> ... it does look very much from the outside that there is an > informal "Cryptographers Guild" in place...
The Guild, such as it is, is a meritocracy; many previously unknown people have joined it since I started watching it in about 1990. The way to tell who's in the Guild is that they can break your protocols or algorithms, but you can't break theirs. While there are only hundreds of serious members of the Guild -- a comfortable number for holding conferences on college campuses -- I think just about everyone in it would be happier if ten times as many people were as involved as they are in cryptography and security. Then ten times as many security systems that everybody (including the Guild members) depends on would be designed properly. They certainly welcomed the Cypherpunks to learn (and to join if they were serious enough). I consider myself a Guild Groupie; I don't qualify but I think they're great. I follow in their footsteps and stand on their shoulders. Clearly there are much larger numbers of Guild Groupies than Guild members, or Bruce Schneier and Neal Stephenson wouldn't be able to make a living selling books to 'em. :-) John PS: Of course there's whole set of Mystic Secret Guilds of Cryptography. We think our openness will defeat their closedness, like the free world eventually beat the Soviet Union. There are some good examples of that, such as our Guild's realization of the usefulness of public-key crypto (we reinvented independently, but they hadn't realized what a revolutionary concept they already had). Then again, they are better funded than we are, and have more exemptions from legal constraints (e.g. it's hard for us to do production cryptanalysis, which is really useful when learning to design good cryptosystems). --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]