From: yanek@novavax.nova.edu (Yanek Martinson)
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 92 08:04:46 PST
To: tony@morgan.demon.co.uk
Subject: Why electronic banks should be Redundant & Distributed
In-Reply-To: <782@morgan.demon.co.uk>
Message-ID: <9211261604.AA26880@novavax.nova.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> UK.  I think a more real problem with anonymous banking, is not 
> one of 'trust' in the 'banker' but in his net access. What do you 
> do when your banker, for whatever reason, becomes unreachable?


The best banker deamon would run multiple copies on widely separated hosts/
networks, and keep each other up to date on accounts/balances.

They would be logically one entity, by sharing crypto keys.  

So if one is cut off from the net, or even destroyed, you just send your
messages to one of the others.

When it comes back up, the others update it with current info.

Somewhat similar (not exactly, since they do not communicate to each other)
existing system is archie.  Imagine that your life or work depended on
constant access to archie.  When there was only one archie@quiche.mcgill.ca
you could have said "What do you do when the archie, for whatever reason,
becomes unreachable?".  Now that there are many archies, the simple answer
is use one of:

	archie.sura.net (USA, Mexico, etc)
	archie.mcgill.ca (Canada)
	archie.funet.fi (Finland/Mainland Europe)
	archie.au (Australia/New Zealand)
	archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (Great Britain/Ireland)

How likely do you think ALL of these widely separated entities could be
simultaneously destroyed/disconnected?


--
Yanek Martinson    mthvax.cs.miami.edu!safe0!yanek     uunet!medexam!yanek
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