...which brings us to http://www.acs.ohio-state.edu/units/law/swire1/pscrypto.htm Which is, mostly, based on Professor Peter Swire's opinion on the cypherpunk "identity is bits" paradigm delivered at FC97, though apparently edited some since then. Not that I agree with him, at all, actually, but there are *lots* of twisty bits in there to wrestle with. Cheers, RAH At 11:14 AM -0800 on 11/16/00, Ray Dillinger wrote:
According to current law in all nations (as far as I know), identity is meat. One person has one identity, and the identity is persistent and lifelong. All law is based on this assumption.
Emerging in this forum and elsewhere is a different assumption, which is that identity is bits. If an entity has Alice's key, then that entity is Alice. Alice's person may be a different person this time, but only if Alice's last person was stupid or careless. And in this case Alice is probably better off with a different person anyway. Your dealings with Alice are still bound by the same guarantees of trust that you've always had with Alice: the laws of mathematics and the steps of the protocols. Alice's reputation and interests are likely to have changed with the change in person, but that's okay.
-- ----------------- 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'