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At 1:59 PM -0400 on 9/18/00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
A Yahoo wrote [about AMEX's "anonymous" credit card technology]:
% What a load of shit.
That market dwarfs what ZKS/Anonymizer will ever get.
Again, boys and girls, barring unforeseen events, like repeals in the
laws of physics, and/or human behavior, :-), the *only* thing that
matters in financial operations is transaction cost, and certainly *not*
financial privacy.
The *only* way to get ubiquitous financial anonymity is for a technology,
like internet bearer transaction protocols (blind signatures, MicroMint,
small signed coins, whatever), to be *cheaper* than the alternative,
which, for the moment, is internet-executed and proprietary
network-settled book entry transactions: credit cards under SSL, cleared
by VISA and MasterCard, settled by FedWire and/or SWIFT, modulo the odd
ACH "check" transaction, bla, bla, bla...
Book-entry transactions can *not* be anonymous, folks, because, of
course, you couldn't send someone to *jail* if they lie about a
book-entry, otherwise, right?
I mean, if everyone could lie about a given book-entry transaction, and
get away with it consistently, *without* going to jail, could you imagine
that *any* book-entry transaction of that type would clear, much less
settle, ever again? I thought not...
Unlike internet bearer financial cryptography protocols, the
non-repudiation "technology" of book-entry settlement is non-existent.
Unless you count ballistic technology, anyway. :-).
More to the point, a given inherently-private technology, like Chaum's
blind signatures for instance, must be *waaay* cheaper, on a risk
adjusted basis, ceteris paribus, whatever, than a public one, like
SSL-encrypted book-entries.
Like a thousand times cheaper, say.
Which is, oddly enough, about the cost differential right now between
book-entry transactions (like stock and bond trades going through DTC or
CREST, or credit cards, or checks) and physical delivery of paper/metal
bearer instruments (like "my Brinks to your Cage" delivery versus
payment, or dollar bills, or coins or stamps).
So, until people actually *do* get bearer financial cryptography
protocols onto the net, and cheap enough (and believe me, people are
working on it :-)), it is important to remember that *any* book-entry
transaction is, almost by definition, a "public" transaction and not a
private one. A "public" transaction "guaranteed" to be "fair" by a
*government*, at the point of a gun.
So, you shouldn't be surprised at all when, horrors, there's *no*
financial privacy in the "mainstream" markets. None in the least.
Moreover, that diminishing financial privacy will, um, increase, as
Moore's law increases that cost-differential between automated
book-entry, and its only current extant competition, which is, at the
moment, *not* internet bearer transactions, but, in fact, *paper* bearer
transactions. Paper bearer transactions which, if you'll notice, *nobody*
wants to do anymore. :-).
Contrawise, you should assume that almost *anyone* who offers you a
"private" book-entry transaction is, for lack of a better word, lying,
frankly -- okay, "marketing" :-) -- *especially* if they're promising to
do it over the net(1).
Hence the "safeguards" in just about everyone's "privacy" products, which
amount to no privacy at all.
Cheers,
RAH
(1) Okay, I *might* :-) excuse Mondex from this rule, I suppose, but only
because the smart-cards themselves are physically swappable, and thus at
the physical, card-to-card level, anyway, are bearer instruments, but I
would only say so under a regime in which those cards *contents*, the
balances therein, are exchangeable for, or better, denominated, in some
*other* internet bearer instrument like Chaumian cash, which may, I'm
afraid, defeat the economics of Mondex altogether. Obviously, Doug Barnes
has pointed this out more than once or twice here and elsewhere.
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--
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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'
