Strong-Enough Pseudonymity as Functional Anonymity

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 2:32 PM -0400 10/3/03, John S. Denker wrote:

>  -- anonymous (no handle all)

If they don't know who I am, I'm anonymous, whether I use a pseudonym or not. 

However, the more "perfect" the pseudonym is, the more "secure" it is, the more anonymous I am.

All of the "anonymous" payment protocols I know of involve using a public/private key "signature", persistent or not. That's a pseudonym, by most definitions of the term.  Blinding gives you anonymity, of a sort, unless in some protocols, you double-"spend", and your key is revealed. Even then it's only your key which is blackballed, not you.

Sure, you can "front" keys, "mix" keys, whatever, but you're still relying on a pseudonym, and people even call *those* methods "anonymous".

As to real-life definitions of "anonymous" or not, it seems to me that technical professions (guilds :-)) use more precise language than laymen do all the time.

Again, the more perfect a pseudonym is, the more anonymous it is.

We get, at the very least, functional anonymity for most things we're interested in.  

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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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