Effects of Marking/Delaying Nonsigned Posts

[Jamie Lawrence]

>If the delays remained entirely unexpected or random, quality would
>degrade.  Humans, however, have an uncanny ability to modify their
>own behavior.

I disagree with your inferrence that quality would stay roughly
the same.

>From Tim May:
>(I am not getting list traffic right now, presumably due to the Netcom
>overload problem, and so am only seeing messages I am directly copied
>on. And maybe not all of them, either. [...]

This seems to indicate that Tim is currently having trouble taking
part in much of the discussion that is currently not directed at
him due to delays in email processing.

Gosh, I wonder if that effects the quality of his Cypherpunks
Experience(tm).

Multiply that by a possible 25% (arbitrary) of the list being delayed
 andmy crystal ball says round after round of the same replies and
comments from different people will filter in after the discussion
of the original comment ceaces. This frustrates the readership who
is trying to find the meat of the list as well as the senders (which,
it should be noted, is the desired goal) by having thier material
appear irrelevent due to being delayed. I'm worried about the reader,
mostly, but then there are those who will be frusterated enough to
leave, for example Tim.  Or perhaps I am one of the few here who values
Tim's comments to the list enough to think the list would loose something
if he took off. And I'd wager that Tim isn't the only one who would leave.

Perhaps your ability to filter the garbage from the treasure is
truly uncanny, Eric, and all this wouldn't effect you. I don't think
most of the rest of us are quite so amazing.

>I am also willing to risk a small amount of degradation to encourage
>people to actually use encryption tools.

I guess this is the answer then.

There we go.

>Having notification that a message wasn't signed was never presented
>as one of the purposes of the proposal.

My mistake then, I thought you had proposed marking messages as unsigned
as an intermediate step. Too hard to keep track of who is saying what in
this particular thread.

-j, preparing to start the Cypherpunks Postal List. After all, what's a
little delay?

>Eric