[E-Lang] Hash Chaining & Capabilities, Proposal #2b: Off-Line Invocation Certificates

[Bill Frantz]

At 02:23 PM 10/18/00 -0700, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>1) Let's drop the optional Resolver.  It's hard to see any motivation for 
>message pipelining in the off-line case.  In the absence of pipelining, most 
>of the effects of the encapsulated Resolver can instead be provided with an 
>explicit Resolver argument.  This decision does make it awkward to interface 
>between the on-line and off-line worlds, so we may revisit it later.

For some reason, this paragraph made me think about the issues of running
the e-protocol thru email.  If we use signed, encrypted PGP email, I think
the only thing we lose is perfect forward security.

But this thought leaves me very confused about what online/offline really
mean.  Is offline one way messaging?  (But email is multi-way as any flame
war will demonstrate.)  Is it slow?  (But we could send the PGP encrypted
data via OCR snail mail, or FedExed Zip disks.)  Or does it mean no
computer mediation?