Cypherspace Residents, Several people have asked about what PGP is, how RSA works, what digital cash is all about, etc. I'll recap where and how these questions can be answered. 1. Long term, there will be a FAQ, to be coordinated by Hugh Daniel, who recently posted about this. 2. I posted or mentioned the following items to this list very recently: - Crypto Glossary (which explains, albeit briefly, RSA, digital cash, DC-Nets, PGP, etc.). This has been also been submitted for the anonymous ftp site (at soda.berkeley.edu in pub/cypherpunks). - Larry Loen's crypto FAQ he posted to sci.crypt recently. This was also submitted for the ftp site. 3. The documentation for PGP has a good discussion of the issues, how the IDEA cipher works, etc. Read this, please, before asking the entire list how RSA works. 4. "Cypherpunks read crypto books" is my variant of Eric's "Cypherpunks write code." (No point in trying to write code if you don't have any idea what you're doing.) I've described many excellent books and articles. Almost any recent book will give you an excellent list of other books. 5. Hal Finney and Karl Barrus have both written excellent summaries of how digital cash works. Work through their examples! (A personal note: I'm blissfully PERL-illiterate, but I use Mathematica on my Mac, so Karl's examples in Mathematica overjoyed me!) 6. Several weeks ago I posted some articles on the dining cryptographers protocol, as Hal also did. I can send these to anyone who wasn't on the list then. (Ditto for the Crypto Glossary.) 7. Sci.crypt is worth reading, especially if you have a good newsreader like "tin" which allows interesting threads to be quickly identified. Hope this helps. --Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: by arrangement.