In the www-buyinfo discussion on crypto,

From research!nsb.fv.com!nsb Sat Dec 17 09:36:40 1994 Eric > "If and When" is Yes and Today. Anybody who can autosign their

The risk analysis is absolutely true. However, I have the impression you missed the phrase "deployed widely enough to have penetrated a meaningful portion of our market". I suspect that the cypherbunks and www-buyinfo communities are not the best place to get a feel for the extent to which crypto is widely deployed. Pick some random other list or newsgroup, however, and I'll be surprised if you find 1% market penetration for crypto.

Obviously, from reading Cypherpunks you'd get the idea that everybody has PGP and all but a few old fogies have MIME :-) However, one of the reasons that few people actually are using PGP signatures on all their messages is that there's no real need - most of us realistically aren't trying to overthrow our governments, except through obsolescence and ridicule, and there isn't much problem with forging postings on the net. On the other hand, if my credit card were involved, I'd certainly be happy to start signing all my fv payment confirmations, especially if there were a convenient tool for doing so that got distributed free.... bILL