Mike - A technical comment - the version posted to cypherpunks has a lot of Macintoshy punctuation metacharacters left in it, e.g. Q J R S representing various quote marks and such. As for the contents, I may or may not get around to writing a real response, but I certainly *hope* that by 2030 we've got digital signatures and such run by the free market and not by the Government, even if it does shrink, and that the Government Printing Office is reduced to the small job of publishing everything the government does. The business about "black banks" providing non-governmentally controlled signatures being unstable because they can't maintain the integrity of their signature schemes is not very credible, unless the governemnt manages to ban them - as long as you have an institution large enough to be relatively immune to bribery and rubber-hose cryptanalysis, it's easy enough to protect the integrity of your signatures. A much more credible scenario is a "Web of Trust" model where many of the major players may very well be government-run (if the central banks haven't collapsed and the phone companies haven't been privatized) for smaller non-free countries, and mixtures of governmental, NGOs, major financial institutions, and MicroSoft Inc./AG/SA/Ltd. BTW, what's fof.org? Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart NCR Corp, 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 # Voice/Beeper 510-224-7043, Phone 510-484-6204 # email bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart@attmail.com