A few pseudonymous questions went astray and landed in my mail box among a few others (without much of a return address too... the problems of anonymity) So I'll volunteer some possible answers, and while doing so will generate more questions :-). Others feel free to elaborate (especially thoses who HAVE read the papers) Still, no mention of detweil(er)ing will be made :-) although I will mention spoofing... 1) "PHYSICAL LAYER" =================== Q: How do you implement the idea that I can see my coin and the coin on the left, but no others? A: You use public key cryptography. You join a "table" by contacting one of the persons already at the "table". He hands you address and public key of (say) his right neighbor, and you hand him your address and your public key. Each time you "toss a coin" you encrypt it and send it to his ex right neighbor (now your right neighbor). You use the same public key protocols to send out to everybody your "different/same" vote, and collect and count everybody elses. It's easy to add and remove individuals, and you can be part of as many "tables" as you want. 2) MORE SPOOFING ================ New question: how do you make sure you are not spoofed to death, and (mis)led to join a "table" of, say, 126 personae of the same three letter entity, and Yourself. In which case, your messages are not very untraceable anymore? Not very satisfying answer: you meet in person your left AND right neighbor at least once to exchange address and keys... Any better answer? 3) GROUP RESPONSIBILITY AND HIGHER LAYERS ========================================= Q: couldn't every member of the group be implicated because they must all participate to produce the bit of information? A: No, when a "table" is established, what you have is a CSMA/CD network in the classical sense (CSMA/CD = Carrier Sense Multiple Access/ Collision Detection) just like Ethernet is one. Your "DC-net physical layer" is now very complicated, and multi-layered itself, but that only affects speed, not much else. You could (maaaybe :-( establish the layering: Coaxial - Ethernet - IP - TCP / Telnet - RFC822 email - PEM - DC-net - IP - TCP / Telnet - RFC822 email - PEM Except that now, your second layer of TCP/IP is untraceable. By the same token (sorry :-), once you have these protocols established for one "table", you can internetwork many "tables" at will. Poof! Inter-DC-net! But, boy, would the above implementations be slow :-) In any case, even though the participants of any network must cooperate for any message to go through (especially true in the case of Usenet, or FIDO, for example), it is hard to hold all the participants responsible for every message just for being part of the infrastructure. It would be different (even with todays networks), if a large proportion of the messages were CLEARLY illegal. Still, even now, it is impossible to tell whether an encrypted message's content is illegal or not (see the previous netnews discussion with respect to FIDO, mail privacy and encryption), and peeking in un-encrypted email is illegal, depending on caller contract. So I would, until contradicted by the legal types among us, consider a DC-net or Inter-DC-net no different legally, than any other cooperative network out there (Usenet, FIDO, internet...), until specifically regulated. Disclaimer: Of course, this is only a technical opinion, legal decisions may or may not consider the technical precedents :-) Reasonable technical arguments have as much weight legally as unreasonable ones (or so it seems at times) (meaning: of course, I'm not a lawuer) Pierre. pierre@shell.portal.com