Can DC-nets be used in a hierarchical or "backbone" framework to reduce communications overhead? Bill Stewart (in personal mail) suggested that such a scheme could satisfy my objections to DC-nets, namely that in order to get N-way anonymity, you must exchange N bits of traffic per bit of anonymous message transmitted. But when we tried to come up with such a scheme, it ended up being an unsatisfying hybrid of DC-nets and mixes. If you know of a backbone arrangement for DC-nets with a local net of size L<<N but an "anonymity parameter" of N, please tell us about it... -- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)