🚀 go-pugleaf

If you never ask the question ``Who are you?'' then you will never be
given a false answer.

For *the overwhelming bulk* of human communication it has not proven
necessary to ask the question. So it is silly to design a ``public-key
infrastructure'' which forces people to ask the question---and suffers
all the attendant problems of false answers.

When you use a public-key system, think of your messages as being sent
*from one key to another*. Accept that you don't know ``who'' controls
the keys that your keys are communicating with. You'll find that you
don't need to know.

For *special cases* such as credit transfers the credit-granting
organization can and should set up an association between what it
considers ``real people'' and keys. And for hunting down criminals one
certainly wants link-level security, so as to be able to trace any
signal to its source. But there is no need for global identities, or
even identities shared between two organizations.

If you hear that IBM just did something, do you care what *real people*
are involved in making that decision for IBM? You might, but IBM doesn't
have to tell you, and business will go on even if you don't know. The
only problem---the problem that public-key cryptography solves---is that
somebody else might pretend to be IBM, the IBM you already know, without
IBM's approval. If IBM signs its messages then this problem disappears.

---Dan (or so je m'appelle in this forum)