November 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Pricing Mojo, Integrating PGP, TAZ, and D.C. Cypherpunks
by Anonymous 24 Nov '01

24 Nov '01

David Molnar writes: > On Sat, 24 Nov 2001, Anonymous wrote: > > > It seemed that part of MojoNation's reason for backing away > > from mojo-as-money was the problem of fairly giving an initial allocation. > > Do you know this because you've communicated with the Mojo team, are they > on record about it, is this speculation, your inference from events, or > something else? It's inference and observation based on their changing policies and statements about mojo over the course of the project. At first it was going to be relatively hard to get and eventually be interchangeable with money. Then everyone got upset because they kept losing mojo, partially because of bugs and mistunings which allowed certain people to game the system and steal it away from others. So they made mojo easier and easier to get. Eventually they decided not to display the amount of mojo you have so that you wouldn't worry so much about losing it. The specific problem of how to fairly give people initial mojo wasn't the main driving factor but it was part of this constellation of problems that they ran into. If you've got to make mojo essentially free in order to deal with other problems, then logically it wouldn't work that well as a currency substitute. It is this last step which is inference, the rest is observation. > Please don't take that the wrong way - I don't doubt your integrity. It's > an interesting suggestion and I'm just wondering where it came from. Anonymous posters don't have integrity; that is a property of persistent identities. With anonymity each message must stand on its own, without the benefit of its author's reputation for integrity or intelligence.

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Re: Pricing Mojo, Integrating PGP, TAZ, and D.C. Cypherpunks
by Anonymous 24 Nov '01

24 Nov '01

Greg Broiles writes: > And that problem seems to be at the center of Nomen Nescio's sotto voce > suggestion that some unnamed cypherpunks work up a currency which can be > used to "pay" people for providing information which is of value - It's not a matter of unnamed cypherpunks doing a favor, but rather a proposal offered to see if there is support. If a few people spoke up with agreement that such an effort were worth doing, the next step would be to put together a project, perhaps on sourceforge, and get some code into play. But if you run the flag up and no one salutes, then you should wait for a better idea. > I get > the impression that s/he is imagining some magic fairy would mint up piles > of the currency, and assign it equally to every subscriber, who would then > be empowered to pay it to the content providers they liked best. > > That's very warm and fuzzy and hippy-like, but if these tokens are handed > out for free, then what, exactly, is their value? This is the problem of initial distribution. Ideally there would be some way to give every person a fixed initial allocation, but in practice this will allow people to create new identities ("nyms") and get more than their share. It seemed that part of MojoNation's reason for backing away from mojo-as-money was the problem of fairly giving an initial allocation. Here's an idea which has been proposed before: use hashcash to purchase e-coins. Hashcash is a hash collision generated by a certain number of standard CPU hours of work. To enter into the ecash economy you could generate hashcash and send it to the server, getting ecash in exchange. Ecash is more suitable than hashcash as a form of currency as it can be transferred and exchanged at the bank with little effort or expense. But the problem is acquiring the initial ecash without the overwhelming inflation that Greg Broiles implicitly warns against. By basing ecash on hashcash which involves a significant expense to generate, you avoid inflation. In this system, the ecash "bank" would not be a bank at all. It would have two functions: give out some ecash given hashcash; and give out some (fresh) ecash given other ecash. The latter would use the double spending database and all that. If you received some ecash as payment you would immediately exchange it at the bank which will simultaneously verify that the cash is good and give you fresh coins for later spending. The ecash server is simply an exchanger. These are serious proposals. With Ben Laurie's lucre library and a berkeley db for the double spending database, a basic server could be put together in a few hours' work. Adam Back's hashcash software can be used as a client to generate the initial requests. The basic pieces are all here, no magic fairies required. The main question is again whether there exists an initial market which could be enticed into trying out this package on an experimental basis.

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Cybercrime treaty signed.
by Neil Johnson 24 Nov '01

24 Nov '01

Just Thought I'd beat James Choate to the punch (hee hee). http://press.coe.int/cp/2001/875a(2001).htm - Neil M. Johnson mailto:njohnsn@iowatelecom.net

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Re: The Crypto Winter
by Steve Schear 23 Nov '01

23 Nov '01

At 11:15 AM 11/22/2001 -0800, David Honig wrote: >At 08:46 PM 11/21/01 -0800, Petro wrote: > > No. Libertarians are for "free markets", which are inherently > >capitalistic in nature, but the reverse is not true. There are many > >*wealthy* capitalists who are all for strongly regulated markets and > >high barriers to entry. One could argue that they are not Capitalists. > >Those are philosophical parasites. Like a congressvermin who campaigns >on liberty and once in office destroys it. A good recent example is Warren Buffett calling for an FDIC-style government insurance against terrorism. In the sweet name of self-interest he proposes that the government increase existing insurance moral hazards by forcing all citizens to underwrite those who have chosen to live or work in higher risk areas. http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/opinion/columns/terror20.htm I'M in the insurance business -- an expensive place to be in the past couple of months. It was made costly for Berkshire Hathaway, the company I run, because I did something very dumb: allowed Berkshire to provide insurance coverage for a huge catastrophe loss without its getting a premium for doing so. The risk we unthinkingly assumed was a loss from terrorism. Given the degree of my error, I was lucky: We estimate our Sept. 11 loss at Berkshire to have been ``only'' about $2.3 billion. That's more, by far, than we've ever lost from a single catastrophe, but the toll could have been far larger. Indeed, had a nuclear device been available to Osama bin Laden, the loss could have bankrupted most of the insurance industry. A potential loss of almost infinite magnitude can be assumed only by an entity of almost-infinite resources. That entity doesn't exist in the private sector. Only the U.S. government fits the bill. Washington has accepted this proposition to a point. Congress is now agonizingly trying to create some sort of industry-government coalition that would insure losses from terrorism. Some proposals limit the government's liability but leave the risk for the industry open-ended. These proposals won't work: If unlimited liability is left with insurers, they will necessarily refuse to renew policies they see potentially leading them to bankruptcy. Equally bad, all the proposals now being considered will engender pricing based upon risk exposure: If a business is located in a high-risk spot, it will be asked to pay a staggering price for insurance. Risk-based pricing is normally equitable and desirable. In this case, though, it would have anti-social consequences. For example, the terrorism risk per dollar of insured value may be 10 or more times for iconic or critical properties in New York City what it is for properties in less-populated areas. But great cities are central to our society. We don't want them to wither under the burden of hugely disadvantageous insurance costs. Their citizens almost certainly bear above-normal physical risks in the terrorist war being waged upon us; we shouldn't impose crippling economic costs on them as well. We should adopt the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. as a model for where we want to head in the insurance industry. The rationale for the FDIC, formed 68 years ago, was clear-cut: The United States sorely needed to eliminate bank runs and the financial panics they caused. Before the FDIC, the risk from bank failures resided with depositors, who had no way to shed it. Neither they nor their banks could lay that risk off on private insurers for two reasons. First, the dollar amounts involved were simply too large; second, losses were correlated, in the sense that the failure of a few banks frequently caused a chain reaction, toppling good banks with bad, leaving a mountain of economic damage. Fortunately, these punishing disruptions to our economy were ended by the advent of FDIC insurance. Now, millions of business owners, individuals, landlords and lenders bear the economic risk of terrorist attacks. Insurers won't assume the risk -- we were previously dumb, but we've learned. It isn't right, though, that these risk-laden millions should have to shoulder this burden themselves. If we were to adopt an FDIC model for handling terrorism, the insurance industry would not be permitted to earn a dime from the coverage. Instead, a premium tax, payable to the U.S. Treasury, would be levied on all insurance. This would have the equitable effect of spreading the terrorism-related cost to the country in general, just as we spread defense expenditures. Were such a proposal enacted, it should sharply limit private lawsuits seeking to place blame on some party involved -- an airline, say. We should want the Treasury to make payments to victims solely to compensate them for loss of property, life or direct earnings, without worrying about fault. The law also should cover war losses. Some people will argue that an FDIC model for insurance would be a socialistic intrusion into the private sector, yet that institution is today generally regarded as having been enormously beneficial. Once, the problem was bank runs and economic panics; we found an innovative solution. Today, the problem is terrorism and its capricious effects on insurance costs; we need a solution of comparable efficacy. Warren Buffett is chairman of the board of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a diversified company with insurance operations, and a director of the Washington Post Co., which has an investment in Berkshire Hathaway. This was written for the Post.

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FiveStarSupplements.com
by Shane Mullholand 23 Nov '01

23 Nov '01

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Re: in praise of gold
by Faustine 23 Nov '01

23 Nov '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > David wrote: > George wrote: >Faustine wrote: >Petro wrote: >>>> 5) Gold makes women sleep with you. I don't know why they >>>> like it, but they do. >>> They sleep with you because of your large cattle herd only they >>> have accepted abstracted value and settle for gold or stocks... >> Not all women are golddiggers. I happen to think any woman who marries >> for money or sleeps around for gifts and dinners is worse than a whore. >> As the old saw goes, at least real prostitutes are honest about what >> they're doing. >It might be more than just wealth these women are after. A man with >fat herds, or a fat wallet can better provide for children than a man >with a single battered old goat, or an empty wallet. And over emphasized >secondary sexual characteristics might, at the subconscious level be >linked with better child-producing abilities. Oh I know, I don't doubt it for a minute; I was just being difficult... As I said in another post, for the vast majority of people, there's no getting away from nature. Schopenhauer said it better than I could long ago in "World as Will and Representation"-- here's a link to his essay "The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes": http://www.concentric.net/~Wkiernan/text/Schopenhauer_Love_of_the_sexes.html Quite entertaining--lots to quarrel with but lots of good sense; one of the most intellectually honest philosophers I've ever come across. Here are some short general quotes to spur some interest... "To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties." "The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness." "Faith and knowledge are related as the two scales of a balance; when the one goes up, the other goes down." "It is with trifles and when he is off guard that a man best reveals his character." "Every nation ridicules other nations-- and all are right." "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents." "Intellect is invisible to the man who has none." "What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity." "He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom." "Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think." "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." "The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively not by the false appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice." Well, I guess that's enough proselytizing for one post... > The only "abstracted value" I find really intriguing is the quality of > a man's mind. Everything else is entirely beside the point. You have no > idea how often I get hit on by so-called "attractive" men--and I'm quite > proud to say I've never dated even one of them. I'd prefer a fat cranky old > genius over a rich businessman or male model anyday! >>You don't know how many men on this list you just gave hope to. :) Which reminds me, there were some really funny passages in that "Herman Kahn: Supergenius" biography I put up a link to a few months ago--if someone who really maxxed out all of the above qualifiers didn't have the slightest trouble getting laid, there must be hope indeed! LOL ~F. *** The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms. - --William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBO/762/g5Tuca7bfvEQJlWwCfT3Hlg1F+hHVWI+aSJq5axfPaPCMAoI0t KDluLjESvKGwnkvwXuhJmgUX =jB+P -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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We are Unable to Reach your Web Page
by adam.brett＠mail.internetseer.com 23 Nov '01

23 Nov '01

There appears to be a problem in reaching the following Web page from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.99.04.05-99.04.11/msg00345.html Error: Time Out This error is most commonly due to an Internet connection problem and does not necessarily indicate that your server is down. As recommended by the robot Guidelines, this email is to explain our research activity and to alert you about the connectivity error we encountered. InternetSeer, the world's largest web site monitoring service, does not store or publish the content of your pages, but rather uses the information to update our ongoing Web Connectivity Study. To learn more about our study results or to request InternetSeer to continue monitoring your Web site in this way, visit: http://scclick.internetseer.com/sitecheck/clickthrough.jsp?I5s57h5e5i5g5l5o… If you find this information about the availability of your Web site useful, we would appreciate your feedback. Should you prefer not to receive these error notices in the future please let us know by replying to this email and placing "remove" in the subject line. You will be removed from receiving further email error notices. Adam Brett Analyst Manager cs-adam.brett(a)mail.internetseer.com InternetSeer.com "Your Remote Web Site Monitor" http://www.internetseer.com PS. We will send you a courtesy email when we are able to reach your Web page again. ##cypherpunks(a)einstein.ssz.com##

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New and Improved! 14017
by k8904＠orgio.net 23 Nov '01

23 Nov '01

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PaiGow Tournament & 30% Bonus At Cherry Casino!
by newsletter＠gamblerdepot.com 23 Nov '01

23 Nov '01

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Re: Geo-encryption
by Dorothy Denning 23 Nov '01

23 Nov '01

We don't have anything yet we are giving out to the public, but no, it isn't related to the CoinCard (which I hadn't even heard of).

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