There's been an upsurge in "cross-mailed" messages, with Cypherpunks copied on "www-buy-blah-blah," and vice versa, and Cypherpunks copied on the growing number of lobbyist lists (EPIC, EFF, etc.). A lot of this is not new, but some of the cross-posts between our list and the various "Net commerce" and like groups are causing debates to blur. This message drove it home for me: -----begin excerpt----- From: ali@eit.COM (Ali Bahreman) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 15:28:00 -0700 To: ali@eit.COM, dnew@sgf.fv.com, www-buyinfo@allegra.att.com, ljo@ausys.se Subject: Digital Cash, Privacy, Anonymity, Double spending protection and Cheating protection Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com Reply-To: bahreman@eit.COM X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk Let's think out loud here for a minute... I am sending this to Cypherpunks to see if someone out there has already thought of a solution to this. Alice wants to get a file from Bob and wants to pay him $1 using some Digital Cash scheme. - Do we want Alice's identity to remain Anonymous (and Bob's too)? (Note that this means that neither party knows who the other really is. They could be using aliases to conceal their real identity.) ... rest of speculations about crypto elided.... ----end excerpt---- I don't know if "ali@eit.COM (Ali Bahreman)" is subscribed to the Cypherpunks list or not. From the nature of his comments, I suspect not. There is great danger in constantly "casting the net wider," in trying to reach more and more people. I understand the temptation for some on both lists to cross-post some messages. I urge that they do this, as Bob H. has done on occasion, by personally forwarding the message, with only _one_ of the lists getting it. (This because the real danger is as above, where multiple lists are in the recipient or cc: fields, and followups semi-spam multiple lists.) Clearly we cannot have our list used to educate others on other lists. Or, rather, I'm finding it hard enough to stay on top of a list with 1200+ subscribers. Adding people from other lists, at varying levels of competence in areas we think important, will simply be too much. For me, at least. For now, I plan to filter out stuff that gets echoed over from www-buy, as I can't keep track of their conversations as well as our own. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."