Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)

[Tim May]

At 2:11 PM -0700 4/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>Tim;
>
>One thing to consider is the role of "credit histories", or
>virtually any other identity-linked information, in a milieu 
>where the people have access to the necessary techniques and
>programs to do those deals.
>
>You sell Alice a credit history on Bob; Bob takes a new
>identity; Alice is back to square one.  Why would Alice
>buy credit histories?
>
>For that matter, why would anyone loan money in the first
>place?  What credit histories could there possibly be?
>

As Declan pointed out in his follow-up, you assume nyms will be 
adopted and abandoned freely. Some will, some won't. "A Melon" 
doesn't have much reputation capital, but "Pr0duct Cypher" does. The 
former will vanish and reappear like quantum foam, the latter will 
not.

This is not a zero friction system.

In any case, "credit histories" are nothing more than assertions. 
Some assertions are true, some are false, some are of little value, 
some are of great value.

Historically, some assertions about credit history are valuable to 
others. The issue of Alice and Bob being pseudonymous is close to be 
orhtogonal to this point.

In any case, caveat emptor works pretty well. If such assertions are 
of zero value, as you imply, then this is what the market will show. 
If not...


--Tim May

-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns