From: cman@communities.com (Douglas Barnes)
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 95 11:04:24 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: More FUD from First Virtual
Message-ID: <v02120d01acee261ab478@[199.2.22.120]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


[Remainder of Nat's largely inaccurate rant deleted]

> But basically, what your argument comes down to is that in
>the event of a catastrophe, users can be told they have to sacrifice
>their anonymity if they want to keep their cash.  As I have said all
>along, the basic tradeoff is between anonymity and risk limitation in
>the event of disaster recovery.

NB's errors and distortions are numerous, but for the sake of brevity
and topicality I've chosen this particular misconstruction of what
I've written as an exemplar.

In my proposed approach, users don't sacrifice one iota of privacy
when redeeming expired cash. When the user reveals blinding factors
on unspent cash, the bank gives the user new (blinded) cash in
exchange. No payer-payee relationship is revealed. This is the same
wrong argument you've made before. Try reading the (very short) note;
this point is made explicitly. I have no clue what Digicash is
actually doing in this regard, but one of their engineers alluded
to something along these lines at Crypto.

It is this systematic distortion of truth by at least two representatives
of First Virtual that has lead to this (highly intermittent) "vendetta".
I try not to feed the energy creatures, but this particular creature
and his minions are literally running around the country, spewing their
lies whenever they get the chance. When they slam cryptography in the
banking community, you can be assured they don't mention their charity
work for Phil, or how they really want to see anonymous systems some day.