Re: <nettime> a nyt article on freenet and gnutella

["R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>]

     [orig Cc: to Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs@philodox.com>]

At 11:31 PM -0700 on 5/11/00, Paul Kelly wrote:


> And then there's the problem how do we guarantee
> transactions and ensure the guy on the other side is who he says he
> is (This is very important with some of these big-money exchanges).

Not, of course, if you can do bearer transactions. Those execute, clear and
settle all at once, so you don't care who you're doing business with, as
long as the underwriter of the transaction is someone you trust...

Guess what?

You can...

Take a look at the proceedings of the annual International Conference on
Financial Cryptography, published by Springer-Verlag:

> http://www.springer-ny.com/
> http://www.springer-ny.com/general/search.html
>
> FC'98
> http://www.springer-ny.com/catalog/np/oct98np/3-540-64951-4.html
> FC'99
> http://www.springer-ny.com/catalog/np/oct99np/3-540-66362-2.html
> FC'97
> http://www.springer-ny.com/catalog/np/feb99np/3-540-63594-7.html

For lots of the gory technical details.

The websits for this year's conference, FC'00, which was held in February,
can be found at <http://www.fc00.ai/>. The proceedings for that will come
out in the summer some time.


<gratuitous-self-serving-plug> BTW, my company, the Internet Bearer
Underwriting Corporation, IBUC to it's friends, will, um, underwrite bearer
transactions on the internet. :-).

IBUC's first product will be streaming cash, for just such stuff as Napster
and gnutella, in denominations of $0.001 and smaller, using Ron Rivest and
Adi Shamir's MicroMint protocol. We expect to go live on January 1, 2001.

At least that's what we're scrounging the venture/instutional investment
for, anyway... </g-s-s-p>

Cheers,
RAH
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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