-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 11:51 AM -0500 10/18/99, Mike Rosing wrote: > On Thu, 14 Oct 1999, Peter Wayner wrote: > >> Stefan Brands, the man who's written some great digital cash >> protocols, has just published a new book called "Building In Privacy: >> Rethinking public key infrastructures and digital certificates." I >> haven't read it yet, but a quick skim shows plenty of equations. It >> should be worth checking out. > > I've only barely managed to get thru half the first chapter, but it's > great. Stefan's biases are clear, but also backed up with *lots* of > good facts. I'm learning a lot, and haven't got to the meat of things > yet. > Only 500 copies were printed, I consider myself exceptionally lucky to > have a copy. Hopefully I'll have more chance to read it in the next > few weeks. Yup. My favorite part so far is this juicy paragraph, found right up front: "This dissertation documents and analyzes the privacy dangers of digital certificates. On the basis of the findings, highly practical digital certificates are constructed that fully preserve privacy, without sacrificing security. The new certificates function in much the same way as do cash, stamps, cinema tickets, subway tokens, and so on: anyone can establish the validity of these certificates and the data they specify, but no more than just that. Furthermore, different actions by the same person cannot be linked." Can you say "digital bearer certificates", boys and girls? *Goooood*. I *knew* you could... And, of course, I'm now in the business of proving that such digital bearer certificates are not only more private than book-entry, database-driven "credentials" are, but that they're, more important than anything else, orders of magnitude *cheaper* than those "auditable" credentials can ever be, by their own very definition. And, of course, money, and financial instruments in general, are the ultimate credential. Money talks, &Cet... But, I bet you knew I'd say all *that*, right? I mean, so what else is new? And, so, besides saying "go, Stefan, go,", or "say halelujia somebody", here's the actual *point* of this post: We've started to get some angel funds in the door (we're still looking for more, of course :-)) for this next phase of IBUC, and, as a result, I'm about about to go spend some of those brand-new "sophisticated" investor-dollars on a road-trip, coming soon to conference room near you. This first trip is to line up memoranda of understanding (MOUs) from people who sell bits (content, services, bandwidth) directly over the net, collect their money by sending a bill through meatspace, or selling a credit-card subscription -- or, of course, sell advertising, the world's worst transfer pricing mechanism. If you're one of those folks, a *current* seller of bits on the wire, and you want to get paid good-old-fashioned non-repudiable *cash* for for those bits, instantaneously upon delivery, and, more important, you want to be able to turn right around *spend* that cash on the net, for free, or to *deposit* that cash, for free, into your *own* bank account with no hassle except a reasonably small minimum deposit size, please reply directly to me, and I'll come for a visit. My objective here is to get a reasonable statistical sample of the internet content and services market signed up with a memorandum of understanding, committing to at least experiment with taking internet bearer dollars (or, more properly, millidollars) in payment, if and when when we get those millidollars on the wire. With that stack of memoranda in hand, I'll go and wave it around under the nose of the *next* collection of MOUs, this time from IBUC's prospective vendor pool: crypto-protocol, hardware, and software developers, bandwidth sellers, financial custodians and, heh, lawyers. Most of whom already know who they are, and who, God help 'em, know I'm going to be back to visit sooner or later. After that, we hire the writing of a public spec and open reference customer/server/underwriter code and, after *that*... Well, *you* get the idea. We want to go live in January 1, 2001, and, this afternoon, at least, I think we can get there from here. Stefan has me *inspired*, today. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.1 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBOAuaPcPxH8jf3ohaEQKm4ACgj/kcXqpXfcUocP5Fzn6bxkkgT1QAoKrq kY+6CsamqDu6XJj17WOjtktv =7tJX -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert 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'
