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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: anonymous credit
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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

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Re: Conference on UK Crypto Initiative 19 May 1997
by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> SCRAMBLING FOR SAFETY > > Privacy, security and commercial implications of > the DTI's proposed encryption policy Didn't the green paper automatically fall since the government which issued it is no longer in office. The DTI does not have the right to make a crypto policy, ministers make policy, nor civil servants. It might be worth seeing if the relevant new junior ministers could attend and turn it into a brainwashing erm briefing session. Phill

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Re: Appeals to Authority and Herr Doctor Professors
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Kent Crispin wrote: > > my opinions are my own, and do not represent any agency > other than the ones involved in the murder of J.F.K. Uhh...OK. -- Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/xenix/xenbody.html

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[ADMINISTRATIVIUM] Degausser
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Embedded in Timothy C. May's babblings are preposterous lies, wild distortions, child pornography (both as graphic descriptions and in JPEG format), ethnic slurs, and racial epithets. <<<< o(0-0)o -ooO-(_) Ooo-- Timothy C. May

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Business Opportunity
by Henry Summers 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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the substrate
by *****Jay Jason LaBelle***** 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What exactly happens to the substrate that causes data to be somewhat readable after a specific bit pattern has been stored there for a long time? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jay LaBelle Amateur Radio Callsign: KB8ZAV Phone:(317)495-2836 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Sierra On-Line FAQ
by Sierra On-Line 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks for visiting SierraWeb! This message contains important information regarding your subscription, so we recommend that you keep a copy for future reference. In particular, you will need to know your username and password to access certain features of our web site: USERNAME: cypherpunks PASSWORD: cypherpunks We can't change your password or look up your existing information, so if you lose your password, you'll have to re-apply under a different name. The rest of this message contains an introduction to our site and answers to frequently asked questions. Thanks again for visiting SierraWeb! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Questions! When you have a web site, you tend to hear the same questions from a lot of different people. And so your friendly webfolks at Sierra put together a list of questions that we hear on a regular basis, complete with the answers that we've typed so many times that we see them in our sleep. And we call it: THE SIERRAWEB FAQ (that's Frequently Asked Questions, not Frantic About Queensryche. Read on!) Q: Okay, I've managed to live this long without logging onto your really cool web site, but I just can't take it any more! How do I log on? A: Well, first you're going to have to go there. The SierraWeb address is: http://www.sierra.com/ This will take you to our main menu page. From this page, you can register to be a member of our site (which we'd probably like to call the Sierra Club, except that the name's already taken, and they don't do computer games). Click on Join to register, and you'll be asked to choose a user name and password, and write them down somewhere where the dog won't chew `em up. Q: I've spent the last six months in a freak time warp/in my aunt's house in Pittsburgh/in a pit/writing my thesis/on an archaeological expedition to Egypt/trying to solve the Chinese Checkers puzzle in Shivers, and in the meanwhile I've forgotten my username or password. Can you tell me what it is? A: Nope! We have no way to tell what your password or user name is. If you've forgotten yours, it's time to pick a new one. Just fill out the registration form again, this time choosing a different username and password. Q: You've got enough pages on your web site to keep Victor Hugo happy (cultural reference, here, folks ... French author, wrote Les Miserables, you could get a hernia lifting the unabridged version). So how am I supposed to find all the info I want about a specific product without having to dig through all those pages? A: You're in luck. The Search feature of our site will allow you to go to just the topics you're interested in and skip the rest, like picking through the dessert buffet and selecting only the stuff that has jell-o in it. So if you only like baseball simulations, or low-fat recipe programs, or computer games with robots in them, all you need to do is click on Search (always found at the bottom right-hand corner of each page), and type in the word you're looking for. This will provide you with a list of all the places on our site that your subject is mentioned. Look through the list, click on anything that looks interesting, and it'll take you there! Q: Okay, so I've looked through 97 different pages on your site, downloaded 8 demos and enough screenshots to fill a bucket of zip cartridges, talked for three hours with the folks in the Chat rooms, and, frankly, my brain is fried and I really don't want to hit "<- Back" about 183 times to get back to the index page. Isn't there an easier way? A: Yep. At the bottom of each page is a "Home" button. Click it. Q: I clicked to download a file, and it gave me an error message which said, "FTP anonymous access denied". What's up with that? I wasn't trying to be anonymous. Doesn't your system recognize me any more? This is starting to sound like an episode of "Nowhere Man"! A: Don't worry about it. It just means that the file you want can't be downloaded from the server at the moment. Our server is usually busier than a colony of ants at a Fourth of July picnic, so it may take several tries to get a file. Just try your download again later.

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Re: LSL5 - Patty can't get into Studio 2
by tdls＠voyager.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

When you get to the bottom of the elevator, you have to go one screen to the right to get to the right studio. Then you can use the number from the blue stickum. -- (This message was sent to you automatically as a reply to a message you posted in "The Land of the Lounge Lizards" on Sierra's web site at http://www.sierra.com/messages/larry/.)

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None Zero-knowledge commit
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim C. May styles his facial hair to look more like pubic hair. /_/\/\ \_\ / Tim C. May /_/ \ \_\/\ \ \_\/

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