Anonymous address problems, etc.

Chris Hibbert sent me a solution for the problem I mentioned about the last remailer in an anonymous address chain being able to discover the true name for the address. He suggested making your own remailer be the last one in the chain. If you added a little padding, so the second-to-last remailer couldn't tell (from the small size of the encrypted address) that yours was last, this sounds pretty good. And it's another reason to run a remailer, even if you had to do it manually. On the digital cash issue - I think we should get some kind of implementation of digicash (oops, "electronic money") out for people on the list to play with. Then, we should think of some kind of experimental email-based game to play which would use the special characteristics of anonymous cash. Maybe we could use the remailers, too. Players would send cash back and forth to each other as part of the game. Even if the tools are sort of rough at first, this could show where the most work is needed. Can anyone think of a good kind of game that we could play? As Eric Hughes pointed out, the cash doesn't have to be "cash", it could represent "gold" or "carrots" or any other material which exists in limited quantity. I think it was on the extropians list that Eli Brandt pointed out the need for a shorter term than "digital cash" for this cryptographic money. He suggested "cryps". I thought of "emoney" or "ecash" by analogy to "email". Here's another one: "crydets", based on "credits". Or maybe we should call them "Chaums". That way he'd be less likely to sue us for infringing on his patent. ;-) I notice he managed to cleverly name DC-nets after his initials so maybe he'd like this. Hal [email protected] P.S. I hear PGP 2.1 is coming out today.