July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [cryptography] Digital cash in the news...
by lodewijk andri de la porte 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I get back from vacation and suddenly my inbox is filled with misconceptions. While this is supossed to be a fairly technical mailinglist (about cryptography) it seems clear many people haven't quite understood bitcoins' workings. Let me break it down: * With a private/public key combination you can sign a message stating you're transferring a certain fraction of value (a bitcoin is what we call the 1 value). * This message you sent to nodes within the bitcoin network. * Each node checks whether or not your transaction can be executed and compiles these correct transactions into a 'block'. * Each node will try to find a proof-of-work for the block he made. Once he has it, he can ship the block off towards everywhere (as many as possible other nodes). * Recieving nodes will check the block and when they accept it, put a reference (hash) to it in their next block. The resulting chain of blocks is called the block 'chain' Now that the transaction is solidified in a block one can proof he has some amount of money, by referencing a payment to him in the block. How do the first bitcoins enter the system? By making a block one gets an award. The amount given per award is getting steadily lower. If you're thinking you can get rich quick by letting your computer solve blocks, think again! There's only one block to be solved every ten minutes, if it goes to fast the blocks will get harder, and there's a lot of people trying to solve it, you're electricity will likely cost you more than solving blocks is going to earn you. You're welcome to try though, solving a block makes transactions happen. What will happen when the awards are nearly gone? Then the total amount of bitcoins will stay nearly the same. This'll happen after quite some years. The total amount will be nearly 21 million bitcoins. The transactions will be paid for by bounty set on every transaction. As long as someone is willing to make the proof-of-work your transaction will end up in the block chain and be made permanent. That is basically the system. The whole whitepaper<http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>isn't long or hard to understand and I highly suggest reading it. I know of only two (not dealbreaking) issues: 1. Transactions take time to happen (they are non-instant) (bank transactions are much worse though). 2. Because of the deflation all coins gotten earlier were easier to get and are now "worth" as much a block gotten now. I prefer deflation over inflation and if this really takes of the earliest of adaptors really deserved the money. On the (geo)economical side I think this is the best that every happend to the world. The bitcoin is quite violent right now, because there's still so little value being traded with them. But that will sort out and after that it'll just keep on getting more stable. "Regular" currency's (dollars, euro's, yen, whatever) are only as stable as their backing organisations or resource. Anything that goes up has got to fall, and bitcoins aren't anything, not even air! Trade has always been based on "when I give you this, what can I do with what you give me back?" and so, when people accept a certain amount of bitcoins for something, bitcoins have use and thus value. There is a wonderfull elegance in something we can trade at no costs, without any ability to cheat or adversely manipulate it's amount. Even without saying who (exactly) we are! It's propable that when you swap something as elementary as our not-wonderfull money with this it'll give some turbulance. And as with anything new, especially when it gives true freedom, people will get their panty's all up in a bunch. Usually their arguments either rest on not understanding what's going on, or claiming that this gives a security issue. The first argument I'll always counter with knowledge and logic. For the second argument I'd like to parphrase Benjamin Franklin: "He who sacrifices essential freedom for safety, deserve neither.". Surely being able to own and transfer what you own is an essential freedom. I'd prefer not going into political conversation on here but I think it far too interesting not to have it at all. -- Lodewijk "Lewis" Andre de la Porte 2011/6/13 Nico Williams <nico(a)cryptonector.com> > On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Nathan Loofbourrow <njloof(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > The good old market played a role here too. There are lots of investors > > whose risk profile dictates that they should be in "safe" investments, > e.g. > > pension funds and old people. With the interest rates held on the floor, > and > > Greenspan and Bernanke sitting on their chest, those safe investors > started > > to buy up mortgages, because mortgages were big dumb investments and > > everyone paid their mortgage. > > You just proved the point: the market was distorted, with private > actors acting _within_ the distorted market parameters. Thus people > who needed to make low-risk investments did make what _seemed_ like > low-risk investments (after all, real estate had been a low-risk > investment for decades in the U.S.), but actually were not just > high-risk, but bound to fail. > > You can blame the derivative sinners (pun not intended) all you like, > but there's an original sin here. Everyone else was either fooled > into sinning, peer-pressured into it, or outright forced, and though > there surely were some who understood what was happening and sought to > profit from it, you can hardly blame them either -- we all do > something of the sort (if you see inflation coming and manage your > money accordingly, are you ripping off all those who can't or don't > know to do anything about inflation? and if so, are you a terrible > person for it?). > > > After a while you run out of big dumb mortgages, and we did. So the > pressure > > was on to create more of them. Once everyone has a mortgage, or maybe > two, > > you start lending to folks with a risk profile that wasn't so hot > anymore. > > The whole tranching process masked the fact that this was happening > because > > you could still issue AAA bonds out of these and everyone bought in. > > tl;dr: everybody gets to wear a hat that says "dummy", whether private, > > public or individual. > > The whole tranching thing was almost brilliant, and would have worked > out fine (securitized mortgages from the 80s seem to have done fine, > no?) if there had been no bubble (but in a bubble the securitization > helped it along), and if all the issues in tracking the underlying > loans (and thus pricing the securities) had been worked out correctly. > > > ObCrypto: sorry, got nothing. > > Yeah, well, we need a sub-list for OT discussions. At Sun we used to > have lists with sub-lists named the same + a "-extra" suffix, where > people who wanted to participate in these sorts of long, flame > war-ish, OT discussions could. > > Nico > -- > _______________________________________________ > cryptography mailing list > cryptography(a)randombit.net > http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography > _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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by None 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

1at9tm1Nu3Nl3oW0 for <jya(a)pipeline.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 19:42:00 -0500 (EST) Received: from hq.pro-ns.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hq.pro-ns.net (8.12.9/8.12.5) with ESMTP id hB80dcTW026480 for <cypherpunks-list(a)hq.pro-ns.net>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:38 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from owner-cypherpunks(a)ds.pro-ns.net) Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hq.pro-ns.net (8.12.9/8.12.5/Submit) id hB80dcCZ026479 for cypherpunks-list; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:38 -0600 (CST) X-Authentication-Warning: hq.pro-ns.net: majordom set sender to owner-cypherpunks(a)ds.pro-ns.net using -f Received: from hq.pro-ns.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hq.pro-ns.net (8.12.9/8.12.5) with ESMTP id hB80daTW026468 for <cypherpunks-forward(a)ds.pro-ns.net>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:36 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from cpunks(a)hq.pro-ns.net) Received: (from cpunks@localhost) by hq.pro-ns.net (8.12.9/8.12.5/Submit) id hB80dabs026465 for cypherpunks-forward(a)ds.pro-ns.net; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:36 -0600 (CST) Received: from slack.lne.com (gw.lne.com [209.157.136.81]) by hq.pro-ns.net (8.12.9/8.12.5) with ESMTP id hB80dQom026459 for <cypherpunks(a)ds.pro-ns.net>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:31 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from cpunk(a)lne.com) Received: from slack.lne.com (slack.lne.com [127.0.0.1]) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id hB80dMTf003847 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for <cypherpunks(a)ds.pro-ns.net>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 16:39:22 -0800 Received: (from cpunk@localhost) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10/Submit) id hB80dMDV003842 for cypherpunks(a)ds.pro-ns.net; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 16:39:22 -0800 Received: from ak47.algebra.com (algebra.com [216.82.116.230]) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id hB80dGTe003829 for <cpunk(a)lne.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 16:39:19 -0800 Received: from ak47.algebra.com (cpunks@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ak47.algebra.com (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id hB80dGLG031103; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:16 -0600 Received: (from cpunks@localhost) by ak47.algebra.com (8.12.1/8.12.1/Submit) id hB80dGqU031100; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:16 -0600 Received: from tisch.mail.mindspring.net (tisch.mail.mindspring.net [207.69.200.157]) by ak47.algebra.com (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id hB80dELG031089 for <cypherpunks(a)algebra.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:39:15 -0600 Received: from user-0ccetrj.cable.mindspring.com ([24.199.119.115] helo=JY09) by tisch.mail.mindspring.net with smtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 1AT9Qg-0005IG-00 for cypherpunks(a)algebra.com; Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:39:14 -0500 X-Sender: jya(a)pop.pipeline.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0 Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:37:26 -0800 To: cypherpunks(a)algebra.com From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> Old-Subject: Re: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19 In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312071754510.29758-100000(a)greeves.mfn.org> References: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74(a)got.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-Id: <E1AT9Qg-0005IG-00(a)tisch.mail.mindspring.net> Subject: Re: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19 X-Algebra: <A HREF=http://www.algebra.com>Algebra</A> Approved: LISTMEMBER CPUNK Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)ds.pro-ns.net Precedence: bulk ----- And here's Algebra's substantial verbosity:

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None
by None 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

1at8UH24t3Nl3pv0 for <jya(a)pipeline.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 19:06:11 -0500 (EST) Received: from ak47.algebra.com (majordom@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ak47.algebra.com (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id hB7LmNLG009486 for <cypherpunks-outgoing(a)ak47.algebra.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:48:23 -0600 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by ak47.algebra.com (8.12.1/8.12.1/Submit) id hB7LmNXw009485 for cypherpunks-outgoing; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:48:23 -0600 X-Authentication-Warning: ak47.algebra.com: majordom set sender to owner-cypherpunks(a)Algebra.COM using -f Received: from slack.lne.com (gw.lne.com [209.157.136.81]) by ak47.algebra.com (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id hB7LmGLG009442 for <cypherpunks(a)ak47.algebra.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:48:19 -0600 Received: from slack.lne.com (slack.lne.com [127.0.0.1]) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id hB7LmDTf002878 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for <cypherpunks(a)ak47.algebra.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 13:48:13 -0800 Received: (from cpunk@localhost) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10/Submit) id hB7LmDtF002872 for cypherpunks(a)ak47.algebra.com; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 13:48:13 -0800 Received: from slack.lne.com (slack.lne.com [127.0.0.1]) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id hB7LlTTf002845 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for <cypherpunks-goingout345(a)slack.lne.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 13:47:29 -0800 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10/Submit) id hB7LlS6O002844 for cypherpunks-goingout345; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 13:47:28 -0800 X-Authentication-Warning: slack.lne.com: majordom set sender to owner-cypherpunks(a)lne.com using -f Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20031207131538.02880c28(a)idiom.com> X-Sender: wcs(a)idiom.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 13:47:12 -0800 To: declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart(a)pobox.com> Old-Subject: Re: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow" Cc: cypherpunks(a)lne.com In-Reply-To: <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74(a)got.net> References: <20031206015356.GC4450(a)clueinc.net> <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0(a)mail.well.com> <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74(a)got.net> <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74(a)got.net> <20031206015356.GC4450(a)clueinc.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Subject: Re: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow" X-Algebra: <A HREF=http://www.algebra.com>Algebra</A> Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)Algebra.COM Precedence: bulk X-List-Admin: ichudov(a)algebra.com ----- Lne's modest offering:

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by None 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

1at8NF1dj3Nl3qU0 for <jya(a)pipeline.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:58:55 -0500 (EST) Received: from slack.lne.com (slack.lne.com [127.0.0.1]) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id hB7NQwTf003380 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for <cypherpunks-goingout345(a)slack.lne.com>; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:26:58 -0800 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by slack.lne.com (8.12.10/8.12.10/Submit) id hB7NQwYx003379 for cypherpunks-goingout345; Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:26:58 -0800 X-Authentication-Warning: slack.lne.com: majordom set sender to owner-cypherpunks(a)lne.com using -f Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v606) In-Reply-To: <20031207212546.GZ5783(a)leitl.org> References: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26(a)dizum.com> <20031207212546.GZ5783(a)leitl.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Message-Id: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74(a)got.net> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Tim May <timcmay(a)got.net> Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19 Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:26:37 -0800 To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.606) Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)lne.com Precedence: bulk -----

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by None 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I found the FTU's recent report on concealable weapons (http://LB.wnd.com/FBI-weapons.pdf) interesting, but find that it omitted a few possibilities, viz: 1. The pop-top steel lid on a can e.g., of catfood forms a sharp edge when removed. (I have a permenant scar on a finger attesting to this.) If half the disc were grasped in a cloth it could be more effective than several of the items you list. 2. Similarly, the steel lid on e.g., a tuna can forms a sharp (and flatter, and slightly more rigid) edge when removed with a can opening tool. A can opening tool can be very small, e.g., the military-style can openers, which by itself is not dangerous. Again, any piece of cloth forms a graspable handle on the resulting sharp-edged disc. 3. Even a beverage can, e.g., from a beer purchased in flight, can be ripped into a sharp edge, although the thinness of the (typically soft aluminum) metal makes this less effective than the above. 4. The large knitting (crochet) needles which I believe the TSA admits could be filed into a sharp point, producing a spike as effective as some you list. As these are typically aluminum, abrading them into a point would not be difficult. 5. It is possible that a skilled knife maker could chip a glass bottle into a knife while in the restroom, producing something comparable to the obsidian knife you list. The production process might be noisy however, unlike the above. Comment, which you will no doubt ignore: Given the facility with which weapons are improvised or concealed, it might be a better idea to stop motivating the actors, as distasteful as that might be to some in power. Although some will enjoy the Israel-like police state that foreign entanglement will otherwise drag the US into, and some -perhaps your- careers might even advance faster under such conditions. Have a nice day A. Citizen

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[NEC] 2.9: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content
by nec-admin＠shirky.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture Published periodically / # 2.9 / September 5, 2003 Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html Archived at http://shirky.com Social Software weblog at http://corante.com/many/ In this issue: - Introduction - Essay: Fame vs. Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content (Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html) - Notes: historyflow: Software from IBM Danah Boyd on Friendster Club Nexus ETech CFP T-Mobile and Starbucks Don't Get Wifi * Introduction ======================================================= This essay, Fame vs. Fortune, is an attempt to fuse two earlier themes: the uselessness of micropayments, and the difficulty of charging users directly. -clay * Essay ============================================================== Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html Micropayments, small digital payments of between a quarter and a fraction of a penny, made (yet another) appearance this summer with Scott McCloud's online comic, The Right Number, [http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/trn/intro.html] accompanied by predictions of a rosy future for micropayments. [http://www.google.com/search?q=mccloud+bitpass] To read The Right Number, you have to sign up for the BitPass micropayment system [http://www.bitpass.com/learn/] once you have an account, the comic itself costs 25 cents. BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, [http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html] the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn't fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response. The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator. - Why Micropayment Systems Don't Work The people pushing micropayments believe that the dollar cost of goods is the thing most responsible for deflecting readers from buying content, and that a reduction in price to micropayment levels will allow creators to begin charging for their work without deflecting readers. This strategy doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. [http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html] The only business model that delivers money from sender to receiver with no mental transaction costs is theft, and in many ways, theft is the unspoken inspiration for micropayment systems. Like the "salami slicing" exploit in computer crime, [http://www.yourwindow.to/information-security/gl_salamislicing.htm] micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice, because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by lowering the dollar cost of goods. Worse, beneath a certain threshold, mental transaction costs actually rise, a phenomenon is especially significant for information goods. It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny? A newspaper, exposed to the logic of micropayments, becomes impossible to value. If you want to feel mental transaction costs in action, sign up for the $3 version of BitPass, then survey the content on offer. [http://www.bitpass.com/share/sites/] Would you pay 25 cents to view a VR panorama of the Matterhorn? Are Powerpoint slides on "Ten reasons why now is a great time to start a company?" worth a dime? (and if so, would each individual reason be worth a penny?) Mental transaction costs help explain the general failure of micropayment systems. (See Odlyzko [http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropayments.pdf] Shirky [http://oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html] and Szabo [http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html] for a fuller accounting of the weaknesses of micropayments.) The failure of micropayments in turn helps explain the ubiquity of free content on the Web. - Fame vs Fortune and Free Content Analog publishing generates per-unit costs -- each book or magazine requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front costs by the number of readers means that content gets _cheaper_ as it gets more popular, the opposite of analog regimes. The fact that digital content can be distributed for no additional cost does not explain the huge number of creative people who make their work available for free. After all, they are still investing their time without being paid back. Why? The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. Prior to the internet, this didn't make much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities -- even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight. This disrupts the old equation of "fame and fortune." For an author to be famous, many people had to have read, and therefore paid for, his or her books. Fortune was a side-effect of attaining fame. Now, with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative people face a dilemma they've never had before: fame vs fortune. - Substitutability and the Deflection of Use The fame vs fortune choice matters because of substitutability, the willingness to accept one thing as a substitute for another. Substitutability is neutralized in perfect markets. For example, if someone has even a slight preference for Pepsi over Coke, and if both are always equally available in all situations, that person will never drink a Coke, despite being only mildly biased. The soft-drink market is not perfect, but the Web comes awfully close: If InstaPundit [http://www.instapundit.com/] and Samizdata [http://www.samizdata.net/blog/] are both equally easy to get to, the relative traffic to the sites will always match audience preference. But were InstaPundit to become less easy to get to, Samizdata would become a more palatable substitute. Any barrier erodes the user's preferences, and raises their willingness to substitute one thing for another. This is made worse by the asymmetry between the author's motivation and the reader's. While the author has one particular thing they want to write, the reader is usually willing to read anything interesting or relevant to their interests. Though each piece of written material is unique, the universe of possible choices for any given reader is so vast that uniqueness is not a rare quality. Thus any barrier to a particular piece of content (even, as the usability people will tell you, making it one click further away) will deflect at least some potential readers. Charging, of course, creates just such a barrier. The fame vs fortune problem exists because the web makes it possible to become famous without needing a publisher, and because any attempt to derive fortune directly from your potential audience lowers the size of that audience dramatically, as the added cost encourages them to substitute other, free sources of content. - Free is a Stable Strategy For a creator more interested in attention than income, free makes sense. In a regime where most of the participants are charging, freeing your content gives you a competitive advantage. And, as the drunks say, you can't fall off the floor. Anyone offering content free gains an advantage that can't be beaten, only matched, because the competitive answer to free -- "I'll pay you to read my weblog!" -- is unsupportable over the long haul. Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable strategy. It is a strategy that works well when no one else is using it -- it's good to be the only person offering free content. It's also a strategy that continues to work if everyone is using it, because in such an environment, anyone who begins charging for their work will be at a disadvantage. In a world of free content, even the moderate hassle of micropayments greatly damages user preference, and increases their willingness to accept free material as a substitute. Furthermore, the competitive edge of free content is increasing. In the 90s, as the threat the Web posed to traditional publishers became obvious, it was widely believed that people would still pay for filtering. As the sheer volume of free content increased, the thinking went, finding the good stuff, even if it was free, would be worth paying for because it would be so hard to find. In fact, the good stuff is becoming _easier_ to find as the size of the system grows, not harder, because collaborative filters like Google and Technorati rely on rich link structure to sort through links. So offering free content is not just an evolutionary stable strategy, it is a strategy that improves with time, because the more free content there is the greater the advantage it has over for-fee content. - The Simple Economics of Content People want to believe in things like micropayments because without a magic bullet to believe in, they would be left with the uncomfortable conclusion that what seems to be happening -- free content is growing in both amount and quality -- is what's actually happening. The economics of content creation are in fact fairly simple. The two critical questions are "Does the support come from the reader, or from an advertiser, patron, or the creator?" and "Is the support mandatory or voluntary?" The internet adds no new possibilities. Instead, it simply shifts both answers strongly to the right. It makes all user-supported schemes harder, and all subsidized schemes easier. It likewise makes collecting fees harder, and soliciting donations easier. And these effects are multiplicative. The internet makes collecting mandatory user fees much harder, and makes voluntarily subsidy much easier. Weblogs, in particular, represent a huge victory for voluntarily subsidized content. The weblog world is driven by a million creative people, driven to get the word out, willing to donate their work, and unhampered by the costs of xeroxing, ink, or postage. Given the choice of fame vs fortune, many people will prefer a large audience and no user fees to a small audience and tiny user fees. This is not to say that creators cannot be paid for their work, merely that mandatory user fees are far less effective than voluntary donations, sponsorship, or advertising. Because information is hard to value in advance, for-fee content will almost invariably be sold on a subscription basis, rather than per piece, to smooth out the variability in value. Individual bits of content that are even moderately close in quality to what is available free, but wrapped in the mental transaction costs of micropayments, are doomed to be both obscure and unprofitable. - What's Next? This change in the direction of free content is strongest for the work of individual creators, because an individual can produce material on any schedule they like. It is also strongest for publication of words and images, because these are the techniques most easily mastered by individuals. As creative work in groups creates a good deal of organizational hassle and often requires a particular mix of talents, it remains to be seen how strongly the movement towards free content will be for endeavors like music or film. However, the trends are towards easier collaboration, and still more power to the individual. The open source movement has demonstrated that even phenomenally complex systems like Linux can be developed through distributed volunteer labor, and software like Apple's iMovie allows individuals to do work that once required a team. So while we don't know what ultimate effect the economics of free content will be on group work, we do know that the barriers to such free content are coming down, as they did with print and images when the Web launched. The interesting questions regarding free content, in other words, have nothing to do with bland "End of Free" predictions, or unimaginative attempts at restoring user-pays regimes. The interesting questions are how far the power of the creator to publish their own work is going to go, how much those changes will be mirrored in group work, and how much better collaborative filters will become in locating freely offered material. While we don't know what the end state of these changes will be, we do know that the shift in publishing power is epochal and accelerating. -=- * Notes ============================================================== - historyflow: Software from IBM Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, in IBM's Collaborative User Experience lab have created a tool called historyflow that lets you see the history of a wiki page. They turned the tool loose on the wikipedia.org, the collaborative encyclopedia project, and the history flow site has many of their observations on observed patterns for the formation of encyclopedia entries on contentious subjects like Abortionh or Islam. Its an astonishing X-ray of long-term social patterns in action, and because its so visual, it is hard to describe in an acsii-only format, so I'll point you to the site, and to my longer (and picture-strewn) observations elsewhere. historyflow: http://www.research.ibm.com/history/ My more detailed observations about historyflow: http://www.corante.com/many/20030801.shtml#49472 - Danah Boyd on Friendster Friendster, the social networking service, has been causing a lot of stir recently with its new "no fakes" policy. The site, a kind of "sixdegrees with dating" affair that has grown like wildfire among the under-30 set, had been home to a number of amusing but fictional users, including Jesus, the City of San Francisco, Pure Evil, and a Giant Squid. These fakesters were both amusing and effective -- two people who listed the City of San Francisco as a friend would then be connected through this shared affinity. However, Jon Abrams, the Friendster CEO, disliked the Fakesters, as he felt they trivialized the site, and began to weed out the fake profiles, creating an immediate and public backlash. The fight between users who used the site to create something valuable to them and the community owner who wanted a more placid group of users is an old old story, but like many old stories, its still interesting to see how it plays out. The backlash is going on as I write, and no one is doing a beter job of covering it from various angles than Danah Boyd, who has runs a weblog called connected selves, on social networking services: http://www.zephoria.org/snt/ - Club Nexus HP researchers Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar wrote a paper about social clustering in Club Nexus, a service for Stanford University's online population. Because Club Nexus users left such a rich metadata trail, they were able to test a number of assertions about social congres that had previously been made only as generalities. In addition to uncovering the expected gross patterns (power laws, clustering, small worlds networks, low hop-counts between people, etc), they were able to make refined observations about what sorts of affinities correlate with high clustering (the higher the listed ratio is above 1, the stronger the correlation with social clustering): We found further that, in general, activities or interests that are shared by a smaller subset of people showed stronger association ratios than very generic activities or interests that could be enjoyed by many. For example, raving (1.64), ballroom dancing (1.61), and Latin dancing (1.49) showed stronger association in the social activity category than barbecuing (1.20), partying (1.18), or camping (1.11) [...] In sports in particular, multi-player team or niche sports were better predictors of social contacts than sports that could be pursued individually or casually. Among water sports, synchronized swimming, diving, crew, and wake boarding were better predictors than boating, fishing, swimming or windsurfing. In the land sports category, team sports, in particular women's team sports such as lacrosse and field hockey were better predictors than soccer (often played casually as opposed to in a competitive college team), tennis, or racquetball. [...] We observed that niche book, movie, and music genres were more predictive of friendship than generic ones. Gay and lesbian books, read by 63 users, had a ratio of 4.37, followed by professional and technical, teen, and computer books. In contrast, the general category of 'fiction & literature' had a ratio of 1.09. Well worth a read: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_6/adamic/index.html - ETech CFP O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference is happening in February, and the Call for Papers is up now. The topics are: Interfaces and Services - Sherlock, Watson, and Dashboard; micro-content viewers and RSS; laptop, palmtop, hiptop, and cellphone interfaces; web services. Social Software - Software for describing and exploring social connections, FOAF (friend-of-a-friend networks), Flash Mobs, MeetUp, and related applications. Untethered - WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks; Rendezvous, SMS, and ad hoc networking; Symbian and J2ME mobile development environments. Location - GPS/GIS technologies and devices, location based services, navigational devices, geospacial annotation tools, and visualization software. Hardware - Hardware hacks and mobile devices, sensor arrays, RFID tags, TinyOS, and sub-micro computing. Business Models - Who is putting a stake in the ground and attempting to build the new applications, network, and online culture -- and how are they doing it? You can submit a conference or tutorial proposal here: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/create/e_sess - T-Mobile and Starbucks Don't Get Wifi More proof, as if any were needed, that the economics of Wifi are interfering with plans to offer metered commercial access. I have a T-Mobile Wifi account, 300 mins for $50, so that when I'm away from free APs, I can at least drop into a Starbucks, order up a doppio, and check my mail. Today, T-Mobile informed me when I logged in that that deal was over, dead, forget it, they're sorry they ever mentioned it. Instead, they were offering me a "convenient" Day-Pass, for the low, low rate of $10/24 hour period. Meaning, of course, that if you spend even as much as an hour logged in at a Starbucks, the cost per minute has almost tripled, to 16 cents a minute from 6. Worse, if you just want to go in, grab a cup of coffee and check your mail under the old "10 minute minimum" regime, that will now cost a dollar a minute. I could have elective surgery for a dollar a minute. This is Iridium or those back-of-the-seat airphones all over again. Any pricing plan that is even moderately convenient shows up on the spreadsheets at HQ as being less than a rocket ride to riches, so they come up with the two-fisted brainstorm of making it less convenient to use, then slapping a "Now with new expensiveness!" sticker on it. I smell a business school case study in the making -- don't take products with vanishingly small marginal cost and make them too expensive for your target audience to want to use. * End ==================================================================== This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. 2003, Clay Shirky _______________________________________________ NEC - Clay Shirky's distribution list on Networks, Economics & Culture NEC(a)shirky.com http://shirky.com/nec.html --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: [cryptography] Digital cash in the news...
by lodewijk andri de la porte 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I get back from vacation and suddenly my inbox is filled with misconceptions. While this is supossed to be a fairly technical mailinglist (about cryptography) it seems clear many people haven't quite understood bitcoins' workings. Let me break it down: * With a private/public key combination you can sign a message stating you're transferring a certain fraction of value (a bitcoin is what we call the 1 value). * This message you sent to nodes within the bitcoin network. * Each node checks whether or not your transaction can be executed and compiles these correct transactions into a 'block'. * Each node will try to find a proof-of-work for the block he made. Once he has it, he can ship the block off towards everywhere (as many as possible other nodes). * Recieving nodes will check the block and when they accept it, put a reference (hash) to it in their next block. The resulting chain of blocks is called the block 'chain' Now that the transaction is solidified in a block one can proof he has some amount of money, by referencing a payment to him in the block. How do the first bitcoins enter the system? By making a block one gets an award. The amount given per award is getting steadily lower. If you're thinking you can get rich quick by letting your computer solve blocks, think again! There's only one block to be solved every ten minutes, if it goes to fast the blocks will get harder, and there's a lot of people trying to solve it, you're electricity will likely cost you more than solving blocks is going to earn you. You're welcome to try though, solving a block makes transactions happen. What will happen when the awards are nearly gone? Then the total amount of bitcoins will stay nearly the same. This'll happen after quite some years. The total amount will be nearly 21 million bitcoins. The transactions will be paid for by bounty set on every transaction. As long as someone is willing to make the proof-of-work your transaction will end up in the block chain and be made permanent. That is basically the system. The whole whitepaper<http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>isn't long or hard to understand and I highly suggest reading it. I know of only two (not dealbreaking) issues: 1. Transactions take time to happen (they are non-instant) (bank transactions are much worse though). 2. Because of the deflation all coins gotten earlier were easier to get and are now "worth" as much a block gotten now. I prefer deflation over inflation and if this really takes of the earliest of adaptors really deserved the money. On the (geo)economical side I think this is the best that every happend to the world. The bitcoin is quite violent right now, because there's still so little value being traded with them. But that will sort out and after that it'll just keep on getting more stable. "Regular" currency's (dollars, euro's, yen, whatever) are only as stable as their backing organisations or resource. Anything that goes up has got to fall, and bitcoins aren't anything, not even air! Trade has always been based on "when I give you this, what can I do with what you give me back?" and so, when people accept a certain amount of bitcoins for something, bitcoins have use and thus value. There is a wonderfull elegance in something we can trade at no costs, without any ability to cheat or adversely manipulate it's amount. Even without saying who (exactly) we are! It's propable that when you swap something as elementary as our not-wonderfull money with this it'll give some turbulance. And as with anything new, especially when it gives true freedom, people will get their panty's all up in a bunch. Usually their arguments either rest on not understanding what's going on, or claiming that this gives a security issue. The first argument I'll always counter with knowledge and logic. For the second argument I'd like to parphrase Benjamin Franklin: "He who sacrifices essential freedom for safety, deserve neither.". Surely being able to own and transfer what you own is an essential freedom. I'd prefer not going into political conversation on here but I think it far too interesting not to have it at all. -- Lodewijk "Lewis" Andre de la Porte 2011/6/13 Nico Williams <nico(a)cryptonector.com> > On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Nathan Loofbourrow <njloof(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > The good old market played a role here too. There are lots of investors > > whose risk profile dictates that they should be in "safe" investments, > e.g. > > pension funds and old people. With the interest rates held on the floor, > and > > Greenspan and Bernanke sitting on their chest, those safe investors > started > > to buy up mortgages, because mortgages were big dumb investments and > > everyone paid their mortgage. > > You just proved the point: the market was distorted, with private > actors acting _within_ the distorted market parameters. Thus people > who needed to make low-risk investments did make what _seemed_ like > low-risk investments (after all, real estate had been a low-risk > investment for decades in the U.S.), but actually were not just > high-risk, but bound to fail. > > You can blame the derivative sinners (pun not intended) all you like, > but there's an original sin here. Everyone else was either fooled > into sinning, peer-pressured into it, or outright forced, and though > there surely were some who understood what was happening and sought to > profit from it, you can hardly blame them either -- we all do > something of the sort (if you see inflation coming and manage your > money accordingly, are you ripping off all those who can't or don't > know to do anything about inflation? and if so, are you a terrible > person for it?). > > > After a while you run out of big dumb mortgages, and we did. So the > pressure > > was on to create more of them. Once everyone has a mortgage, or maybe > two, > > you start lending to folks with a risk profile that wasn't so hot > anymore. > > The whole tranching process masked the fact that this was happening > because > > you could still issue AAA bonds out of these and everyone bought in. > > tl;dr: everybody gets to wear a hat that says "dummy", whether private, > > public or individual. > > The whole tranching thing was almost brilliant, and would have worked > out fine (securitized mortgages from the 80s seem to have done fine, > no?) if there had been no bubble (but in a bubble the securitization > helped it along), and if all the issues in tracking the underlying > loans (and thus pricing the securities) had been worked out correctly. > > > ObCrypto: sorry, got nothing. > > Yeah, well, we need a sub-list for OT discussions. At Sun we used to > have lists with sub-lists named the same + a "-extra" suffix, where > people who wanted to participate in these sorts of long, flame > war-ish, OT discussions could. > > Nico > -- > _______________________________________________ > cryptography mailing list > cryptography(a)randombit.net > http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography > _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [ZS] IMPORTANT: Delegation, decentralization, personal initiative & flying the ZS flag
by Bryce Lynch 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Dirk Bruere <dirk.bruere(a)gmail.com> wrote: > In which case TOR is going to be a very minority interest, except for > very occasional use. > In fact, I cannot think of any instance where I have needed such > anonymity over the past decade Please keep in mind the following things: An increasing number of world powers (i.e., goverments) are deploying hardware at both the ISP and the national levels of communications infrastructure which are capable of monitoring the traffic of thousands of people in realtime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, year 'round. There is no shortage of manufacturers of this hardware and software: http://werebuild.telecomix.org/wiki/Blue_cabinet Surveillance deployment in the Middle East is on the mind of many, chiefly because they think it can't happen where they live. It already has happened where they live. The country I live in - the United States - deployed this functionality over a decade ago and has gone to incredible lengths to keep it not only unaccountable but safe from any sort of oversight or legal interdiction. The only reason this is known is a pair of whistleblowers who are now nearly as hot targets as Julian Assange is these days. Depending on whom you talk to, Great Britain either has plans in the works for, or already has implemented the Interception Modernisation Programme, which is designed to carry out exactly the same tasks for the same reasons. Same with Sweden, and there is absolutely no reason at all to think that other countries did not do precisely the same thing years ago. This equipment's been on the market for over a decade to whomever can pay for it. We are attempting to bootstrap a transnational social state, unbound by political or geographic boundries, making use of and pushing the envelope of bleeding edge technology, and functioning more or less in parallel with everything else. That is not only highly unusual, but in a time of amazing paranoia and fear it is extremely suspicious. By "amazing paranoia and fear," I refer to the following groups that have been investigated (and occasionally infiltrated) because they are considered potential terrorist threats: Vegan cooking classes in California, the War Resisters League, Code Pink, the Rhode Island Community Coalition for Peace, Food Not Bombs (which is de facto illegal in Florida now), the People's Summit (held in 2008), the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, a couple of pro-Palestinian organizers (I have an interesting video squirreled away about that), the Critical Mass Bike Ride, the New York sports club Extreme-Goers, anti-death penalty groups in Maryland... To think that we're not on someone's radar already is folly; we already are whether or not the humans in the same orbit as the technology are aware of it yet. <waves to Ft. Meade> If we don't start following through with our plans now, pretty soon it won't matter. -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ "I am everywhere." -- -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [ZS] Bitcoin @ $1000 - unlikely any time soon
by Lodewijk andri de la porte 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

2012/8/14 Gary Mulder <flyingkiwiguy(a)gmail.com> > Any major governmental reaction and the resulting negative publicity and > loss of confidence would > Any publicity is good publicity. The more the US gov bashed on drug trading with BTC the better it was. Same will go for "it is undermining governmental authority and putting civilians at risk". So what is the marginal cost of mining Bitcoin? > The cost is not marginal. The performance of the network exceeds even SETI@Home. It is the largest distributed computing effort ever done by end-users (supercomputernetworks for the LHC for example are still bigger). It would seem you're taking this the wrong way around. If the Bitcoin rises in value the mining increases with it. If there's money to be made with mining it is done right away and thus the amount of money made is lowered. On the other hand no miner will sell for underneath the mining cost. The 50% premium may well be the cost of running hardware at the current risk assesment. Nevertheless the cost of mining Bitcoin knows no upper bound. If Bitcoin would break 1000$ mining will cost right around there. The two prices push and pull eachother. Be carefull not to confuse money theory with practical considerations or at least do so conciously. GPU/FPGA/ASIC doesn't matter when we talk about mining as we do now. -- -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[Neuclear-general] VERAX Beta Dollar the second NeuClear asset is
by Pelle Braendgaard 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

now live Sender: neuclear-general-admin(a)lists.sourceforge.net List-Id: <neuclear-general.lists.sourceforge.net> List-Post: <mailto:neuclear-general@lists.sourceforge.net> List-Help: <mailto:neuclear-general-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=help> List-Subscribe: <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/neuclear-general>, <mailto:neuclear-general-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=subscribe> List-Archive: <http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=neuclear-general> Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 16:06:23 -0500 I am pleased to announce the new VERAX Beta site at: http://beta.veraxpay.com As VERAX is one of the primary sponsors of NeuClear this is an important step. It is also the first NeuClear asset that will have some kind of value. While it in no way is a hard currency. For more details of the value see it's asset rules at: http://beta.veraxpay.com/rules.html VERAX is currently giving away $50 Beta Dollars to each account. So go try it out. >From a technical standpoint the VERAX Beta introduces integration with the NeuClear Directory at http://pkyp.org. When you go to the Transfer page you have the choice of entering an account url, account id or searching the directory for keywords. Try creating your own account page with the NeuClear Personal Trader and people can search for you directly from the transfer screen. Of course this is still completely optional. You can still receive payments to your 32 character account id for privacy reasons. Of course feedback is always welcome. Pelle ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the new InstallShield X. >From Windows to Linux, servers to mobile, InstallShield X is the one installation-authoring solution that does it all. Learn more and evaluate today! http://www.installshield.com/Dev2Dev/0504 _______________________________________________ Neuclear-general mailing list Neuclear-general(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/neuclear-general --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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