December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: MIT Fascism
by No Taxes through No Government 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>True enough. Most of our rules have been bundled together. Either you >accept all of them or you walk away. So Tim, if you don't like the FBI The above false information incorrectly assumes that all laws apply to all people.

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

17 Dec '03

At 8:27 AM 8/23/94 -0400, Peter Wayner wrote: >tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) wrote: >> >>I don't think any of us on this list is yet ready to present a plan to >>real bankers. Eric Hughes has told me he agrees. > >Real bankers may be well ahead of everyone on this list. I'm told that >Citibank has some very intriguing work pending at the patent office. It's >for digital cash. Thank you. This is exactly the kind of stuff I've been talking about. Real bankers aren't completely necessary. This is why my thinking has changed on the subject. You need financial accumen to make sure you don't spend down your suspension account, but that (cash portfolio management) can be purchased from lots places besides real banks. The technology of digital cash is something that Citicorp thinks it has to reinvent. That's par for the course. But you don't need a real banker to run a secure www/Secure Mosaic node. You barely need real bankers to hook in to the ATM system as long as you can prove that nobody, including the underwriter, sniff the user's card swipe and PIN number. You don't need real bankers to make sure that the fraud laws cover double spending of digital cash. You don't need bankers to make sure that you comply with cash reporting requirements when money comes on and off the net. Wiring all the above together to make a digital cash underwriter is doable at a relatively small level, without bankers for the most part. This is why Citicorp, and other banks like it, are going to shoot themselves in the foot when they try. I 'm pretty sure, having worked for Citicorp myself, they spent big piles of money trying to engineer around Chaum (or anybody else). Chaum almost has a viable product, which will cost a whole lot less (even if he gets his cut of profits) to implement from the underwriter's standpoint. Citicorp has tried this "We are The Technologists" tack in Travel (CIMS), Point of Sale data collection (CPOS), Telephone Banking (they even invented their own dial up terminal!) and several other unrelated businesses. They failed because of an institutional mentality of Not Invented Here and a very centralized, top-down management style. They're not much different from most other very large banks, I'm afraid. Citicorp's early success in bank Data Processing during the late 60's and early 70's, first in ATMs (they aren't the largest any more by a long shot), and the credit cards (same here), makes them, and some readers of this list, think they are a 900lb gorilla when it comes to digital cash. They aren't. Neither is any bank, no matter how large they are. I'd be real interested to see if Citibank can beat an onslaught of smaller underwriters who can offer cash at smaller margins than they can. Folks, the costs of an operation like a digital cash underwriter aren't too difficult to imagine. The entry cost for the average underwriter (if the market is there to support one) is not nearly the amount that Citicorp is going to spend putting up theirs, and so Citicorp will loose money on this investment as well, and eventually back out. It's like people who go in to see the machine The Well runs on. Their jaw drops at how small the box really is. If Citicorp did it the machine would be 10 times bigger and cost 10 times as much, to justify their hockey-stick earnings estimate and a cast of a thousand managers and analysts. The thing that's important here is Grove's Law. Chips have an economic half-life of 18 months, which drops the cost of any computer based business accordingly, along with the costs of entry into those businesses. I've personally seen large companies go into a new high-tech service businesses and kill their entry with overengineering and bloated middle management. You see it in the Wall Street Journal all the time. At some point, if the market is there, there will probably be a consolidation in digital cash underwriting, and larger companies will emerge as economies of scale become evident. But to think that any company can come into a completely different operating paradigm and take over from the start just because they're huge somewhere else is probably not going to wash. Think about railroads and airplanes. If the railroads seriously tried to fund aircraft development, they would have gotten smeared. They would still be trying to make a steam powered plane fly the day Douglas delivered the first DC-3. The banks aren't the big bad monsters we fear them for. Their participation in the market is necessary, as is the participation of most financial instutions, but an Argumentum ad Bacculum with the Banks as the threat of force is pretty much a waste of breath. Sorry. I promise not to turn blue next time. 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: Nuclear Weapons Material
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <paBMkOwscIgG070yn(a)io.org> Mark Terka writes: > Not to mention the fact that without tritium, the "trigger" for nuclear > weapons (and extremely expensive and rare at $ 100m a gram) all you have > is a radioactive paperweight. To the best of my knowledge, tritium is not used in nuclear weapons (meaning A-bombs), only in thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs). One of my teachers was involved in the Manhattan project; he never mentioned any need for tritium. -- Jim Dixon

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

17 Dec '03

In message <199408230610.XAA15960(a)netcom3.netcom.com> "Timothy C. May" writes: > Jason Solinsky wrote: > > Easily. They could deny you access to services of greater value than the > > tax being imposed. MIT weilds this power quite successfully. This thread > > Jason is confusing markets and governments. > > A movie theater that sells tickets is not "taxing" its patrons--it is > selling access. A university that charges tuition is not "taxing" its > customers. > > [ complications deleted] > > To call all negotiated prices "taxes" is, bluntly, > absurd. It also cheapens the language by throwing away the essential > distinction between market prices and taxes. Jason's use of the term 'tax' in a special sense is no more an abuse of the language than the attempt to change the conventional meaning of the word 'government'. He says that institutions like MIT govern the behavior of their special populations, that they can impose levies on their users, and that they can enforce rules against their users without the use of physical force. > In any case, something is a "market price" if one can walk away from > the transaction. I know of almost nothing the U.S. government calls a > "tax" that taxpayers are free to walk away from, to not pay (and thus > not receive the service). You can walk away from almost all US taxes by walking away from the USA. I have. What about luxury taxes, fishing licenses, flying licenses, and so forth? If you insist on calling these 'market prices', you begin to really rip the fabric of the language. -- Jim Dixon

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Death & Taxes
by frissell＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Steve Witham & Jason W Solinsky seem to be sowing a bit of confusion about government and taxes. Steve says: >This is the "monopoly on force in a geographical area" definition of >government. It's also pretty much government as we know it. It's a >fundamentally bad idea and it's what James and I are against. But I don't >think it's a good definition of "government." It *is*, however, the definition that my very commie-liberal poly sci department taught me when I was studying with them. Also "That institution charged with the authoritative allocation of values in society." >The reason is that what most people mean by "government" is a set of >services, the main ones being what James calls "true law": police, courts, >and defense--protection services for large numbers of people. Experts in taxonomy always try to define a species by the characteristics that *distinguish* it from other species. Not those characteristics that are the same. Governments are distinguished by their claim of monopoly on judging the appropriateness of uses of force within a given geographic area. Thus the symbol of a king's office is often a mace (club) and a sword. The American Eagle has arrows clutched in one claw. And in most times and places only the sovereign and his cronies are allowed to carry weapons. The peasants are prohibited from doing so. Jason says: A cybergovernment says "Do as we say or you can't communicate with our citizens" MIT says "Do as we say or go somewhere else" US democrats say "If you don't like US laws, move somewhere else" Actually, if you are a citizen you are bound by US tax laws even if you move to Alpha Centauri. Or if you are a narco terrorist you need not even be a citizen. MIT remains largely consensual. Governments do not. If they become mere market actors as I expect that they will, then they will no longer be the sorts of monopoly institutions that we refer to with the word -- "government." Actually "Self-Government vs. Others-Government" is the real split (with thanks to the Advocates for Self Government. DCF "You speak Treason!" - The Lady Marion Fitzwalter "Fluently!" - Sir Robin of Loxley Not from the politically correct version.

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Zimmerman's use of PGP
by Bill O'Hanlon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As anyone who has ever sent an encrypted "Really neat program, Phil!" message to Phillip Zimmerman knows, he doesn't run PGP where he reads his mail. He has to download messages to decrypt on a local machine. All of the cute elm/vi/emacs/mh/pine scripts you wanna post won't help him. -Bill (P.S. Back when he didn't get so much mail, if you'd done the above, you'd get a response in a couple weeks, telling you this. He mentioned that he saw the irony of the situation -- that the inventor of PGP couldn't make convenient use of it.)

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archives for cypherpunks?
by PatHuff＠world.std.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Do any archives exist for this group? I would be intereted in scaning them. Pat. PatHuff(a)world.std.com

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Re: Voluntary Governments?
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:14 PM 8/23/94 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >Russell Nelson says: >> In our high school we had a student government. We had no prisons >> and no guns. >> >> Then you were a club. > >Indeed. [snip] >(I once was part of a >debate held by Columbia University's Philolexian Society on the topic >"Resolved: Student Government is Amazingly Lame", in which I noted >that the low probability of a student government coup d'etat complete >with tanks rolling about the campus, and of the following student >government dictatorship run by a student military junta, demonstrated >that the student "government" wasn't a government but a weak way to >keep students placated, devoid even of the mild entertainment the >occassional revolt could bring.) Alas. How true. One of my friends got elected student government president at the University of Missouri by standing outside polling places in a clown suit bribing people to vote for him with play money. Later that year, I authored a student senate declaration of war against the University of Wisconsin. They had originated the concept of snickerocracy, or rule by clowns, and as potential competition for scarce laughs had to be destroyed. The declaration passed unanimously. We passed the hat in the bars for our defense budget (to be spent by the sacred Council of War, COW for short), and sent four determined and somewhat inebriated agriculture majors to Wisconsin's dairy barns to collect one ton of bullshit and deposit it on their student union steps at 3 am. In their defense, I must say that the administration generously let us (the senate) vote on the allocation of about $1.3 million of the university's money (somewhat less than 1% of the total, I believe), which made for a lot of sand in the old sandbox. And, I got to meet both Timothy Leary and Ralph Nader out of the deal. I have trouble telling them apart to this day... Ah, Yout'! Adulthood is terminal, 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: Voluntary Governments?
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:37 PM 8/23/94 -0500, Jim choate wrote: >Can't speak for MIT but I can speak for UT Austin, they do have cells to hold >prisoners. The security forces at that school attend the Tx Dept. of Public >Safety training school and hold state law enforcement positions. The last >thing you want to do is really piss one of these guys, you would end up >in one of the state prisons for several years, Huntsville probably. The University of Chicago, where I went for awhile, has the third largest police force in Illinois, after the Chicago PD and the State troopers. They have guns and cells. During the Cambodian days of rage, the administration had an interesting tactic. The acquiesced to the students' demands and took their pictures as they left. Then they expelled them all. Not violent, really, but harmful, maybe. "Hyde Park, where Black and White stand shoulder to shoulder against the Poor." (Nichols and May[not Tim]), 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: Voluntary Governments?
by elton＠sybase.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Right ... I had taken this offline, but it looks as though it ain't quite dead yet. Kindly stop reading now if you wish this subject would go away. Consolidating two messages from Jim Dixon: >Jason's use of the term 'tax' in a special sense is no more an abuse >of the language than the attempt to change the conventional meaning >of the word 'government'. and >You can't simply take over the ownership of words in the English >language. 'Government' is indeed the name used for an entity that >exercises authority or enforces laws. Of course we can -- it happens all the time. However, this time I haven't usurped the meaning of anything. Force -- the threat or actual use of violence -- is the essence of government. You just said so yourself: "enforces laws". Here's the closest applicable dictionary definition of "government", taken from the Random House Dictionary of the English Language: "1. the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states; direction of the affairs of a state, community, etc.; political administration." This is amplified by looking at "govern" in the same dictionary: "1. to rule by right of authority, as a sovereign does." "Rule", or "political ... control" are only ever exercised through force. People keep using that word, "enforce", without looking carefully at it. >From the same dictionary: "to put or keep in force; compel obedience to." "Enforcement", regardless of the dry dictionary definition, is the essence of government. Without the power to enforce arbitrary rules, there can be no government. There are several methods of achieving compliance with a set of rules: social pressure (shunning, as some religious sects do); withholding of goods or services (the degree that Jason spoke about being denied); and topical application of violence ("enforcement"). Of these, the first two are related, and are commonly practiced by social units that don't recognize the right to use force on one another. The last named is the only one that results in physical damage to the person being "ruled", and is also the only one that can physically prevent that person from engaging in the proscribed behavior. The others can make life bloody unpleasant, but they won't terminate it. One other thing: >I grew up in a small town of 5,000. It had a city government. The >county government was in the same town. No one denies that California >has a government, I think. And then there was the US government. And >we had city police, the sheriff's office, the Highway Patrol, and the >FBI paid an occasional visit. Uh ... you _do_ understand that that's a specious argument, yes? What do you suppose the outcome would be if your home town were to legalize marijuana, and then attempted to prevent the DEA from enforcing the overriding federal law? Yes, we have a distributed government, with each layer operating under the authority of the next layer up; but each layer can only add restrictions, never remove them, and each enforces its restrictions by the same method as the layers above it: main force. Further, each attempts to prevent other agencies from enforcing sets of rules counter to the ones they themselves enforce. That's what makes them true "governments", rather than some other social institution. Here, someone will surely object that by this definition, the Mafia can be considered a government. Well, if they can successfully kick the existing thugs off of some plot of ground, and then defend it against all comers, then yes: that's exactly what they'll be. How else do you suppose that governments become established? -- Elton

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