At 1:25 PM -0500 11/20/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
At 12:10 PM -0500 on 11/20/00, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
If CAs included a financial guarantee of whatever it is they are asserting when they issue a certificate, then all these problems would go away.
Right.
Like Ellison (and Metzger :-)) have said for years now, the only "assertions" worth making are financial ones. "Identity", biometric/meat, or otherwise, is only a proxy for asset protection anyway.
I claim you can do this on the net without the current mystification of identity that exists in the financial system, using bearer asset cryptography, among other things, but that's another discussion altogether.
And I have been asserting for years that _belief_ is all that matters. Or, more carefully put, that all issues of lawyers, backing by gold, financial instruments, escrow, bonds, etc. are issues of "How is belief affected?" One can think of many examples of where issues of identity, home address, name of lawyers, credit ratings, amount of a bond, etc. are really issues of belief in some outcome. One _believes_ that someone with a verifiable home and business address is more likely to be collected from (in a transaction or legal judgement) than someone with only a pseudonym. And one _believes_ that someone one has met is, for all intents and purposes, who he says he is (or, rather, that a key he represents to be his wills serve as adequate I.D. for future transactions.) A financial bond, or guarantee, is only one aspect of belief. Perhaps an important one, but only a subset. Belief is all. "All cryptography is about belief." --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)