-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The DC-Net is not very easy to understand. I'll try to explain the most important parts of the concept as simply as I can. Let's say there are a number of participants in a DC-Net. Each participant shares a different one-time pad with each of several other participants. At most one participant can send one bit through the DC-Net per "round". How does this work? For each round i, a participant takes the i-th bit of all the one-time pads that he has and XORs them together. If he doesn't want to send a bit, he just broadcasts the resulting bit to every other participant. If he DOES want to send a bit, then he broadcasts the XOR of that resulting bit and the bit he wants to send. When everyone has done this, each participant takes all of the bits that has been broadcasted, and XORs them together. This last action produces the output of the DC-Net for the i-th round. Suppose for the first round nobody wants to send a bit. Since each one- time pad is known by 2 participants, the first bit of each pad has been XORed into the final output twice. Since anything XORed by anything twice equals itself, these two XORs cancel each other out. And since nothing else has been XORed into the output, the output must equal 0. If one participant wanted to send a bit, however, then something else HAS been XORed into the output. Since all the bits from the one-time pads cancel out, the output equals the bit he wanted to send. Wei Dai P.S. I realize someone has probably written something like this already, but I hope this explanation helps someone who is still puzzled. If nothing else, it serves as a sanity check on my own understanding. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLzbKfTl0sXKgdnV5AQGTpwQAtGe5zl91MgA/ayzBGo/DLXh7NyTDSw00 h/qZZxh2U9HoNFLHMMiHV64PYE8poJlCH8kLDY+XZlv1phoiBtMnc2AehN5XVJmr YCQ77rH9vp6yk6SZ5F7HV/UNIIQj6TkW806OZP7LlgUrXWPZdCSYGPh7n60J4TkD RaspzTgFcUk= =ml6y -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- E-mail: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> URL: "http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai" =================== Exponential Increase of Complexity =================== --> singularity --> atoms --> macromolecules --> biological evolution --> central nervous systems --> symbolic communication --> homo sapiens --> digital computers --> internetworking --> close-coupled automation --> broadband brain-to-net connections --> artificial intelligence --> distributed consciousness --> group minds --> ? ? ?