RE: REAL WORLD ENCRYPTION

[Pierre Uszynski <pierre@shell.portal.com>]

Sandy writes:

> I want to know what the
> people on this list intend to do with cryptography in the "real
> world."

I want to move many of the transactions I do today via snail
mail, credit cards, and cash, to electronic medium. Receive bills
in email (authenticated and encrypted), pay them in email
(e-checks) on a digital bank. Receive statements from the bank
in email (authenticated and encrypted). Track the complete
transaction in the same medium, mostly automatically, via
my email agent.

In what can be done now, the systems are disparate, ad-hoc,
non-integrated, insecure, expensive,
incompatible, etc... in short: junk. And none of the existing
systems apply to transactions between individuals. I want
transactions between individuals to become practical.

I want a complete and usable electronic commerce setup usable
not only between me and utilities (phone, electricity, internet),
but between me and most other entities (employer pay and expense
refunds, rent, other individuals), including across borders,
of course.

Not only do I want it "integrated" and "open" so I can use it
with whoever I damn well please, but I want it light-weight,
so payments in pennies become routinely feasible. Efficient
payments in pennies allow stuff like routine digital postage,
and routine remuneration of authors "as I read", as in shareware
books, magazines, and newsgroup postings.

I strongly disagree with people who lightly dismiss what they
call "digital postage". I think that allowing for digital pennies
as part of a general digital payment system would open the
door to many useful applications in, yes, pay-per-use ftp, and
generally individual pay-per-use access to databases.

But both PGP and e-momey won't work until people's mailers
and newsreaders allow them to use them easily (that is, until
people quit getting stuck with Microsoft's stuff). Even the
Unix mailers and newsreaders are not getting updated anywhere
quickly enough. That means the first commercial
crypto-applications may have to provide the hooks themselves,
or rely on what others like General Magic are doing.

A pointer to how far we are is that many people still get
spooked by 50 messages a day list traffic, and desperatly try
to  unsubscribe quickly. This means they don't even have a mail
preprocessor (procmail, deliver, etc...)

A pointer to how close we are is that 3 years ago, this
discussion would not even take place, and these pre-processors
did not exist yet. Also that people are now opening commercial
MUDs.

BTW, none of the applications I'm interested in would require
IP-level transactions, all would work fine with email-level
transactions. That's good, because little of the windows
market is going to get IP connectivity anytime soon, whereas
most will get email and fax connectivity.

The stuff that is being done now is in the right direction,
but frankly, it's still too fragmented and impractical to see
much use (and that's why I'm not bothering to sign this
message). Anonymous posting is the only "application" that
sees much use, and even then, I guess it's not fully
understood by many users (na vs an, "identity leak", etc...)

Pierre Uszynski,
pierre@shell.portal.com