[arrakistor at gmail.com: Wikipedia & Tor]

[Tyler Durden]

In many segments of the credit card insutry meatspace is also irrelevant. 
Anyone with a FICO greater than about 680 is almost certainly concered with 
maintaining their reputation with the current crop of TRWs of the 
world...collections efforts leverage the potential damage to the reputation, 
and only very gradually (if ever) fall back into actual meatspace threats 
(ie, docking your pay, etc...). And in many cases meatspace threats are 
forgone due to the collections effort (times probability of collection) 
yielding more than what would be recovered.

So for many, it's effectively been psuedonyms for years, though their 
psuedonyms happen to correspond to their true names.

-TD


>From: John Kelsey <kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com>
>To: "Roy M. Silvernail" <roy at rant-central.com>,        "R.A. Hettinga"  
><rah at shipwright.com>
>CC: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>, cypherpunks at jfet.org
>Subject: Re: [arrakistor at gmail.com: Wikipedia & Tor]
>Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 10:01:51 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
>
> >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