At 12:06 AM +0100 on 7/1/02, Ben Laurie wrote:
No, a pseudonym can be linked to stuff (such as reputation, publications, money). An anonym cannot.
More to the point, there is no such "thing" as an "anonym", by definition. There's no way to link the behavior of one event that an "anonym" causes to any other event that that "anonym" might, or might not, have caused. If the events are linkable to the same signing key, which is what we mean reputation in cypherspace, then you have a pseudonym. I do agree that a perfect pseudonym is functional anonymity, however, in the meatspace, is-a-person, biometric identity sense of "anonymity". Which points up the main flaw in book-entry content settlement/clearing schemes like the one that Microsoft/WAVE is trying to pull off. If were just possible to pay *cash* for *bits*, you don't care *who* bought your bits, and, frankly, it's not only cheaper, it is, as we will find out soon enough, impossible to do any other way at the anywhere near the actual cost of transporting bits across the net. I leave following that logical thread back to a recursive cash-settled auction market for content, and the resulting income increase to *creators* of content mostly at the expense of *distributors* of content :-), as an exercise for the reader... Like others, I'm practically praying that Microsoft actually tries to paint this Escher picture of a financial Russell's paradox. The longer that Microsoft, the content distributors, and, unfortunately, the financial community, though learning has to occur sometime, persist in making a "rights" "management" system which attempts to be both consistent and complete, the more money other people will make getting a mostly-anonymous cash-settled bits-on-the-wire content system up and running. The price of the financial cryptography engineering is falling through the floor as we speak. Sooner or later, it's just going to happen. Then things will get interesting. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'