Email transit over SSL has been around and in common use for the better part of the last decade.
Do you actually somehow enforce your email delivery over SSL only? Otherwise the fact that it can go over SSL doesn't help in this discussion. Maybe look into S/MIME if you're really decided on this email thing and it isn't just a quick hack tacked on in the wake of GLBSE without any structural consideration.
In SMTP it's on the recipient to choose how secure they want to be.
Last time I checked email addresses were available anonymously for anyone that wanted them.
As far as I know email addresses can either be safe or anonymous. There's no way for someone to have both.
Incorrect.
What good would a username be? Or a code?
You're asking me as if I'm proposing this. I am not.
If you are in fact doing something like that, the problems are too many to list.
If you go back I was responding to your sentence listing "usernames" as things I might be including in the email. You have a way of quoting just enough to confuse people.
An email address and share count is all you need when you have a trustworthy source for the list.
This happens to be false. The problems have been amply discussed in the Goat delisting threads, please look there.
I have read them thoroughly. It is a completely different issue. The lists goat received did not include email addresses, which are independently verifiable vessels of ownership. There's no way someone can claim the same shares twice from the same email...
I tell everyone that the asset issuers get a list of email addresses. I am not bashful about this fact, and purposefully publish this so that our users can decide when they sign up for an account how anonymous they want to be when dealing with us.
Yes, and this openness pays you the dividend that people who otherwise wouldn't be interested or know enough to comment can point out (free of charge) what they perceive as problems with your designs. You're the recipient of a gift not the accused of a crime, simmer down.
I definitely appreciate the input. Perhaps it's the barbs that come with it that ruffle my feathers.
This simple fact renders a user's exposure on BTC-TC nearly the same as a user's exposure when signing up for MPEx, which incidentally deals with you using... your email address
This is absolutely not the case. In fact, I could use your email address to register an MPEx account, and while you'd know I emailed something to MPEx so you could maybe guess it's a new account if it is anything at all, you couldn't find out if I had or have funded it, bought anything, etc.
Eh... this one confused me. How do you propose using someone else's email address and still achieving two way communication? Either you receive mail at the address (rendering it yours, whether you stole it or not) or you do not. Sure, spoofing an outgoing message is easy enough, but it is not so easy to receive the reply.
the only way to legitimately protect your MPEx account is to never ever connect your PC to the internet. (Or plug in a floppy drive, cd rom, or usb stick into it) Exactly who has one of those PC's just sitting about?
A used laptop which you can format and dump some sort of Linux on is maybe 100 dollars. But that aside, people dealing straight on MPEx are a lot better capitalized and a lot more sophisticated than you seem to imagine.
Please do not take my criticisms as an attack toward your user base. It clearly takes a knowledgeable individual to trade on MPEx.
In any event, note that the need for 2FA on a website is different than the need for 2FA in GPG based systems such as MPEx. There are numerous ways in which the password to a site can be leaked, such as XSS attacks (which are probably the most common). In and of itself the GPG passphrase even if acquired does nothing: you need both the passphrase and the secret key to do anything. Obviously on Windows this difference is mostly meaningless (I think?) because he who has any sort of sniffer installed also has full access to the disk. On Linux this can be quite a different story. But in any event: making MPEx stronger than the user's GPG signature serves no purpose, because once the attacker acquires the ability to GPG sign with the user's signature he can already issue signed obligations which are strong enough to be enforceable.
Your comment about passwords being leaked is kind of the point behind 2FA such as google authenticator. If your password is leaked, it's not the end of the world. (I suggest reading up on yubikey/google auth.)
I also do not think the MPEx is as strong as you think it is. Linux is great, but certainly not without it's issues. (been using it for a desktop over 15 years now.) Bottom line is that with MPEx if your desktop is owned, you're owned. Both of the pieces required to trade (key + pass phrase) would reside on the machine if the attacker is reasonably intelligent enough to install a keylogger.
Cheers.
