Selling a Persistent Identity

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How would you sell a persistent identity with a good reputation?

The obvious method of selling the secret key doesn't work because the
buyer has to trust the seller not to resell it.  This could be solved
by revealing your True Name, but that's no fun.  A nym with a good
reputation for this sort of business could be used, but that wouldn't
be any fun either since it could link a series of identities with one
source.

The only thing I can think of is to have a trusted party who creates
and manages the key.  When the owner of the key wants to sign
something, he or she sends it to the trusted party for signing and
transmission.  To sell the key, the trusted party is instructed to
accept the buyer's messages instead of the seller's.  The buyer and
the seller never actually possess the key themselves.

Is there a better way to do this?

Monty Cantsin
Editor in Chief
Smile Magazine
http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html
http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.htm

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>Amad3us
>
>(As there seems to be some confusion about my public key block, here
>it is again with Version field and blank line; I surmise that the
>problem Bill Stewart encountered was that pgp5.0 can't handle armor
>without blank lines (or maybe without blank lines and Version))

Yes, that appears to be the problem.  The original key with
a Version: and blank line added works fine, so I've signed it.

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				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

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Try this Monty:

The new owner of the Monty persona is defined to be the first public
key which is signed by Monty's private key and posted to this forum.

So the buyer sends Monty a public key, and Monty signs it and posts it
to the list.  (Optionally via a trusted third party to ensure fair
play.  There is a race condition in the making there but it's not too
bad, we could fix it if we were bothered.)

So Monty can cheat and post one he signed earlier selling to a
different key, but we will ignore those because we base it on first
posted.

Buyers will no longer be interested in buying Monty's persona after
they have seen it sold, because they know it is no longer his.

The person who buys Monty's persona could resell it.  Using the same
protocol.

Amad3us

(As there seems to be some confusion about my public key block, here
it is again with Version field and blank line; I surmise that the
problem Bill Stewart encountered was that pgp5.0 can't handle armor
without blank lines (or maybe without blank lines and Version))

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