December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: DigiCash ???
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <9408281521.AA13945(a)ua.MIT.EDU> Jason W Solinsky writes: > > I would like somebody to explain how I would go about using an anonymous > > digicash system to buy a automobile? > > > > Just for arguments sake lets say I want to buy a new Ford Mustang GT from > > the local dealer and desire that nobody at the dealer has any idea who I > > am or where I come from. > > You hire an anonymous reshiper... no different from an anonymous remailer > only you can't use an automated program (yet :) and its damn difficult to > avoid traffic analysis. Do we care that you can't get it on the road without insurance in most states, and that the registration must be in someone's name? -- Jim Dixon

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FCC and Crypto
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Keep it up. Literate writing is ur-code. Crypto-tech entrepreneurs will smell the coffee. John

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Re: DSPs
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 13:09 1994/08/26 -0700, Phil Karn wrote: .... >But then I hear people say that it's not the multiplication that slows >down modular exponentiation, it's the modular reduction. .... Modular reduction is scarcely worse than the multiplication. If I have a 60 word multi precision number N to be reduced by a 30 word number M, I compute a guess by dividing the 32 bit most significant bits N by the most significant 32 bits of M. I then multiply this quotient by M and subtract that from N. That reduces N by some multiple of M leaving N mod M unchanged. The error in the guess might mean that N is less than 32 bits shorter than it was before the operation but this method gets nearly 32 bits per pass. The inner loop of the is the same as in multiplication. For all of this using the floating point unit wins on most modern CPUs.

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Golbal Econ.
by Rick H. Wesson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

With topics like buying a car with digital cash make me think some may be missing my point. I don't want to replace all currencies world wide with some implementation of digital cash, be it an on or off-line system. I would like to help get an internet economny going! For the internet to become a source of greater revenue I'd like to see a system that can securely make business transactions that we are all happy with. The amounts should be small transactions compaired with selling a car, I'd like to know how I can pay for some online information without having to have an account based with the information supplier. For starters how can I pay for some HTML page or purchase a physical product via CURRENT technologies on the internet. Lets first start an internet cash system before you go off and let our ego's make all other forms of hard currency obsolette. -Rick

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Re: DSPs
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <199408281656.JAA14318(a)netcom.netcom.com> Norman Hardy writes: > Modular reduction is scarcely worse than the multiplication. If I have a 60 word > multi precision number N to be reduced by a 30 word number M, I compute a guess > by dividing the 32 bit most significant bits N by the most significant 32 > bits of M. On a DSP chip like the Texas C40, 32-bit multiplication takes one clock cycle. Modular reduction will take something on the order of one hundred clocks. Modular reduction is much more expensive than multiplication. > I then multiply this quotient by M and subtract that from N. That reduces N by > some multiple of M leaving N mod M unchanged. The error in the guess might > mean that N is less than 32 bits shorter than it was before the operation but > this method gets nearly 32 bits per pass. The inner loop of the is the same as > in multiplication. > > For all of this using the floating point unit wins on most modern CPUs. Not on DSP chips. On the C40, reals are only 32 bits long, so there is no benefit to using them. They are less precise than integers. -- Jim Dixon

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Bootstrapping a free banking economy
by Anonymous User 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Pr0duct Cypher writes: > To those at the Nexus who are using Magic Money: thank you and good luck. Is the Nexus Bank still up? Reference to it seems to have been removed from the c2.org web page. Also, what are the current money supply figures for the various banks? I, for one, would like to develop for digital cash (perl, C, Unix, sockets, etc.) but I'm looking for a bank that is commited to turning their barter tokens into an active economy over the long term, so that I will have some choices about how to spend those wages. > So far you are planning to accept Magic Money as payment, and to pay out > Magic Money to a few people who write some code or otherwise help you out. > This will not get it into widespread use. Instead, [rebate in NexusBucks] I think both service fees and the rebate are a good idea. Two more good ideas might be : - Loans, in NexusBucks, to independent developers of online services who expect a future digital cash flow stream from their service - Consumer loans to developers who expect a future wage stream in NexusBucks What is the best way to bootstrap the information services economic cycle? What is the minimal size of economy needed -- how many online services, how many developers, how many skilled believers willing to invest sweat equity to bring us to that pint? "Cypherpunks write code -- for digital cash"

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crypto anarchy thoughts
by nobody＠ds1.wu-wien.ac.at 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Blanc wrote: > list discussions do not altogether convince of the importance of > using encryption as a matter of course or for the re-structuring of > society. True! Encryption and athentication, which is probably all the crypto that CommerceNet and further commercial transactions will use, is just the tip of the crypto-anarchy iceberg. And like an iceberg, most will not see the light of day. > The choice to use crypto is a little different from the sense > of wanting to use it from desperation; I think it is the True again, but then as another pointed out, you draw attention to yourself if you reserve crypto usage for "important" times only. Envelopes don't raise suspicion because nearly everybody uses them. > One of the important issues regarding the use of encryption is not > necessarily whether it is used or not as a matter of course, but > rather the controversy over the source of the permission to use it as > well as the imposed obligation to participate in self-incriminating > applications of it. i.e. do individuals have the sovereign right to I don't understand exactly... for many of the various protocols, full participation is necessary to avoid self-incrimination. For example, digital cash. If you wind up using a credit card or writing checks for everything, you lose any benefits. > But they are not the only ones involved, and it is my understanding > that not all future developments will be determined on this list. Definitely! This list is a clearinghouse of ideas only. People can write in and describe various theoretical concepts which are interesting and fascinating to think about, but whose impact on society will be left for science fiction to describe. I'm not saying this is bad or undesirable. Just that I beleive the future will hold a fairly limited version of crypto anarchy. Here's a scenario: 10 years in the future, PGP is a fully GUI based program at last. It supports drag-n-drop, all sorts of OLE type protocols, and is used just once in a great while by most people, who don't really need the security but once in a great while. Authentication, on the other hand, is pretty big. Companies regularly handle business via networks and thus most have an email address where they take orders, encrypted and signed of course. There are more remailers, a few hundred, but most run in unsecure environments by mostly students who think they're cool. A few commercial remailers were launched, but failed due to lack of interest. The few pay remailers operating are owned by rich hobbyists who can spare a machine and an internet connection and don't care about actually turning a profit. But these don't get much traffic since there are so many free remailers. Digital cash never made it off the ground because credit card companies are now held to stricter laws about disclosing account information, and banks provide competitive debit cards and live under the same disclosure laws (i.e. credit/debit cards good enough for 99.99999% of the people). Furthermore, merchants are restricted from culling purchase records to build dossiers on spending habits (or face legal action), so manufacturers now rely on voluntarily supplied info, usually by enticing customers with various benefits of "registering", such as rebates, discounts, sweepstakes entries, etc. Nobody cares that digial cash preserves anonimity, because bank and stores aren't interested, and customers want the extra benefits that stores offer to add their name to their database. For this reason, offshore banks don't fare too well since the digital cash they issue generally isn't spendible. It is convenient however, if you need to transfer money from one account to another. But you have to go to a "money broker" who will exchange your digital cash for spendible cash, and pay a transaction fee. DC-nets are mostly theoretical, as simple versions are too easy to disrupt, and disruption resistant versions are too complex. Still, a few exist, but don't run continuously - you have to post to alt.dc.net and announce a time you would like to use one, and usually a few people announce willingness to participate. (As it turns out, messages to alt.dc.net account for most of the anonymous mail traffic generated.) Data havens are another failed experiment. Storage costs have plummeted, making it cheap for people to just purchase their own terabyte floptical and encrypt all the data they want to keep. They keep it nearby, making it more convenient to retrieve the data than keeping it at a data haven. A hacked version of PGP which accepts a second plaintext is used to encrypt the data. You specify two passphrases, the real one which decrypts your data, and a second one which decrypts your data to the plaintext you specify. Thus you don't care if you are caught with your data floptical, you can always decrypt the contents to scanned in versions of "War and Peace" and "Alice in Wonderland", etc. How's that sound? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLmDUBfFYvlqvuKtBAQHpJwP/ZW++0uQezy4SJvUU0c1idNjnAqTdVaAI nHa1juO0IWwsvNGemspRZRS1UTwYrMBefdnWIF1JP0vZYb1tyGeDEPf2Se9+RGTH aqGsTcbzjRKUJhwQWr61gFGk9TBOsdNbX05eTYNf/DHOdqI+bOmMGM4WO2D/YAt3 TFVTIPDxQd8= =Si8r -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Golbal Econ.
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:27 AM 8/28/94 -0700, Rick H. Wesson wrote: >With topics like buying a car with digital cash make me think some >may be missing my point. I don't want to replace all currencies world >wide with some implementation of digital cash, be it an on or off-line >system. > >I would like to help get an internet economny going! For the internet >to become a source of greater revenue I'd like to see a system that >can securely make business transactions that we are all happy with. >The amounts should be small transactions compaired with selling a car, >I'd like to know how I can pay for some online information without >having to have an account based with the information supplier. For >starters how can I pay for some HTML page or purchase a physical product >via CURRENT technologies on the internet. > >Lets first start an internet cash system before you go off and let our >ego's make all other forms of hard currency obsolette. Damn straight. The major reason I got interested in digital cash and this list in the first place, and why I'm interested in building the capability to underwrite digital cash now, is to sell and buy code, information and maybe professional services, someday *very* soon, quickly, easily, *and* cheaply. The best way to do that is to make something happen, right now, with whatever's available. As long as 1.) there's the necessary functionality in the code, and that includes 2.) the user interface, and it's possible to 3.) bash the existing financial/legal structure to make it fit (paint to hide!), then we, myself included, have no excuses anymore. Seeing that 1 has been agreed to by acclamation on this list many times, and most people believe that secure WWW/Mosaic handles 2. That leaves 3. Making changes in the way business is done is almost the whole point of going into business. Change is what makes money <no pun intended>. (Aside: see Joel Mokyr's _The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress_ about this, one of my favorite books on economic history.) Fear of modifying the existing business order is what's limiting what may be a very real market in providing liquidity for interenet commerce. That fear is a bugbear. It's a monster in the closet. It ain't real, folks. The laws are there to support digital cash, from very tightassed hypersecure online internet versions of the ATM box at your supermarket checkout stand, to offline digital cash schemes like my current pet business model. The banking/finance structure is there as long as they see a way to make money, the only thing left to do is find out if the market is there. The way to do that is to pick the cheapest, most secure technology to implement, and go for it. Yeah, what he said. It's time to implement something. 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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Making crypto use widespread
by Anonymous User 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One thing that's become apparent is that *convenience* is all important. If we made PGP much more convenient to use, by integrating it seamlessly into our common offline mailers, then folks would stop complaining about receiving encrypted messages of a trivial nature, they would be much more likely to sign their message, etc. Getting the basic functionality is only half the battle -- the other half is making it so that the effort put into using it is less costly than the value of most uses, which for most single messages is slim. Furthermore, we won't find the most valuable uses until we've climed the learning curve by massive experimentation with this software. Small user learning curves and low usage cost means convenience, convenience, convenience. Convenience is utterly necessary to make crypto traffic mushroom. Compare Nate Sammon's web page interface to the remailers to the shell script interface (much less try to do the encryption & nesting by hand) -- it makes all the difference in the world! Only one easily fixed problem there -- Nate's remailer doesn't say whether it's doing the nested encryption or mailing plaintext! That one flaw, perhaps just a tiny oversight, makes a system with almost nearly perfect convenience much less user freindly. (If it's really not encrypting that's a much bigger flaw, but also correctable). If folks fixed that flaw and widely deployed Nate's server, remailer usage would mushroom, and we would have enough traffic to mix it up without long delays. Why has Magic Money failed to take off? It's very incovenient. Far too much of the protocol is left to the users to perform manually, and the command line options as an interface are far too arcane, with few affordances or strong clues as to the current state of the protocol, or what action to take next. This isn't a flaw in way Magic Money has implemented digital cash protocols, it simply means that the software from the point of view of users is incomplete -- soembody needs to write a friendly client on top of the autoclient, and a seamless anonymous messaging system between customer, vendor, and bank. This would make a huge difference in how many people are willing to play with, and eventually use, the system. Incidentally, Eudora developers told me at Internet World that they plan to provide GUI hooks for PGP and PEM in a release due out in late '94 or early '95. This is easy for them to do, they just haven't considered it a high priority. It is just not that hard for vendors to integrate encryption if they have customers telling them that's what they want. We as customers need to speak out to our software vendors and let them know what we want. This is at least as important as political activism, probably moreso.

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Is Off-Line Digital Cash Dead?
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rick Wesson wrote: >It seems that off-line cash is dead or so the latest posts assure me, >is there a way to incorporate some of the anonymity with off-line cash >into on-line cash? > Off-line cash is not dead. I just expressed several reasons why on-line cash has market advantages (immediate clearing, no repudiation, and thus greater value in a Gresham's Law sense) and some disadvantages (connection to clearinghouse). Which systems will win out, and how, is unclear. As in most economic/ecologic matters, expect multiple solutions. But I do think the arguments strongly favor "immediate" clearing, which means either on-line clearing (Alice confirms that money has moved, albeit distantly) or pure cash (conventional). Off-line clearing that relies on trusted observer protocols, and that may allow later repudiation ("that wasn't me--give me my money back"), seems at a disadvantage. (If off-line cash has a cost in terms of not clearing immediately, and even allowing ways to break anonymity--perhaps via repudiation, in some proposals--then it will be 'devalued" relative to "hard currencies" that clear immediately, untraceably, and irrevocably.) That you, Rick, are having coding problems is no great surprise. Despite what some folks are saying here, this is still a research issue. Lots of stuff yet to explore. (Yes, I may be proved wrong when these enthusiasts open their doors at First Digital, but such is life. Having invested in companies before, and knowing something about what to look for in terms of cash flow, burn rates, expectations of actually starting to sell (as opposed to burning money doing research), I wouldn't put a *dime* into a startup to do digital cash *at this time*. This is not to say enthusiasts and researchers should not pursue this. After all, what better way to be prepared to get jobs or start companies in this area when the time *is* ripe? But don't expect many investors to fund a blue sky research startup.) I expect I'll have more to say on these various points. My Netcom account, as about 50 of you Netcommies certainly also know, is delaying mail by up to a day. (They have 30,000+ account names in the file that has to be opened, searched, appended to, etc., each and every time a piece of mail arrives....things fell apart suddenly and now they are revamping the account strucure, which may take several more weeks to fix.) So expect some delays and/or completely missing responses from me. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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