[arrakistor at gmail.com: Wikipedia & Tor]

John Kelsey kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
Sat Oct 1 07:01:51 PDT 2005


>Damn good point.  Now that I think of it, all the classic examples of
>"anonymous" publication were really pseudonymous.  (Publius, et al)

They have different requirements.  Votes and cash transactions and similar things 
require no history, no reputation.  They're one-shot actions that should not be linkable 
to other actions.  

Pseudonyms are used everywhere in practice, because even my name is effectively 
a pseudonym unless you have some reason to try to link it to a meatspace human.  
This is why it's worth reading a book by Mark Twain, even though that wasn't his real
name.  And it would be worth reading those books even if we had no idea who had really
written them.  The reuptation and history of the author lets you decide whether you want
to read the next of his books.  The same is true of academic papers--you don't need to 
have met me or even to be able to find me, in order to read my papers and develop an 
opinion (hopefully a good one) about the quality of my work.  And that determines whether
you think the next paper is worth reading.

--John





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list