At 10:18 AM -0800 11/5/04, Hal Finney wrote: >Yes, I'm looking at ideas like this for ecash gambling, but you have >a who-goes-first problem.
Whenever we talk about financial applications, where the assets represented by one bearer certificate are exchanged for those represented by another, what's really happening is a redeem-reissue process anyway. Since it's the underwriters' reputations you're trusting anyway, we've always assumed that there would be communication between the underwriters in order to execute, clear, and settle the trade all at once. For streaming stuff, we figured that since we were streaming cash for streaming bits, like movies, or content of some kind, you'd just do tit for tat, one stream (cash, probably signed probabalistically tested "coins" in the last iteration that we called "Nicko-mint" :-)) against another, the movie, song, etc being streamed. There's the "missing last 5 minutes" problem, but I think that, in recursive auction-settled cash market for digital goods like this (Eric Hughes' institutional 'pirate' scheme, the 'silk road' stuff, whatever), that there will always be another source to buy what's left from, once the intellectual property issues solve themselves because of the auction process. For things that aren't useful except in their entirety, like code, or executables, (or storing money :-)), I've always been a fan of the Mojo/BitTorrent stuff, where you hash the file into bits, ala m-of-n Shamir secret splitting, and store/buy them from lots of places at once. 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]
