The Crypto Winter

[Adam Shostack]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 10:00:05AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
| Also, I plan to reply only to folks who make a serious effort to debate. 

ok, so this is just some nits, because your analysis is generally good.

| contributors have arrived. We had a guy from Germany, whose name I have 
| spaced out on, but he showed up at ZKS (another point I will get to in a 

Ulf Muller.  

| (Remember when three members of the same family were on the list and two 
| of them were essentially Netscape's security department! Remember when 
| at least three key list members worked for Digicash?) The ZKS issue 
| alone took half a dozen of our most significant contributors off the 
| list (for various obvious reasons), including Ian Goldberg, both Adams 
| (Back and Shostack), and some others.

I'm pretty sure that my posting rate dropped long before I came to
ZeroKnowledge.  Many of the factors you describe contributed; the lack 
of new things being said here, increasing demands from my previous
startup (Netect), and from ZK.

| .... Even if these former list members end up leaving ZKS, as 
| would seem likely, I doubt they'll return to our list.)

Likely true about my posting rate.  However, I think that some of the
new stuff we're working on is actually quite interesting, and I'm
planning to stay here.  I do filter the list heavily, tend to read
only the first few paragraphs of text, etc.

| 6. The failure to get true digital money. Call it what you like, 
| "digital cash" or "ecash" or even one of Hettinga's pet names, but the 
| fact is that for both political and technical reasons we don't have 
| digital cash. This has ripple effects for nearly all of the constructs 
[...]
| This failure to get workable untraceable digital cash (true 2-way 
| untraceable, not the bastardized, banker-friendly, government-friendly 
| one-way untraceable form) is the _deep_ reason things are stagnating.

Sad as it makes me, I don't know of any system which allows 2-way
untracability and fraud prevention.  Can you point me to one?  With
trustworthy reputation systems, you might be able to get away from
this problem.  I don't know of any reputation system that I'd trust
for a multi-hundred dollar transaction today.  (Speaking of
reputation, Syverson and Dingledine have done some new work on
reputations and cascade mixes, at
http://www.freehaven.net/doc/casc-rep/)

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume