At 1:07 PM -0700 on 9/17/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> As far as I know, banks assume that a certain percentage of their > transactions will be bad and build that cost into their business > model. Credit and ATM cards and numbers are as far from secure as > could be, far less secure than somebody doing online transactions > from a Wintel machine on an unencrypted connection, let alone an > encrypted one. Until somebody takes full advantage of the current > system and steals a few trillion dollars in one day, the problems > are easier to deal with than a solution. Until that happens, > there's no reason for banks to go through the pain of dealing with > or requiring Pd. I wouldn't go that far. While Pd. -- and a certain long-term ejaculative (look it up...) denizen of my kill-file -- is pretty much a disingenuous shuck, greed is an amazing thing. The lowest cost producer of anything, transactions, say, will not only make more money than its competitors, but they will also *survive* longer than anyone else. To quote, um, Stalin, "quantity has a quality all its own." So, if strong financial cryptography gives us the lowest *risk-adjusted* cost per transaction by some very large amount, the market will adopt it just as quickly as if confronted with a threat that only strong cryptography can remedy. As software (in the <http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1992/> Gary Becker sense, things that can be more or less perfectly copied) and wetware (valuable opinion, for lack of a better word) become more important compared to hardware (stuff, discovered, extracted, or built), the more valuable strong, secure, (geodesic :-)) networks and (bearer :-)) financial cryptography becomes. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]