Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > accepting liability on behalf of the merchant gets to see every > financial transaction in real time as it is happening. At any point in > time, the merchant financial institution has an approximate idea of > the aggregate, outstanding fianncial liability it has per merchant > (because it is seeing and aggregating the transactions in real time) > and had the ability to shut it all down at any moment.
slight addenda ... the merchant financial institution ... accepting liabiilty on behalf of merchants they sponsored in the infrastructure had one other mechanism. basically, in a payment card transaction ... the card issuing financial institution comes back with a real-time promise to pay the merchant. the card issuing financial institution then tranfers the promised funds to the merchant financial institution. the merchant financial institution, it calculating the outstanding run-rate liability for any particular merchant ... can put a delay on actually making such funds available to the merchant. ... aka they have some calculation on the risk history of the merchant and an idea (from real-time transactions) of the current outstanding liability. One of the ways that a merchant financial institution can control the aggregate financial risk exposure they have per merchant ...is by delaying the actual availability of funds (in any default/bankruptcy by the merchant, since the funds haven't actually be released ... the delayed funds can be used by the merchant financial institution to help cover their outstanding financial liability on behalf of the merchant). In the CA PKI model, unless you are dealing with purely no-value transactions ... there is a double whammy of having the per transaction risk being somewhat ambiguous ... and in the offline certificate push model ... having no idea at all ... how many times a particular certificate has been pushed (basically multiplying an unknown number by another unknown number to come up with some idea of the outstanding liability at any specific moment). somewhat in the business or value world ... trust frequently is translated into terms of financial liability. -- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
