From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 18:27:55 +0800
To: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: encouraging digital pseudonyms
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.970922031430.14500A-100000@eskimo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



One of Tim's suggested cypherpunk projects is to encourage the use of
digital pseudonyms (i.e. cryptographically persistent entities not linked
with True Names). I think the main reason why pseudonyms are not used more
widely is the lack of support on client software, especially on the
receiver side. When I see a piece of email sent to the cypherpunks list
from an anonymous remailer, I typically delete it without reading, because
there is no easy way to tell between anynoymous email (which are typically
junk) and pseudonymous email, and there is no easy way to filter by
pseudonym.

Of course the long-term solution is to get native pseudonym support on the
client software, but in the mean time there is a fairly simple workaround
if someone wants to volunteer a modest amount of resources. That person
should set up a mailing list that simply resends cypherpunk traffic that
are signed by pseudonyms. To help filtering, the pseudonym's key hash
should be prepended to the subject.

When this is done, those of us who want to can filter out everything sent
by remailers to the cypherpunks mailing list and subscribe to the proposed
service. If enough of us do this, it should motivate anonymous senders to
set up persistent identities. If the trouble of generating new pseudonyms
is not enough to discourage the anonymous junk, the proposed service can
charge ecash or hashcash either per pseudonym or per email.