a bit is a bit is a bit, no matter how you represent it. The I Ching stuff is just a handy and culturally rich way of representing bits. Plus it gives me a target implementation for new protocols etc.
"appearances deceive, see things as they are" most machines represent bytes as 8 || 32 || 64 bits, but in actual practice you get things like ascii 7-bit encoding with one bit parity checking that is the parity bit is TRUE if the preceding 7-bits represent an even numbe FALSE other wise, using a 6-bit data segment leaves a 2-bit nibble to use for error correction. Am I thinking about writing a web-based programming environment for a virtual machine with 64 possible instructions??? maybe later. As far as Key servers, setting one up requires a special piece of hardware (intel sells a model that fits in a standard PCI slot) that is a hardware /dev/random, there is then a daemon that broadcasts at a fairly high rate a stream of packets consisting of , <timestamp> <fixed length random key> # usually 1024 or 2048 <hash of the 2 previous segments> For it to be effectively secure several conditions need to be met, namely enough noise is being produced that it is effectively not possible for an attacker to record and test any significant fraction of possible keys. Note that this method does require coordination between alice and bob (they need to decide how to abstract the key stream) but that it does provide effectively secure communication for large quantities of data (think voice or video). http://www.efn.org/~laprice ( Community, Cooperation, Consensus http://www.opn.org ( Openness to serendipity, make mistakes http://www.efn.org/~laprice/poems ( but learn from them.(carpe fructus ludi) http://allie.office.efn.org/phpwiki/index.php?OregonPublicNetworking
