Sandy writes:
I want to know what the people on this list intend to do with cryptography in the "real world."
I want to move many of the transactions I do today via snail mail, credit cards, and cash, to electronic medium. Receive bills in email (authenticated and encrypted), pay them in email (e-checks) on a digital bank. Receive statements from the bank in email (authenticated and encrypted). Track the complete transaction in the same medium, mostly automatically, via my email agent. In what can be done now, the systems are disparate, ad-hoc, non-integrated, insecure, expensive, incompatible, etc... in short: junk. And none of the existing systems apply to transactions between individuals. I want transactions between individuals to become practical. I want a complete and usable electronic commerce setup usable not only between me and utilities (phone, electricity, internet), but between me and most other entities (employer pay and expense refunds, rent, other individuals), including across borders, of course. Not only do I want it "integrated" and "open" so I can use it with whoever I damn well please, but I want it light-weight, so payments in pennies become routinely feasible. Efficient payments in pennies allow stuff like routine digital postage, and routine remuneration of authors "as I read", as in shareware books, magazines, and newsgroup postings. I strongly disagree with people who lightly dismiss what they call "digital postage". I think that allowing for digital pennies as part of a general digital payment system would open the door to many useful applications in, yes, pay-per-use ftp, and generally individual pay-per-use access to databases. But both PGP and e-momey won't work until people's mailers and newsreaders allow them to use them easily (that is, until people quit getting stuck with Microsoft's stuff). Even the Unix mailers and newsreaders are not getting updated anywhere quickly enough. That means the first commercial crypto-applications may have to provide the hooks themselves, or rely on what others like General Magic are doing. A pointer to how far we are is that many people still get spooked by 50 messages a day list traffic, and desperatly try to unsubscribe quickly. This means they don't even have a mail preprocessor (procmail, deliver, etc...) A pointer to how close we are is that 3 years ago, this discussion would not even take place, and these pre-processors did not exist yet. Also that people are now opening commercial MUDs. BTW, none of the applications I'm interested in would require IP-level transactions, all would work fine with email-level transactions. That's good, because little of the windows market is going to get IP connectivity anytime soon, whereas most will get email and fax connectivity. The stuff that is being done now is in the right direction, but frankly, it's still too fragmented and impractical to see much use (and that's why I'm not bothering to sign this message). Anonymous posting is the only "application" that sees much use, and even then, I guess it's not fully understood by many users (na vs an, "identity leak", etc...) Pierre Uszynski, pierre@shell.portal.com