Ed Reed wrote:

...

I'm just curious on this point. I haven't seen much to indicate that Microsoft and others are ready for a nymous, tradeable software assets world.

No, and neither are corporate customers, to a large extent.

Right, so my point (I think) was that without some indication that those people are ready for a nymous, tradeable assets world, the notion of a trusted computing base is limited to working for the Microsofts off the world as the owners of the content, not to users as the owners of assets.

Accountability is, in fact, a treasured property of business computing.

Lack of accountability creates things like Enron, Anderson Consulting, Oil-for-Food scams, and the missing 9 billion dollars or so of reconstruction aid. It's the fuel that propells SPAM, graft, and identity theft.

What I've not seen is much work providing accountability for anonymous transactions.

I am having trouble with tying in "accountability" with the above examples. That doesn't sound like an accountability issue in the technical sense, that sounds like a theft problem. In this sense, I see two different uses of the word, and they don't have much of a linkage. Nymous systems are generally far more accountable in the technical sense, simply because they give you the tools to be absolutely sure about your statements. A nymous account has a an audit trail that can be traced as far as you have access to the information, and because the audit trail is cryptographically secured (by usage of hash and digsigs) a complete picture can be built up. This stands in contraposition to systems based on blinding formulas. That sort of issued money is intended to be untraceable and is thus less easily used to 'account' for everything. Having said that, there's no reason why a given transaction can't be set and stabilised in stone with a digital receipt, which then can form part of an accounting trail. But regardless of which system is used (nymous, blinded or POBA - plain old bank account) the money can be stolen, statements can be hidden and fudged, and purposes can be misrepresented, just like any others... If there was a reason why these big companies didn't get into such digital assets, I'd say it was because they hadn't succeeded in a form that was 'feel good' enough, as yet for them. In which case, I'd say that they would consider 'accountability' to mean 'my accountant won't think it strange.' iang -- News and views on what matters in finance+crypto: http://financialcryptography.com/