is an issue even for folks with the best intentions in the word; note how many remailer operators have kept logs, at least for a while); unless there's a profit motive in doing otherwise, most folks won't. In Hong Kong, the threat is not just real and imminent, it's *perceived* as such. Whether or not there is a real threat in, say, the U.S. (let's please not debate that!), there's much less perception of one.