ERTP: some initial comments

Nick Szabo szabo@best.com
Tue, 22 Jun 1999 13:23:33 -0700


ERTP looks like a good step towards the Agoric Papers 
world (or the one I described in "Objects per Democritus"). 
Some initial comments:

* I'd love to see an example that transfers erights
which are the rights to use a particular service
provide by an object (i.e. to invoke one or more of its
methods a particular number of times), rather than just 
changing a generic numerical balance.  The money example isn't 
representative of how ERTP will usually be used.

* Some of the comments seem to treat "trust" in a party as all or 
nothing.  However, we are only trusting the Issuer with certain particular 
security properties for a particular set of rights.  Such narrowly 
scoped and decentralized trust is critical for real world, 
cross-organizational distributed systems.

* What is the rationale for hiding the distinctions
between exclusive vs. non-, fungible vs. non-,
and unlinkable vs. non-?  Where will the programmer
be able set and query these properties?






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