On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 10:00:05AM -0800, Tim May wrote: | Also, I plan to reply only to folks who make a serious effort to debate. ok, so this is just some nits, because your analysis is generally good. | contributors have arrived. We had a guy from Germany, whose name I have | spaced out on, but he showed up at ZKS (another point I will get to in a Ulf Muller. | (Remember when three members of the same family were on the list and two | of them were essentially Netscape's security department! Remember when | at least three key list members worked for Digicash?) The ZKS issue | alone took half a dozen of our most significant contributors off the | list (for various obvious reasons), including Ian Goldberg, both Adams | (Back and Shostack), and some others. I'm pretty sure that my posting rate dropped long before I came to ZeroKnowledge. Many of the factors you describe contributed; the lack of new things being said here, increasing demands from my previous startup (Netect), and from ZK. | .... Even if these former list members end up leaving ZKS, as | would seem likely, I doubt they'll return to our list.) Likely true about my posting rate. However, I think that some of the new stuff we're working on is actually quite interesting, and I'm planning to stay here. I do filter the list heavily, tend to read only the first few paragraphs of text, etc. | 6. The failure to get true digital money. Call it what you like, | "digital cash" or "ecash" or even one of Hettinga's pet names, but the | fact is that for both political and technical reasons we don't have | digital cash. This has ripple effects for nearly all of the constructs [...] | This failure to get workable untraceable digital cash (true 2-way | untraceable, not the bastardized, banker-friendly, government-friendly | one-way untraceable form) is the _deep_ reason things are stagnating. Sad as it makes me, I don't know of any system which allows 2-way untracability and fraud prevention. Can you point me to one? With trustworthy reputation systems, you might be able to get away from this problem. I don't know of any reputation system that I'd trust for a multi-hundred dollar transaction today. (Speaking of reputation, Syverson and Dingledine have done some new work on reputations and cascade mixes, at http://www.freehaven.net/doc/casc-rep/) Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume