At 10:32 PM 02/28/2000 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>People like Brands and Chaum are blinded (no pun intended) to the very real
>needs for _both_ sides of the anonymity equation.
>I was surprised at one of the CFPs (probably '97) to have Chaum explaining
>to me why payer anonymity (a customer in a store) was "good" but payee
>anonymity (the store owner) was "bad."
>It took me all of 5 seconds to think of a bunch of examples where payee
>anonymity is JUST AS IMPORTANT as payer anonymity:
>-- a seller of birth control information or products in a Muslim or
>Catholic regime
>-- a seller of any controversial information--and the list of controversial
>information is very long indeed
Many of these problems can be handled by jurisdiction-shopping by the payee -
sell the information from places it's not legally controversial,
such as selling birth-control information from the US,
or credit reporting services from Anguilla,
or pharmaceutical CAD/CAM recipes from Netherlands.
Selling controversial non-informational goods is tougher - you may need to
use a Vanuatu corporation to accept payments from your US dope dealing
or otherwise find a jurisdiction that won't chop your head off
for activities outside their space (or that's at least reliably bribeable.)
The classic Bad Payee example I've seen Chaum using is kidnap ransom -
while US kidnappers generally didn't kill their victims before the
Lindbergh case led to the FBI aggressively hunting them down,
kidnapping is still a Bad Thing, and the usual way to catch kidnappers
is by staking out the ransom pickup or marking the ransom money.
>From a government perpective, the more serious Bad Payees are
Tax Evaders (people who do work for money, and become hard to extort)
and Drug Dealers (who provide employment for law makers and enforcers)
and Bribeable Politicians (who are embarassed by how stupid they look
accepting suitcases of money on video.) Funny they never mention
Bribeable Cops...
.....
>Fuck his patents. They NEED to be stolen. It's the right thing to do.
Chaum's methods can be turned around to provide 2-way anonymity,
if I remember Ian's "add another layer of indirection" money-lender talk
correctly (it was long enough ago that I may not.)
Because Chaum's methods were the first ones out there, they could use
the most straightforward approaches, so they're easiest to work around.
Brand's methods are newer, and they're more complex,
partly because they needed to work around Chaum's patent-claim space,
and partly because he was trying to do off-line things, which are harder
than Chaum's on-line methods.
Has anybody looked into ways to transform Brand's stuff into 2-way?
~~~~~
To some extent, the recreational pharmaceutical transaction community
could achieve two-way-ness by buying anonymous physical tokens
and trading them for products. After all, the price of good dope
in much of the US has approximated the price of gold for a while,
so you could run it as even exchange :-)
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
