Electric Communities notion of identity

[Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>]

Tim may wrote:
>I haven't checked on them in the last few months, but "Electric
>Communities" (www.communities.com) was doing some interesting work on
>adding security and market mechanism extensions to Java, in a superset
>language they called "E."
>
>Many Cypherpunk list members, past and present  worked on aspects of this,
>including Chip Morningstar (one of the founders), Doug Barnes, Norm Hardy,
>Bill Frantz, Mark Miller, etc. They can speak up and say more.

E is a language which supports optimistic distributed programming.  It
produces .class files which run on unmodified Java Virtual Machines.  More
information is available from http://www.communities.com

Perhaps of more interest to cypherpunks is the model of identity
implemented in what is called today EC-Habitats, our graphical "world".
(See the web pages for more details.)

The model is quite similar to the model used by James A. Donald's Crypto
Kong.  Identity is a public key.  You prove who you are by showing that you
hold the private key corresponding to that public key.

All of this key stuff is hidden by the user interface.  What the user sees
is:  You meet someone "in world" and give them a nickname.  When you meet
them again, the software knows that it is the same "person", and refers to
them by your nickname for them.  Thus people can develop and maintain
reputations for each other.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz       |                            | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506     | All politicians should ski.| 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz@netcom.com |                            | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA