From: "Fen Labalme" <fen@genmagic.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 92 15:56:27 PDT
To: "Cypher Punks" <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: anonymous bank accounts via
Message-ID: <9210132256.AA08647@relay2.UU.NET>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Mail*Link( Remote             anonymous bank accounts via pem

FYI:

[pem-dev is a private email list for developers of the Privacy Enhanced
Mail protocol additions to Internet mail, originally published as RFCs
1113 - 1115, and now updated as four draft-ietf-pem documents.  To join
the list, send email to pem-dev-request@tis.com.  By the way, most of
the discussion is not nearly as germane to our ideas as this particular
posting, but this one caught my eye as of some iterest to cypherpunks.]

----------- Forwarded Message ------------

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 92 01:07:39 EDT
>From: uunet!ellisun.sw.stratus.com!cme (Carl Ellison)
To: pem-dev@TIS.COM
Subject: Re: [Peter Williams: Perhaps OSI security is not possible in a liberal
community!]
Sender: uunet!TIS.COM!pem-dev-relay

Let me throw in another vote against the *necessity* of hierarchical
certification by arguing against the necessity of certification itself.

For example, it is possible, given digital signatures, to have totally
anonymous bank accounts -- identified only by public key -- with no
certification of relationship between that key and any other fact about any
individual or corporation.  Such accounts are at least as valuable as a
Swiss numbered account -- perhaps more so since no one need know the
identity of the person or people with the power to withdraw funds.  Such
funds transfers can be made not only anonymously but untraceably.  It might
even be possible for them to be made without it being possible to trace
the transfer at either end (eg., using digital cash techniques).

I don't propose that all bank accounts be anonymous.  It's just that I
don't like to see us jump into an attempt to relate public keys into the
physical world so that our old established notions about relationships and
responsibility can carry over into this new domain when by doing that we
end up avoiding research into all the possibilities which digital
signatures open up.  That research needs to be both technical and social --
or we could shy away from it by forcing relationships between keys and
those entities to which we are already accustomed.

--Carl