One thing that's become apparent is that *convenience* is all important. If we made PGP much more convenient to use, by integrating it seamlessly into our common offline mailers, then folks would stop complaining about receiving encrypted messages of a trivial nature, they would be much more likely to sign their message, etc. Getting the basic functionality is only half the battle -- the other half is making it so that the effort put into using it is less costly than the value of most uses, which for most single messages is slim. Furthermore, we won't find the most valuable uses until we've climed the learning curve by massive experimentation with this software. Small user learning curves and low usage cost means convenience, convenience, convenience. Convenience is utterly necessary to make crypto traffic mushroom. Compare Nate Sammon's web page interface to the remailers to the shell script interface (much less try to do the encryption & nesting by hand) -- it makes all the difference in the world! Only one easily fixed problem there -- Nate's remailer doesn't say whether it's doing the nested encryption or mailing plaintext! That one flaw, perhaps just a tiny oversight, makes a system with almost nearly perfect convenience much less user freindly. (If it's really not encrypting that's a much bigger flaw, but also correctable). If folks fixed that flaw and widely deployed Nate's server, remailer usage would mushroom, and we would have enough traffic to mix it up without long delays. Why has Magic Money failed to take off? It's very incovenient. Far too much of the protocol is left to the users to perform manually, and the command line options as an interface are far too arcane, with few affordances or strong clues as to the current state of the protocol, or what action to take next. This isn't a flaw in way Magic Money has implemented digital cash protocols, it simply means that the software from the point of view of users is incomplete -- soembody needs to write a friendly client on top of the autoclient, and a seamless anonymous messaging system between customer, vendor, and bank. This would make a huge difference in how many people are willing to play with, and eventually use, the system. Incidentally, Eudora developers told me at Internet World that they plan to provide GUI hooks for PGP and PEM in a release due out in late '94 or early '95. This is easy for them to do, they just haven't considered it a high priority. It is just not that hard for vendors to integrate encryption if they have customers telling them that's what they want. We as customers need to speak out to our software vendors and let them know what we want. This is at least as important as political activism, probably moreso.