From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 94 15:20:33 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Reputation Capital papers?
In-Reply-To: <199409062037.QAA21812@arthur.bwh.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <199409062220.PAA21494@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu> writes:

>	Are there papers out there on reputation capital that I should
>be familiar with before talking about it?  I have a bunch of ideas,
>but would like to review the lit before presenting any of them, so I
>don't repeat things that have been talked about, and don't make any
>dumb mistakes.  I checked the index of AC, and also looked in the
>bibliography under Chaum but did not see anything.

I seem to recall a posting in outline form by Dean Tribble to this list
about 1 1/2 years ago.  It was some notes he had used in a presentation
to a CP meeting.  Maybe someone could dig it out again.

I don't think Chaum has particularly used the term or even discussed
the issue that much.  It doesn't seem like it is an issue which is
talked about in many places.  Your ideas are probably as much worth
hearing as anyone's.

Hal Finney

P.S. I did find a paper on the net called "Endorsements, Licensing,
and Insurance for Distributed System Services", by Lai, Medvinsky,
and Newman of Information Sciences Institute.  Here is the abstract:

"Clients in a distributed system place their confidence in many servers,
and servers themselves rely on other servers for file storage,
authentication, authorization, and payment.  When a system spans
administrative boundaries it becomes harder to assess the security and
competence of potential service providers.  This paper examines the issue
of confidence in large distributed systems.

"When confidence is lacking in the 'real world,' one relies on
endorsements, licensing, insurance, and surety bonds to compensate.  We
show that by incorporating such assurances into a distributed system,
users are better able to evaluate the risks incurred when using a
particular server.  This paper describes a method to electronically
represent endorsements, licenses, and insurance policies, and discusses
the means by which clients use such items when selecting service
providers."

Unfortunately, I can't recall where I saw the pointer to this paper.
I'm sure other people read the same lists and newsgroups I do so perhaps
someone else can provide a pointer.  Also, my copy of the postscript
paper would only print the first three pages, so I can't really evaluate
their ideas.