Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality

[Tim May]

On Friday, November 30, 2001, at 01:56 PM, Wei Dai wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 04:28:58PM -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
>> Following which, Alice pulls out the pre-dated revocation certificate,
>> and generates confusion as to the validity of Bob's key change message.
>
> I guess we would need a distributed public registry of key
> change/revocation messages that guarantees only one such message will be
> posted per key, and any revocation messages not posted to this registry
> would be ignored.
>
> Again, I don't think reputation capital is the best solution to the
> problem that it tries to solve. I'm just trying to defend it against the
> charge that it's a nonsensical idea. I still propose b-money as a better
> alternative. Maybe Tim has found an even better solution, and if so I
> certainly look forward to seeing it.

I'm writing a response to your long reply to my long article.

(You hadn't responded to my article for some number of days after it 
appeared, which is fine, but that's why I haven't felt pressured to 
reply immediately to your reply.)

I'll try to get it out later today or tomorrow.

But so there's no suspense, I'm not claiming a better cryptographic 
protocol, certainly not involving distributed key registries for nym 
reputations. It's that whole approach I'm arguing against.

Which I think I argued for reasonably well in the long post. If you or 
others are not convinced, fine. But I will send off the reply on 
specific points later, tonight or tomorrow.



--Tim May
"Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David 
Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11