At 5:29 PM -0400 4/15/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Sun, Apr 15, 2001 at 02:11:56PM -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
You sell Alice a credit history on Bob; Bob takes a new identity; Alice is back to square one. Why would Alice buy credit histories?
Not everyone will choose to be lost in the Net.
So the solution is simple: I sell Alice a new report on Bob's new identity, after doing the appropriate research and employing the relevant investigators.
All credit is a gamble. If I know a person's meatspace identity and ties with religious/social/family groups, I'm far more likely to lend them money then if they're using a throwaway hushmail account.
If Bob is doing the latter, he won't get credit in the first place. If he's using a known meatspace identity, I can do the research and likely succeed.
And to make sure that Ray Dillinger is not confused, let me point out that my "credit rating data haven" is not necessarily for cyberspace nyms. Rather, it's for the meatspace world of credit evaluation. The point of moving it outside a jurisdiction like the U.S., and perhaps beyond _any_ physical jurisdiction, is because meatspace credit data bases and reporting services are heavily regulated. (Also a good reason why seller-untraceability is as important as buyer-untraceability.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns