December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Balance of Terror
by TruthMangler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May wrote: > At 12:22 AM -0400 4/12/97, Jeremiah A Blatz wrote: > > >peace. No logical holes there. However, the premise that a large nuke > >will keep some 3rd world dictator from lobbing some Exocets at your > >ships is, well, provably false. > > Given that the peace was kept, for whatever ultimate reasons, saying the > Peacekeeper had a "provably false" mission or name is unsupported. The same could be said for Charles Manson's aims being "provably false". The country has been going downhill since the 'Communist plot' to flouridate the water supply. "Provably false" has little meaning in this context, as well. > (We never have the luxury of running history over and over again, under > different controlled conditions, so we can't say for sure what caused > things to happen the way they did. I am persuaded that the balance of > terror in the 1950s-80s played a major role in the avoidance for 50 years > of any major wars. At horrendous cost to the U.S. and U.S.S.R., to be sure, > and better ways could probably have been found. But major wars _were_ > avoided.) I know it's midnight, the drugs are kicking in, and there are few posts to respond to on the weekend, but please make an attempt to start a new thread, as opposed to taking the easy way out and piling new drivel on top of old drivel. Dr. TruthRoberts

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One-time pads
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy C[reep] Mayonnaise studied yoga back-streching exercises for five years so he could blow himself (nobody else will). ///// | @ @ Timmy C[reep] Mayonnaise C _) \ o

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Re: Jim Bell raid
by jimbell＠pacifier.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:43 4/10/97 -0400, Sergey Goldgaber wrote: >On Wed, 9 Apr 1997, Greg Broiles wrote: >- -> I realize that we're talking about net-time, but "long before" seems like a >- -> poor way to describe the 2-2.5 days between the appearance of the "IRS >- -> Inspection" report (which was, in fact, the transcription of newspaper story) > >Time flies fast on the Internet; or haven't you noticed? Three days of rather >heated discussion took place between the time the arrest was announced and >your message saying that you had the warrants, etc. For the record, I was never arrested and so far haven't been charged with anything. They're mightily pissed, however, and who knows what'll happen in the future. However, the local news was pretty embarrassing to them, and they've unintentionally alerted the media that there is actually a story to be covered, although it wasn't the one they wanted! The local newspaper is putting the essay on their website, or so I hear, so the public is going to be able to bypass all of the government hype and get to the real issue. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Jim Bell raid
by jimbell＠pacifier.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 20:05 4/04/97 -0500, John Young wrote: >Now that's Assassination Politics to feed the lust of the best and brightest >of all nations, if not that of a few of the overmuch AP protestors here. > >Jim's telephone number: 1-360-686-3911 My _correct_ phone number is 1-360-696-3911. Sorry that I didn't notice the error until now. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: "...markets are fundamentally chaotic, not efficient"?
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> By that definition, markets, whether for capital or assassins, > are distinctly _not_ chaotic*, since most people's decisions > [* Unless Life, The Universe, and Everything are really > deterministic, but fate has decreed that I don't believe that...] > about what stocks to buy/sell, and particularly the timing, > are influenced by lots of random events - when they hear what information, > whether they were busy doing something else when they heard, > whether they'd just blown their disposable income on a new car > because that freak windstorm dropped a tree on their car the same > week the Post Office ate their car insurance payment, > whether Alan Greenspan had a bad pizza the night before the quarterly > interest rates came out or too much caffeine before his latest speech.... I don`t really want to get into this discussion/flame war too deeply but I will post on this thread once... Any of the events described above are completely determined by the initial conditions of the system, just because a system is too complex for us to measure its initial conditions in enough detail does not mean it is random, it simply means we see it as random. Hence a market`s behaviour is labeled chaotic, because it appears random. It is, however, completely deterministic however we cannot know the initial conditions because they are too complicated. End of chat, chaotic behaviour is NOT random, it simply appears so unless one can accurately measure the intial conditions. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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None Mondex
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There's a rumor that Timothy Mayhem sells his dead relatives as fertilizer as they constitute the best shit in California. ||||||||||| \~0/ \0~/ < (0) > --oOO--/|||\--OOo- Timothy Mayhem

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Re: "...markets are fundamentally chaotic, not efficient"? Really?
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mr. Crispin? Fuck you. With a brick. Now, exactly what did that nasty little bit of vituperation have have to do with our admittedly equivocal discussions about the definition of randomness, and whether any given market was a random process -- definitional prestidigitation aside -- and thus as efficient as it was ever going to be? Something any finance major, and probably any electrical engineer, for that matter, is taught in the third week of school? Not a god-damned thing. A point, which, if you actually go back and *read* the asinine (woops!) bit of logical sophistry (so sorry!) you eventually found yourself in, you might have actually comprehended. If you didn't fancy yourself as God's Gift to Disputation (damn... another one; I simply *must* stop this). Which, of course, was my point in showing you all your ad hominems. A point you didn't actually get, insisting on piling on more instead, so you could "prove" your point with a veritable bestiary of informal fallacies. (The nadir of which, by the way, was asking me to clarify something I said in passing, and then calling it a "straw man" in reply. Remarkable.) Having watched you for a while, and having determined that you have nothing new to add to the discussions here, I have no compunction whatsoever about putting you into my killfile. With a brick, Mr. Cretin^h^h^h^hispin. <Plonk!> Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Lesley Stahl: "You mean *anyone* can set up a web site and compete with the New York Times?" Andrew Kantor: "Yes." Stahl: "Isn't that dangerous?" The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Re: anonymous credit
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wei Dai, <weidai(a)eskimo.com>, writes: > The idea goes like this. The government announces a new series of > anonymous zero-coupon treasury bonds that mature in 10 years, backed by a > special lump-sum tax to be collected when the bonds mature. The proceeds > of the bond auction and the tax are distributed equally among everyone. > So basicly, the government forces everyone to take out a loan on the > credit market and guarantees its collection. Anyone who does not want the > loan anonymously buys treasury bonds with all of his distribution, holds > them for 10 years, redeems them at maturity and uses the proceeds to pay > off the lump-sum tax. I think this is a very intriguing idea. Let me try to spell it out in more detail with some concrete numbers. A zero-coupon bond is one with a purchase price less than its face value. After the maturation of the bond, it can be redeemed for its face value. The purchaser of such a bond is loaning money to its buyer, and he will be paid off at the end of the loan period with more money than he put in. For a ten year bond, maybe the purchase price is 1/2 its face value. A $1000 bond would be purchased for $500, and redeemed in 10 years for $1000. An "anonymous" bond would be a bearer bond, one which is sold without any record of who bought it, and which can be redeemed at maturity by whomever holds it. In the example above, the U.S. government sells, say, $1 billion worth of these 10 year zero coupon bonds. It will have to pay back $2 billion in ten years at maturity. The $1 billion in revenues is then distributed evenly to everyone in the country. Assuming a population of 250 million, each man, woman, and child gets $4. In ten years, in order to pay off the redeemed bonds, $2 billion of special taxes will be collected. This will amount to $8 per person. As Wei says, each person in the country (who doesn't participate in the bond sale) is given $4 now, and must pay $8 in ten years. In effect he is given a $4 loan, payable in ten years. If he does not want that loan, he can take his anticipated $4 and buy $4 worth of the bonds during the bond sale. This produces no gain or loss of money, but he gets the bond. Then, in ten years, he turns in his bond for $8, and uses that to pay off the $8 in taxes. He ends up without any change in his financial state, neither loaning nor borrowing money. (There is a slight complication in that at the time of the bond sale, people who want to offset their loan with a bond purchase won't yet have the loan funds to buy the bond; and at the end, people want to pay off their tax with the bond redemption, but the government can't redeem the bonds until it collects the tax. I'm not sure if this is a serious problem or not.) Now, if this picture is correct, this isn't exactly how I would have thought of an anonymous loan. The people receiving the distributed revenues from the bond sale are essentially borrowing money from the government. Every borrower is identified, and must pay back his loan in ten years via his taxes. So the loans are fully identified and not anonymous. What does happen though is that some (or most?) of the people can offset their loan by anonymously lending money (buying bonds). In effect they have borrowed money from the government, non-anonymously, but then have the option of lending all of it back, anonymously. At the end, it is impossible to know which people have retained their loans and which people have cancelled them. So you don't know who has borrowed money, and this therefore is effectivelly equivalent to an anonymous loan. > The fatal flaw, of course, is that there is no reason why the government > would want to help people get anonymous loans. Can anyone find a way to > fix this? Maybe a non-governmental body could be used in place of the government. Suppose a group of people wanted to allow some members to borrow money anonymously. For example, a church group wants to help members through tough times via loans, but they don't want the recipients to be identified and bear the stigma of needing charity. Wei's idea could still be used: the church sells its own bonds, redeemable at some future date for more than the face value. The funds from the sale are distributed evenly to all members. Members who don't want to borrow make purchases at least equal to their receipts. Then, after the time period, everybody has to pay a special membership fee ("tax") so that the bonds can be redeemed. If some people can't pay, the other members will have to be willing to pay more to cover their defaults. One practical problem with this idea is that the amount of money loaned per person is small compared to the volume of transactions going on, especially for large groups. In my example above, each person only anonymously borrowed $4, given $1 billion worth of transactions. That's a lot of paperwork with associated transaction costs for a small value. With smaller groups the idea might actually be more practical, although there is less anonymity then. Hal

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Fuck/god-damned/damn / Was--Re: "...markets are fundamentally chaotic, not efficient"? Really?
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert Hettinga wrote: > > Fuck you. With a brick. > god-damned > damn... As a long-time sufferer of Tourette Syndrome, I would like to thank all those on the list who have gone out of their way to make me feel at home. -- Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/webworld

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Re: "internet is ruining representative govt"
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote: > *To: Multiple recipients of list <info-policy-notes(a)essential.org> > *Subject: Cokie Roberts on How Internet Is Ruining Representative Government > For many parents, the idea of yet another influence in their children's > lives over which they have no control is threatening. Kookie Roberts is just another in a long line of parents who seem to think that control over their children's development is the responsibility of someone other than themselves. I have a wonderful idea. How about if those parents who don't want to assume responsibility for control over their children's lives pass custody of them to someone who will assume that responsibility, instead of arguing that everyone else's rights must be abridged because they are busy doing other things. I, for one, don't want to be forced to live in Kookie's world just because she is too busy being busy and important to properly supervise her children. -- Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/xenix/xenbody.html

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