[Cryptography] Proposal of a fair contract signing protocol

[Ron Garret]

On Jun 14, 2016, at 10:09 AM, Christian Huitema <huitema at huitema.net> wrote:

> On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 12:04 AM, Ron Garret wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> You are assuming the communications channel between Alice and Bob is
>> reliable.  If it’s not, then the participants cannot reach a reliable conclusion
>> about whether or not they have actually reached an agreement.  In the real
>> world this rarely matters because modern communications channels are
>> reliable and for most negotiations the stakes are low.  But you and I actually
>> experienced a real-world failure of exactly this sort recently where the result
>> was that I showed up for a meeting and you didn’t (twice!).  And this
>> happened because during a critical period we did not have a reliable
>> communications channel.  So this sort of thing really does matter even in the
>> real world on occasion.
> 
> How is this negotiation different from the Two Generals' Problem? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem).
> 

It *is* the two generals problem.  That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make.  I even included that exact link in one of my earlier posts.

rg