geographically removed?

[James A. Donald]

    --
Major Variola:
> > > Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can 
> > > always be defeated by cranking up the police state a 
> > > notch.
> > >
> > > This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems.

James A. Donald:
> > The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment 
> > system gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters.   We have a 
> > long way to go before police states are the problem.

Steve Furlong
> Heh. When the stasi come a-callin' tell them they'll have to 
> wait because you've got bigger problems. Wonder how well that 
> would work?

The stasi are not a callin yet on ecash, and have not been 
particularly effective against people publishing bittorrents.

> I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is 
> ripe for fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a 
> mature system make use of trusted intermediaries?

People issuing e-cash systems want to be irrevocable and 
anonymous, in part because the market niche for revocable 
payments is occupied by paypal and credit card companies, but 
they are running into trouble from fraudsters.  They also have 
trouble from states, but as yet the trouble from states is 
merely the usual mindless bureaucratic regulatory harassment 
that disrupts all businesses, not any specific hostility to 
difficult-to-trace extranational payments.

> The vendors register with the intermedi- ary *, who takes 
> some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness, and so 
> on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if 
> appropriate. The sellers pay the intermediary, who takes a 
> piece of the action to act basically as an insurer of the 
> vendor's good faith. If there's a problem with the service or 
> merchandise and the vendor won't make good, the intermediary 
> is responsible for making the buyer whole. Is there some 
> reason this wouldn't work? If not, why hasn't anyone tried it 
> yet? Not enough cash flow to make it worth their while?

Lots of people have tried it, with varying degrees of success. 
Not much demand for it yet.  A big problem is that whenever any 
such a website achieves some degree of acceptance, a storm of 
fake websites appear imitating its name, its look and feel, 
with urls that looks very similar. 

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         James A. Donald
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