an41418@anon.penet.fi (wonderer) writes:

How do you implement people seeing their neighbors coin, but nobody else seeing it? Does it require a secure channel between every adjacent person?

Yes. There are a couple of methods you could use to perform this. One is to burn a ton of random noise into a CD-ROM and mail it to your neighbor. Another is to use public-key encryption to pass a large chunk of data over the net (you know who your neighbors are, so it is relatively easy for them to publish a key along with thier address when the net is forming) or you could all agree to use the same PRNG and then you just pass seed values to the person you share data with and let them expand it out as needed (if bandwidth is limited, for example.) Either way, if one transmission is compromised you are not necessarily left visible to an evesdropper; they also need to know the random numbers that are being compared to the data you exchange... jim