bryce@digicash.com writes:
Okay having said I couldn't think of a good way, I'll go ahead and suggest a way.
Let's assume that it is possible to stop people from pretending to be anyone in Real Life(tm). (It is possible.)
How? Identity police taking genetic samples from every person on the planet six times a day? Even that can't prevent me from going to a corner pay phone and calling someone and saying I am Ignatz Ratkin.
Now let's collect N people and form a Dining-Cryptographers' net. Once the Dining-Cryptographers' net is up-and-running let's put out a call for each of the N participants to announce a public key which will be their nym from now on. Assuming that you get N public keys, you can have _some_ degree of assurance that there is a one-to-one mapping between pubkeys/nyms and humans on the DC-Net.
And how do you catch the person who tries to send out two keys? .pm