[Cryptography] Curating opinion: Re: Anonymous rendezvous

[jrzx]

> > If NewEgg and its reviewers were strongly
> > pseudonymous, and their product links
> > were hashes to immutable data or a third party
> > signature to mutable data, it would
> > work even better.

PM Salz, Rich via cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:
> Why would it be better and in what ways? Please be
> specific, and don’t just do a hand-wave about it being
> the way of the future.

Because when one runs a web site with a community of
commenters, those commenters, and the owner of the website
himself, are subject to threats, intimidation, pressure,
and sometimes violence and the threat of violence.

To take a less political example, consider the drama
around Enron.

Enron was a Ponzi scheme. They would buy stuff on credit,
sell it for cash, and have the person they bought stuff
from deliver it to the person they sold it to, without
themselves ever going near the stuff, and without the
stuff ever going near them.

But Enron was a registered corporation, had accountants
and all that. (Phillip Hallam-Baker's beloved "Civil
Authority") The accountants were corrupt, and went along
with cooked books. More and more people knew or suspected
this, but no one respectable dared call them out, because
too much to lose.

They were eventually called out by a bunch of
disrespectable accounting students with nothing to lose,
hence resistant to pressure.

I can produce numberless similar examples, but most of them
the moderators would not allow, because they would swerve
the conversation off topic.
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