December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

e$: e-cash underwriting
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:53 PM 8/20/94 -0400, L. Todd Masco wrote: >The problem here, and the one that's of interest to Cypherpunks, is > how to change this system, using credit cards and all the loss of > privacy they entail, into one using anonymous digital cash. HKS > certainly has a commitment (though in word only at this point, since > it's vaporware) to support digital cash, but as I've noted before > it a very difficult bootstrap problem. > >There has to be some reason people would use digital cash over credit > cards and frankly, I don't see it happening in the near future except > by some large power (like banks) decided to support it. Forgive me, I'm beginning to think that the power doesn't have to be that large at all. I'm beginning to have an attack of "I've got a barn, let's have a show". It's okay, it'll pass if I sit down... While I think the technical mechanics are simple (you all seem to, anyway), I'd like to see what regulatory and legal roadblocks have been identified. The only way to find out about the *market* for the product is to test it. By the way, I think the problem of double spending is a risk that can be managed, like the risk that a bank takes when a check is bounced... The culprit is identified, and it becomes a matter between the bouncee (however removed from the criminal transaction), the law, and the bouncer. Of course this might require some pretty vicious personal ID on the part of users of digital cash, like no nyms allowed, but you still get privacy if nobody bounces the cash. I'm also sure other administrative methods will evolve which will allow almost total privacy and no double spending in practice. Tim refers to voluminous study and many man-years of effort put into figuring how to do e-cash underwriting from a regulatory standpoint. I prefer the word "underwriting" to banking, because there are no accounts of deposit held at an e-cash exchange (where underwriting happens). There seems to be a problem with the word "bank" here, like there seems to be a problem with the word "bond". ;-) Are there any non-proprietary, public sources of information on these legal and regulatory research efforts? Are there archives of the c'punks traffic on this subject that I can look at? Thanks, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Re: In Search of Genuine DigiCash
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:24 PM 8/19/94 -0700, Eric Hughes wrote: >The withdrawal transaction posts a debit to a customers demand deposit >account (decreasing it) and a credit to the suspension account >(increasing it). NewJargonNotice("suspension account") Is this new nomenclature? It sounds less risque than "float", I must say... >Where digital cash is immediately useful is online as a retail level >wire transfer system. [snip] >the cost of networking is >dropping and the cost of computation is dropping. I personally don't >expect that off-line digital cash techniques will ever actually be >economically most efficient. Existing alternates (e.g. credit cards) >work well enough today, and by the time PDA's work well enough and are >cheap enough to be universal, the cost of an online verification will >be down in the fractions of a cent. Immediate and final clearing must save money, somehow, but right now, it's hard to prove whether cash is still king in cyberspace. I have a (somewhat religious, in the sense that it may not be empirically proved in my lifetime) belief that that's the case. That's why I like to agitate for a test. Yes, Tim, I know, you guys aren't bankers... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Re: In Search of Genuine DigiCash
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:43 PM 8/19/94 -0700, Eric Hughes wrote: >If there were already a fully identified digital money system, Is there one? >On the other hand, there is likely also a local maximum where the >premium is fairly small. In this case you get not only all the people >above, but a large percentage of the people who are willing to pay >just a little more for privacy. > >As to where these local maxima actually are, and which yields the >larger profits, I have no idea. It all boils down to Bedford Forrest's maxim "Get there first with the most men." (Sun Tsu said it first, but Forrest probably wouldn't have liked to know that, I'm sure) If in fact there is no method for making cash transactions on the internet, particularly "off-line" transactions with no trusted third party in the loop at transaction time, then digital cash is all we have. Eric has destroyed the point about the efficacy or need for off-line transactions already, but to expand on his last sentence, there needs to be empirical evidence to back up or refute his and my opposing claims. >The costs associated with anonymous digital cash may well be less that >for identified digital money systems. [reasons elided] > >Digital cash, on the other hand, needs a redeemed note database, but >this is one of its only unique costs. [snip] >It is likely that digital cash is more efficient economically, since >it unbundles a bunch of previously linked services and allows them to >be purchased separately by those who actually need them. Halleluja! Eric, for the last three months, you have said that there was no way to prove whether digital cash was more cost effective than other forms of e$, and thus potential efficiency was useless as an economic argument for its adoption. Perry and have held that it must be, and you have just now given a bunch of real good reasons. Now we need to figure how to test all this out... I love this place... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Re: Something of Interest (fwd)
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Alan wrote: > >>>Is it just me, or does anyone else remember a similar message being pumped > >>>out about the same time Bell was raided (April 1). > I found the actual article. It was forwarded to the list by someone. > (Maybe Igor?) The headers are interesting. I have the full header set if > anyone is interested... > > This post did not seem to get posted to the list, but only as a forward... It is my recollection that Igor filters the incoming files that use a blind cc: to cypherpunks(a)(anylist).com and checks to see if they are spam with cc:'s to a thousand email addresses or are meant for the cypherpunks list in specific. If they are not just random spam, then Igor forwards them to the list subscribers, which accounts for the headers showing the post as a forward rather than as sent directly to the list.

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Re: U & Pu "poisoning of the environment"
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >One doesnot need to detonate the Uranium/Plutonium one can poison the > >watersuplies and make havoc with The Simple Bear Necessities of life. > > Well, I wouldn't want to snort the stuff daily, but its toxicity > has been overrated in the popular press. > > Epidemiologic studies of workers [even wartime workers with impressive > body burdens/ exposures] in a number of uranium bomb-making centers have > found ~ no health effects. This is quite similar to saying that nerve gas is harmless because scarcely anyone working in storage areas has been killed by it. Or that bullets won't harm you because people handle crates of them and they don't get shot. -- Jim Dixon

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Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
by David K. Merriman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > >I wonder why the issue of bomb parts is now being given such a >huge push in the press? > Because the last Crisis of the Week is running out of steam (viewer interest) - not that I'm cynical or anything. :-( Dave Merriman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Finger merriman(a)metronet.com for PGP/RIPEM public keys and fingerprints. Unencrypted Email may be ignored without notice to sender. PGP preferred. Remember: It is not enough to _obey_ Big Brother; you must also learn to *love* Big Brother.

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U & Pu "poisoning of the environment"
by pstemari＠bismark.cbis.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> In all of these cases there is a serious attempt to make sure that the > workers are not harmed by the dangerous substances involved. I must > say that the phrase "impressive body burdens" is fairly incomprehensible. "Body burden" refers to the amount of Pu that has been ingested and remains in the body. The entire point of safeguards is to minimize body burden and exposure. If someone has a "impressive body burden", it means the safeguards didn't work.

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Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
by cfrye＠mason1.gmu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One of the secrets the government didn't want out was the nature of the gamma ray trigger, as the concept of explosively compressing U235 was *relatively* widely known (this is pre-1980). Curt

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Re: Using PGP on Insecure Machines
by p.v.mcmahon.rea0803＠oasis.icl.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

James Hightower writes: > Which brings me to the question; "What ARE people using, and what are > they GOING to use?" Can anyone point me to a survey of the most used > Consumer will be using so that we can be there with strong, usable ^^^^^^^^ Who? > crypto when he gets there. ^^^^^ Where? Or less tersely, which users of messaging are you interested in providing crypto for? Apart from the Defence sector, there seem to be three main communities: 1 "Formal" inter-business electronic messaging using commercial value-added networks (VANs) - which are perceived as secure - and associated user agent software (which varies greatly). About fifty thousand North American companies are "there" already (for EDI, and at a cost). Leakage (due to high VAN costs) of formal messaging business from VANs onto the insecure Internet is not yet significant - although CommerceNet will doubtless fix that. 2 Intra-organisation nessaging based on LAN or corporate workflow and email systems. This has built both bottom-up and downwards (e.g. from PROFS or equivalent). The prevalent software is diverse, proprietary and volume. I don't have total market figures to hand, but as an example, the 11JUL94 Government Computer News ranks MS Mail (Windows 3), cc:Mail (Windows), cc:Mail(DOS), MS Mail (PC Networks), and WordPerfect Office as the most preferred e-mail packages amongst Federal users. I would expect a similar list in most commercial email-enabled organisations (with the addition of Lotus Notes). Varying security facilities are bundled within these packages already. 3 The "informal messaging" sector (including most Internet traffic). The associated software is more diverse and "open", but its users have a marginal and/or occasional need for end-to-end / message-transfer security. Note: for both 1 and 2, an "insecure machine" (i.e.: with administrative intrusion potential into an individual's messaging security) is more likely a requirement than a problem for medium/large corporations - as management supervision and control over information assets need to be possible. -- Tim May writes: > I had assumed the poll was of *us*, which is both a manageable poll to > take, and a useful one. What would be done with the results? --- James A. Donald says: > High Tech industry has considerable experience with surveys of > consumers for nonexistent products. > > Such surveys are useless at best, and dangerous at worst. On the other hand, how else do you find out whether a sufficiently serious market exists to warrant investment in developing / productising a technology ? - pvm

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Digested Version no longer available
by Robert A. Hayden 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It is with deep regret that I inform you all that the digested version of the list is no longer available. The machine that the digested version was running from was removed from the network due to a power-ploy by faculty and administration in computer services and the computer science department. It is my hope that in about two weeks when school officially resumes, I will be able to get the machine restored. At that point, I will attempt to recoordinate with Eric to get the digested list set back up. I apologize. ____ Robert A. Hayden <=> hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu \ /__ -=-=-=-=- <=> -=-=-=-=- \/ / Finger for Geek Code Info <=> I do not necessarily speak for the \/ Finger for PGP Public Key <=> City of Mankato or anyone else

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