  With the recent discovery that many aspects of black hole thermodynamics can
be effectively reduced to problems in three spacetime dimensions, it has become
increasingly important to understand the ``statistical mechanics'' of the
(2+1)-dimensional black hole of Banados, Teitelboim, and Zanelli (BTZ). Several
conformal field theoretic derivations of the BTZ entropy exist, but none is
completely satisfactory, and many questions remain open: there is no consensus
as to what fields provide the relevant degrees of freedom or where these
excitations live. In this paper, I review some of the unresolved problems and
suggest avenues for their solution.
