Jon Udell has an interesting little piece today called Mr. Slippery. It's about all the old cypherpunk favorites such as nyms, digital signatures etc. Recently there's been a lot in the press about the failures of CypherPunks and how everythings going towards an identity based internet.

I'm glad to see that Jon share's my idea that Nym's are still usefull. A Nym is simply an name for an anonymous identity. I wont use the word ficticious, because a nym can build up it's own reputation and value, exactly like a real person.

Almost everything I see coming out of the US on the whole Identity front is based on your real (offline) identity. Not taking privacy into acocunt I can see how this makes sense in certain developed countries like the US, Denmark et al. It makes it so much easier to link into the existing financial and corporate infrastructures for dealing with clients.

What about citizens of countries, where there isn't such a good infrastructure in the first place. Or countries with recent memories of bad dictatorships (eg. Nicaragua), with current dictatorships (eg. Cuba) or with slightly uncertain futures (such as Venezuela and Argentina). How about countries where the only realistic way to earn a living for most people is through informal businesses (such as Haiti and Somalia).

People from these countries need an alternative, not whatever is most suitable to US financial institutions who wont be providing services for them anyway.

A good infrastructure based on Nym's, Transparency and Reputation capital can do just this. Which is essentially what I'm working on with my Neubia project. In Neubia there aren't even usernames in the traditional sense. There are just NameSpaces and Names. These are virtually never mapped to a real identity because there is no need.

If you want to build trust in your name using transparency you open up your activities under a namespace and allow the public to view a transaction log.

If you need to do something that doesn't involve building trust in you, you dont have to use this feature.

Through the rest of August and September I shall be revealing more and more about this architecture and what will be possible.

(Currently in sunny Dorset, England)