Mail*Link( Remote anonymous bank accounts via pem FYI: [pem-dev is a private email list for developers of the Privacy Enhanced Mail protocol additions to Internet mail, originally published as RFCs 1113 - 1115, and now updated as four draft-ietf-pem documents. To join the list, send email to pem-dev-request@tis.com. By the way, most of the discussion is not nearly as germane to our ideas as this particular posting, but this one caught my eye as of some iterest to cypherpunks.] ----------- Forwarded Message ------------ Date: Tue, 13 Oct 92 01:07:39 EDT

From: uunet!ellisun.sw.stratus.com!cme (Carl Ellison) To: pem-dev@TIS.COM Subject: Re: [Peter Williams: Perhaps OSI security is not possible in a liberal community!] Sender: uunet!TIS.COM!pem-dev-relay

Let me throw in another vote against the *necessity* of hierarchical certification by arguing against the necessity of certification itself. For example, it is possible, given digital signatures, to have totally anonymous bank accounts -- identified only by public key -- with no certification of relationship between that key and any other fact about any individual or corporation. Such accounts are at least as valuable as a Swiss numbered account -- perhaps more so since no one need know the identity of the person or people with the power to withdraw funds. Such funds transfers can be made not only anonymously but untraceably. It might even be possible for them to be made without it being possible to trace the transfer at either end (eg., using digital cash techniques). I don't propose that all bank accounts be anonymous. It's just that I don't like to see us jump into an attempt to relate public keys into the physical world so that our old established notions about relationships and responsibility can carry over into this new domain when by doing that we end up avoiding research into all the possibilities which digital signatures open up. That research needs to be both technical and social -- or we could shy away from it by forcing relationships between keys and those entities to which we are already accustomed. --Carl