Reputation and anonymous companies

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

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On Sat, 18 May 1996, Jean-Francois Avon wrote:

> Yes, but anonymity would prevent the easy build-up of reputation too:
> 
> If Joe Anon9876 say: "company ANON1234 Inc screwed me, how peoples
> will know that it is not a unscrupulous competitor trying to damage
> their reputation?
> 
> Now, if Joe Anon9876 decides to disclose to the public that his real
> name is John Doe to give more weight to his denounciation, and
> depending on wether or not his bosses *are* or are not crooks, he
> might very well get some sort of "prediction" on his head.
> 
> Now, Jim Bell's servers don't have to be completely public.  Suppose
> some servers were built so that the donation address would be known
> but the list of donation would be kept secret: Such server could
> thrive.  Most "donation" here would not be 2 bucks but rather 20,000
> bucks to ensure that the contract would get taken up promptly.  And
> since the targets would not be published, there would be not even a
> hint that company ANON1234 *might* have put a contract on John Doe
> (Now, aka Joe Anon9876) .  The fact that an open AP server exists
> makes the later possibility also possible.  To have access to the
> target list would require to be member of a *very* close circle, or
> maybe, actually, just en employee of ANON_KILLERS4567_Inc.

You are right about the anonymity part -- I hadn't thought about it that much.
However, how would AP solve anything?  If the company is completely anonymous,
then nobody would know who to kill.  Every worker including the president would
be pseudonymous.

- -- Mark

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