I’ll be honest, I walked into the room, said “Damn, that looks like Steve Kirsch, WTF” and left after the Microsoft guy, who certainly taught me a couple of things. Steve is a serial pitchman, I have encountered him in a variety of incarnations over the years, and the common thread is that he is always, always pitching. Smart guy, but I don’t come to IETF plenaries to hear pitches. -T
On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 4:38 AM, Ted Lemon <ted.lemon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 6, 2014, at 11:19 AM, John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:He took it pretty well—I was the one who was embarrassed.
> I suppose, but he's been around long enough that he really shouldn't
> have been surprised.
Yeah, it was frustrating that he didn't go deeper into what he had in mind. Also frustrating that he thinks what he described is patent-worthy, given all the prior discussions of similar technology in the existing literature.
> Personally, I'd have tolerated the talk a lot
> better if he opened the kimono a wee bit and told us how he was
> planning to do digital signatures everywhere in a way that scaled,
> worked for people who aren't megageeks, etc. It's not like it's news
> to anyone here that signatures are dandy if you can get stuff signed
> in the first place.
The first talk was great. I found it quite useful, even though I already know quite a bit about electronic payments online. It could have been aimed at a little more knowledgable audience—a lot of it was review for me, but it was still good and worth doing.
> On a more positive note, the first talk wasn't flashy, but it was a
> nice overview of the issues that people will need to deal with in
> succesful online payments system. It was, for example, helpful to me
> when he pointed out that a remarkable number of electronic payments
> are already among people who don't have bank accounts and aren't
> likely to have one any time soon.