On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 7:46 PM, James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote: > In order to shop, one needs a third party mediating transactions > > *THEY* should issue certificates. The Visa certificate should signify "This > merchant is trusted by Visa to accept Visa."
That'd be nice, but since the financial system ultimately has to make payments work between any pair of peers, this doesn't work -- Visa (or whoever) cannot attest to the trustworthiness of everyone. Also, what if we had real cryptographic money, with anonymity? In other words: the payments system cannot be the trusted third party for everything. The financial industry could be/have a trusted third party for authenticating its members to their customers (and prospective customers). Nico -- _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
