In many segments of the credit card insutry meatspace is also irrelevant.
Anyone with a FICO greater than about 680 is almost certainly concered with
maintaining their reputation with the current crop of TRWs of the
world...collections efforts leverage the potential damage to the reputation,
and only very gradually (if ever) fall back into actual meatspace threats
(ie, docking your pay, etc...). And in many cases meatspace threats are
forgone due to the collections effort (times probability of collection)
yielding more than what would be recovered.
So for many, it's effectively been psuedonyms for years, though their
psuedonyms happen to correspond to their true names.
-TD
From: John Kelsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Roy M. Silvernail" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "R.A. Hettinga"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: "James A. Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia & Tor]
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 10:01:51 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
>Damn good point. Now that I think of it, all the classic examples of
>"anonymous" publication were really pseudonymous. (Publius, et al)
They have different requirements. Votes and cash transactions and similar
things
require no history, no reputation. They're one-shot actions that should
not be linkable
to other actions.
Pseudonyms are used everywhere in practice, because even my name is
effectively
a pseudonym unless you have some reason to try to link it to a meatspace
human.
This is why it's worth reading a book by Mark Twain, even though that
wasn't his real
name. And it would be worth reading those books even if we had no idea who
had really
written them. The reuptation and history of the author lets you decide
whether you want
to read the next of his books. The same is true of academic papers--you
don't need to
have met me or even to be able to find me, in order to read my papers and
develop an
opinion (hopefully a good one) about the quality of my work. And that
determines whether
you think the next paper is worth reading.
--John
