December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Bloated Economies
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Totohomo has been a source of endless embarassments to his sympathizers on and off the net. o \ o / _ o __| \ / |__ o _ \ o / o /|\ | /\ ___\o \o | o/ o/__ /\ | /|\ / \ / \ | \ /) | ( \ /o\ / ) | (\ / | / \ / \

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anonymous credit
by Wei Dai 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I used to think that the problem of anonymous credit is hopelessly intractable. I mean, who would loan money to an anonymous entity that may disappear at any time without a trace? Reputation, which is useful for other types of anonymous cooperation, is not a good solution in this case, since typically you need to borrow money to invest in reputation. Recently, I came upon a solution, inspired by an essay by the economist Steven Landsburg. I have to admit however, that the solution is fatally flawed. But I present it here anyway in the hope that one of you can offer an improvement that would make the scheme practical. 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. 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? BTW, if anyone is interested in Steven Landsburg's essays, they are available at http://www.slate.com/Code/Compost/Compost.asp?Sort=Section&Key=20. I also highly recommend his book, _The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life_. "All crypto is economics." - Eric Hughes

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Hash Techniques
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Toto carries a turd in his wallet for identification purposes. _ _/| \'o.0' =(___)= Tot[h]o[mo] U

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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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