Re: Kid Gloves or Megaphones

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 07:11 PM 3/14/96 -0800, Eric wrote:
> The debate which must be taken to the public
>is whether we want payee anonymity or not.  I am confident that people
>want their privacy and are willing to let others have theirs as well.

My initial impression of Chaum's work, from his 1985 CACM paper,
was that the technology gave you strong anonymity; I was surprised
when I first saw references to payees _not_ being anonymous
(subject to the usual limitations of getting the digicash to them
anonymously and getting the service you want from them anonymously.)
We've had discussions on this list about topics like kidnap ransom,
which need payee anonymity to make sense at all; we later had discussions
about how to provide it given that it wasn't a standard feature.

So first we need to tell people that the technology _won't_ provide
payee anonymity unless used carefully, and then we need to tell them
that it _can_ provide anonymity if you want it....

Depending on the details of Ian's method, I don't think the debate
needs to be taken to the public, or even done - it may simply be a
done deal once the technology's out there.  If Mark Twain Bank or
Merita Bank or the Federal <Exonive-Deleted> Reserve wants to offer Digicash(tm)
with Payee-Non-Anonymity, they can always make it a contractual requirement
that their payees not use anonymity techniques in return for being paid.
#--
#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281
# "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened
# to halt the growth of Internet use.  [...] Government control of news media 
# generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and
# social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who
# exceed the permissable."  - US government statement on China...