John,
I think you and Steve are on the right track. Clearly the
hierarchical trust model is useful and should be a goal.
But we don't have any incremental growth options here --
nothing works until it all works.
Credit cards worked in commerce for several years before the
out-of-band verification stuff became ubiquitous (resturant
phoning in when processing your tab) and before PINs caught
up with them and before bank teller machines
proliferated.
The scalability to a hierarchical solution needs to remain ...
and continue to be pushed. But a direct trust method has
real functionality and should cause PEM to be proliferated.
Then the hierarchy can catch up as the needs scale up.
Rex Buddenberg