December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

e$ Signorage
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:50 PM 4/3/96, Hal wrote: > Or do you mean that people who receive > ecash will not want to deposit in their bank accounts, but just turn > around and spend it? Yes. Or maybe even invest it there. I was just finished a little 800 word blurb for Wired's Idees Fortes section on, (guess what?) "Geodesic Capital", which talked about just such a scenario. I believe money which is never redeemed back at the bank is called signorage in the currency biz. Whatever signorage *actually* is, Kawika Daquio of the ABA (B for "Banking"), the Fed makes $20 billion a year on it. Not much against a trillion dollar federal budget, but, hey, every little bit helps... Stuff that doesn't get returned also useful for other stuff, like the reputation of the currency. When was the last time someone went in and cashed in their dollars for gold, or silver, at the Fed? It's legally impossible now, but the French did it until Nixon stopped it by floating the dollar, in the early seventies, if you remember, and it used to be done by normal people all the time. Pierpont Morgan had to bail out Presedent Garfield?, Cleveland? with a European treasury bond flotation because there was a run on the treasury at the turn of the century. > I will point out that with regular currency, most merchants who receive > it just deposit it at the bank, save for a bit passed out as change. Unless, of course, they're in Russia (remember the money plane?), and other places. That's where that $20MMM comes from, I think, but I'm not sure. > Supermarkets don't actually take the cash their customers give them and > hand it to their suppliers. They deposit it and pay with checks. So > the "life cycle" of a $20 bill is pretty much from the bank, to the > customer, to the merchant, and back to the bank, only to repeat the > cycle. Maybe I'm talking about net balances on the net. e$ in circulation overall. I'm really starting to stretch here, you can tell. My guess is in the old days before book-entry stuff like credit cards, and even pervasive checking accounts, cash had to be more physically robust, because it probably stayed out longer. Remember those old double-eagles? Gold is certainly durable. More probably people just exchanged worn-out bills for cleaner ones, but that meant that the money stayed in cash. > Ecash, it seems to me, is already able to circulate to this > extent, although of course it is not yet widely used. Indeed. On both counts. :-). If my WAG about digital cash certificates eventually replacing demand deposits comes about (my claim is that they'll eventually be cheaper, and maybe more secure someday), then money would tend to stay on the net. That's when I figure we'll have actual e$-currency. On the other hand, one of the best deterrents against someone cracking or stealing the bank's key is to "expire" your currency issues, so there might be some "rolling over" of the the money on the net, expecially if it's anonymous. Just like they traded in worn-out bills in the old days. Hmmm. As usual, I seem to be loosing my wiggle room here. Welcome to quibble-punks. ;-). (Me! Not you, Hal!) Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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Re: National id already here?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:35 PM 4/3/96 -0800, Yap Remailer <remailer(a)yap.pactitle.com> wrote: >http://www.aamva.net/AAMVAnet_New_Systems.html says: > Coman said [police] officers can use "CDLISCheck" to access commercial > driver license status, history and AKA information. She noted that > the new service was developed in response to a Congressional mandate > that requires access to commercial carrier and driver information by > at least 100 roadside sites by 1996 and at least 200 locations by 1997. > >There's a congressional mandate for nationwide online id??? There are a lot more regulations on interstate truckers than on most people; it's somewhat within the Constitutional guidelines.

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"unsubscrive" again!
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:51 AM 4/4/96, Batman wrote: >unsubscrive * batman(a)internet.infomaniak.ch >unsubscrive * batman(a)ns.infomaniak.ch >unsubscrive * batman(a)mail.infomaniak.ch Yet another "unsubscrive"? Is this some weird alternate spelling? Or are we being trolled? Apparently Batman has not been reading any of the recent posts on this subject--which is not surprising, for correlative reasons--so I doubt he'll even read this message. But in the hopes that he comes out of his Batcave long enough to fire up his Batcomputer: How to subscribe to the Cypherpunks mailing list: send a message to "majordomo(a)toad.com" with the body message "subscribe cypherpunks". To unsubscribe, send the message "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to the same address. For help, send "help cypherpunks". Don't send these requests to the Cypherpunks list itself. And be aware that the list generates between 40 and 100 messages a day. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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unsubscrive * Peter.Posch@koeln.netsurf.de
by Peter N. Posch 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unsubscrive * Peter.Posch(a)koeln.netsurf.de

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Rebuttal to Dvorak
by David K. Merriman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Letters to the Editor, PC Magazine RE: April 23 issue I found Mr. Dvorak's name-calling and finger-pointing sufficiently inspirational that I have posted an editorial rebutting his April 23 column on our Web server at http://www.shellback.com/editorials.htm (yes, the 'l' is missing at the end :-) Permission is hereby granted to reprint and/or repost the article in total. David Merriman webmaster(a)shellback.com Amarillo, TX ------------------------------------------------------------- "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." P. J. O'Rourke (b. 1947), U.S. journalist. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> http://www.shellback.com/personal/merriman/index.htm

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Fascinating troll with forged newgroups
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Looks like the Nazis forged newgroup messages for rec.fag-bashing, rec.org.kkk, and 100 RFD'd groups in order to get their little messages across. How entertaining. What a marvelous new form of net.vandalism they've discovered. Or is this not new? The clearly forged Date: header and the cover newsgroups are pretty transparent, if you ask me. -rich

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Re: Digest Version???????
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Typically the way to get a digested version of a cow is to kill and eat it... Oh, wait, you probably mean the list..... www.hks.net and nntp.hks.net let you read the Cypherpunks and Coderpunks mailing lists with the Web and Newsreader programs (except when they're down for repairs.) The Web version is typically half a month behind because it gets summarized and hypertextified monthly, though I suspect the articles are there and it's just the index that's old. If you're looking for a reduced-volume list filtered using human intelligence, Eric Blossom <eb(a)comsec.com> does cypherpunks-light for $20/year, and Ray Arachelian (sp?) does fcpunx for free, somewhere you can probably look up with AltaVista. At 05:30 PM 4/3/96 -0600, you wrote: >Anyone know if I can get a digest version of this??? > > (__) > (oo) > /--------\/ > / | || <-- Moo.(We live in Wisconsin, the dairy state, get it?) > / || || > * ||-----|| > ~~ ~~

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Re: Digest Version???????
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:32 AM 4/4/96, Bill Stewart wrote: > If you're looking for a reduced-volume list filtered using human >intelligence, > Eric Blossom <eb(a)comsec.com> does cypherpunks-light for $20/year, > and Ray Arachelian (sp?) does fcpunx for free, somewhere you can probably > > look up with AltaVista. I also run e$pam, where I filter the e$-relevant stuff from cypherpunks and about 50 (don't hold your breath, there isn't that much else out there, yet) other sources. The total e$pam mail feed is about 30-50% (depends on the day) of the cypherpunk total. The e$ home-page is: http://thumper.vmeng.com e$pam is sponsored, so individual subscriptions are free. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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Re: Digest Version???????
by in5y113＠public.uni-hamburg.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bill Stewart writes: > www.hks.net and nntp.hks.net let you read the Cypherpunks and Coderpunks > mailing lists with the Web and Newsreader programs (except when they're > down for repairs.) The Web version is typically half a month behind > because it gets summarized and hypertextified monthly, though I suspect > the articles are there and it's just the index that's old. There is another hypermail archive at http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/ and an unmoderated digest from majordomo(a)abc.gateway.com (subscribe cypherpunks-d). -- "In some ways the online environment in 1996 feels like Hong Kong in the last days of British rule: a very free community wondering what's going to happen as the forces of law and order start moving in." -- Charles Platt Ulf Möller * E-Mail: <um(a)c2.org> * WWW: http://www.c2.org/~um/

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time/date hash
by Jerry Whiting 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Interesting note in current issue of PC Magazine about how DOS 4 and later generates volume ID numbers. Neil Rubenking describes a time/date hash of the form: month plus seconds day plus hundredths of seconds high byte of the year plus hours low byte of the year plus minutes I've actually been thinking about such a time/date hash during idle brain cycles. Any thoughts on how secure such a hash is, as in how collision proof if the input date is from today forward 50 years? thanks, Jerry Whiting 72627.746(a)compuserve.com <- til our server is back up...

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