Anonymity

  The protocol is designed to determine a selling price without revealing any of the bid values (other than the second highest, of course). The identities of the bidding parties can also be protected. Anonymous (or pseudonymous) public keys may be used if there is some form of accountability to the keys which is considered acceptable for the purposes of the auction (possibly just a deposit as in 4.6.1). To preserve anonymity over real networks, the communications channel between the bidders and the auctioneers must be anonymized by means of some anonymous forwarding system.