Nyms for sale! Get your red hot nyms!

georgemw at speakeasy.net georgemw at speakeasy.net
Fri Nov 30 14:57:53 PST 2001


On 30 Nov 2001, at 13:56, 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.
> 

This assumes that you want it to be possible to buy and sell 
reputation capital, and that people will accept bought reputation
as valid, propositions that I think are contrary to fact.
	That is, if (purely hypothetically) I believed "Wei Dai" was the
most intelligent, informed, and creative poster I had ever seen,
and I learned that "Wei Dai" had sold his name to some unknown
third party,  I would consider any impressions I had about
"Wei Dai" to be instantly invalidated (since there's no particular
reason to believe they'd apply to the new nym owner), and the
name would become worthless (in my eyes) regardless of how 
much the new owner paid for it.
	I'll take that a step further: the possibility that nyms might
me surreptitiously bought and sold is a critical weakness of any 
sort of nym reputation system, and a system designed to
facilitate this kind of fraud is system in which only a fool
would put any confidence in any reputation.


> 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 don't think anyone claims that the whole idea is nonsense,
just that it's a mistake to view it as a singel real number.
Maybe a 3x3 matrix would be better?

George





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