- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Rucker on "Cryps"
by Arthur Chandler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There is an unflattering picture of crackers and anti-crackers (and crypto-heads?) in Rudy Rucker's new novel, *The Hacker and the Ants*. Here's a sample: * * * * * * * * * * In the valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and afterward used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who'd turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into some company's machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle -- the cryps' security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide. (*The Hacker and the Ants*, page 90)

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Re: Virtual Cash
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >[...] but noone (as far as I've seen) > >has come up with an "economic model" within which they could use them. > > Denominate digital money in dollars in a demand deposit account in a > US bank. > Why reinvent the wheel, or, in this case, the unit of value? The two common models are either to denominate private currency in some convertable currency, like dollars or rubles (useful for providers of financial services trying to add digicash to their services), or for a service provider to denominate digicash in some unit of their service, e.g. subway trips, road tolls, phone calls, email shuffles. The latter approach is easier to bootstrap (the service provider can just do it, there's no problem with learning banking laws, etc.), but it's less convertible unless lots of people want the service, so it tends to be localized use.

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Virtual Cash
by PMARKS＠VAX1.UMKC.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal and Blanc have started an intesting thread on the concept of "digital money" or "Tacky Tokens." I'm not sure what they are talking about, exactly. But it sounds like "vitual money." I would like to see a description of the model for this. Sounds like a form of barter-script. I'd like to see more on this. Bud

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Chimerically Misquoted
by Jeff Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- From: "Jim Sewell" <jims(a)Central.KeyWest.MPGN.COM> The term Cypherpunks is amorphous, thus subject to use and abuse by the masses. When people like Jeff Davis and Phill Zimmermann say "The cypherpunks are generally opposed to Clipper" it makes us an "organization" which, like it or not, does have representatives and agendas. Unfortunately, perception defines reality. If we I've never said this in any forum, public or private. The only Zimmerman quote on cypherpunks I've ever seen was in the WSJ. He stated he was not a cypherpunk, he wore a suit when he contacted clients. In responding to this, I've opened myself to another spew by Perry, but what the fuck. If one has to take a cheap shot, one is already whipped. And I'm not here to win a popularity contest either. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLcXKAl/ScHuGXWgVAQFq9gP+MP1BlrWA5IMO6SMOBsB6UBaIxJQ33Dtv vwc37mUc3YoueFpoQJVDPEfYHzsVThJI1gJNGOV4ELtN/YYaQx9jDpyV+dsQfEtC F7g2Wyx6mlo6AP7E2PYomBgAQD54liHgCUQJPmxEQMW8fdTEoMQsg4GpLvejeQo4 mCh8x0pXGjM= =aJDt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- PGP PUBLIC KEY via finger! JAFEFFM Speaking & Thinking For Myself! * eagle(a)deeptht.armory.com email info(a)eff.org * *** O U T L A W S On The E L E C T R O N I C F R O N T I E R **** ***** Committed to Free Public Internet Access for World Peace *****

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Re: Digital Cash
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Black Unicorn <unicorn(a)access.digex.net> writes: > So has anyone tried to solve the problem of double spending and > the online requirement of digital cash? > Is there any way to take cash offline? Or is this merely the copy > protection problem rehashed? Double spending is one of the main problems digicash systems try to solve, since digicash can obviously be copied easily. Online systems make the double-spending relatively easy to prevent, but, besides inconveniences, the online transaction has a transaction cost that may make the system unusable (e.g. a 5 cent telephone message unit costs too much for a newspaper, though it may be fine for paying for contraband tobacco at $5/pack.) There are two main approaches to off-line systems that I've seen: - making the hardware expensive or contractually limited (e.g. subway farecards, phone cards, postage meters) (It's intellectually unexciting, but works fine economically for small transactions.) - using tamperproof trusted hardware that embeds enough information about its identity in each digicoin that double-spending reveals the identity, or multiple spending reveals the identity with increasing probability. Much of this work has been done by Chaum's folks in the Netherlands, using "observer" smartcards; somebody posted a paper about it on sci.crypt recently. It's harder to use these approaches for applications like emailing credit card numbers, but they're ok for tollbooths. I worry somewhat about the privacy issues - in order for revealing a cheating userid to be effective, either the bank needs to have a registry of who the user is, which is a privacy problem for people who really want anonymous money, or else there needs to be some system for distributing bad userids, analagous to the inconvenient books of bad credit-card numbers that small shops used to use before phone verification became widespread. (Obviously they'd be digital, but I'd rather not have to carry a CDROM drive or gigabyte hard disk in my wallet...

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Re: Digital Cash
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Online systems are also guaranteed anonymous. Well, maybe, though traffic analysis may be a problem. I did hear of an interesting case of people paying for privacy in the real world. In Hong Kong, the Aberdeen tunnel has drive-through smart card readers for tolls. The problem is, these cards don't use a privacy- protecting protocol. And many folks there are worried about what will happen come 1997. So there's now a resale market -- stores buy toll cards in quantity, and resell them over the counter, for cash. This underscores what I've said in the past about anonymous digital cash: it's not going to go anywhere unless folks are willing to pay a premium for privacy. There are too many sound reasons for keeping audit trails (debugging, fraud detection, marketing analysis, etc. -- and note that the first is an issue even for folks with the best intentions in the word; note how many remailer operators have kept logs, at least for a while); unless there's a profit motive in doing otherwise, most folks won't. In Hong Kong, the threat is not just real and imminent, it's *perceived* as such. Whether or not there is a real threat in, say, the U.S. (let's please not debate that!), there's much less perception of one.

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Re: list active?
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Thanks to Paul Ferguson, smb(a)research.att.com,Harry Bartholomew, and Norman Hardy for replying. >From bart(a)netcom.com Tue May 3 09:13:27 1994 >From: bart(a)netcom.com (Harry Bartholomew) >Subject: Re: list active? >To: talon57(a)well.sf.ca.us (Brian D Williams) >Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 09:14:25 -0700 (PDT) >MIME-Version: 1.0 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >Content-Length: 132 > Yes same as normal. And majordomo says you're still on the list, >so NSA is gobbling your messages specifically, en route! Hmmmm, I guess someone is doing something, cause I'm still not getting any traffic today, any other WELL-beings having a problem? ...---... ...---... ...---... ...---... ...---... ...---... Brian Williams Extropian Cypherpatriot "Cryptocosmology: Sufficently advanced comunication is indistinguishable from noise." --Steve Witham "Have you ever had your phones tapped by the government? YOU WILL and the company that'll bring it to you.... AT&T" --James Speth -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLcacytCcBnAsu2t1AQGDUQQAjZ9r8V2Af1Aw7HZmJCGUlRHz1RmSC7dO qM3g7PZNh+DkkOolR90E6A66DA3usDjDIIUFZI1wIbP47xD37HDzJKEJCNRgLhTj dCNBdpIWgdyZKQDKSjMqQaJB4kYO50TLWAUo4g73J2gVycBlDnPPjeydGt6HrQZt 7sEKOBmAYuI= =KTZj -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> said: Hal> Why don't we brainstorm a bit to see if we could come up with a way Hal> to take this digital cash software and do something useful and interesting Hal> with it. To re-work a notion expressed earlier, why not use the digital cash to purchase (legitimate) access to systems? This provides good protection against double-spending, as the act of ownership would be to change the login password. Hal> (There may also be some problems in advertising these services. ... (skipped) Hal> Folks, if you want to sell something, make sure people know Hal> what you're selling.) Perhaps we need an advertising server. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCcAgUBLcb+07hnz857T+PFAQEsvAQ0CWluaOPn6eHVl1YFwwBdu6u00Eq8bhx8 if+OmZGnUSyagVaiIiGCLuxSHCINiUO0voBSsfPBlVocSmTAtRqE7/zbDSOW1LcA gb/jJEQMGynZcCcV50Autrkgi7yLsHk7b9ksoWzVKOZxPlGNZg36ruFo6pCkDdup bBjiWGZNMsONERAZL7/J =xEaF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Digital Cash
by rah＠TIAC.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Robert Hettinga, Shipwright Development Corp. said: >> Is it possible to see instantaneous settlement happen in the financial >> markets with digital cash? > and "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)snark.imsi.com> said: >In theory, yes, although one would also need to move all securities >being traded to book entry or "digital bearer certificates". >Presumably the current securities laws would require some changes. > >This of course has the potential to dramatically lower transaction >costs in these markets. I'm trying to remember the name of the guys who "buy" trades from large institutions like Fidelity. Their transaction clearing costs are supposed to be radically lower because of the automation they use. . . Something about making their money in the bid/asked spread. I'm sure the tax man will want to trace things like this (they might worry about bearer securities after they killed them off already), but there's probably a way to cut them in enough to keep them and the other regulators happy. It might be a way to institutionalize (so to speak ;-)) strong crypto somewhere with enough clout to keep the other Feds out of normal people's business. Your reference to book entry reminded me about the book value for some reason, and the flap about FASB mark-to-market initiatives. That kind of ratcheting down of the time horizon might make the financial markets try to reduce their costs, and be more open to a reduction of transaction costs. Perry, how would some one go about demonstrating the "potential to dramatically lower transaction costs in these markets"? cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02313 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Who's got Tacky Tokens?
by greg＠ideath.goldenbear.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I must confess that I, too, let the initial wave of interest in Tacky Tokens pass me by, and I find myself without any - and without any memory of where one gets them. I assume that once upon a time, they were available from the bank for free ..? So .. does anyone want to own up to having any? What do you want in exchange for them? Can/will the bank operator reveal how many tokens have been distributed, and how many transactions are processed per day? Are people interested enough in data havens or postage-based remailers that they'd actually use them? (And, re data havens - AT&T plans to offer "virtual storage areas" and archival storage as part of its "PersonaLink" online service allegedly to be introduced this summer. While AT&T may not be privacy-friendly, if this works it will set both technical and economic examples for other, more pro-privacy, services.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLcb0v33YhjZY3fMNAQGJ6wQAkDOgix3p8dQysAHoGS8qGiZk/eQB4dJz P8p9Qmiwnl8i3WUaAGEZOjZryAA/G1w7VQG9RdYzywa9mOG9G5mpyb8pxm+/UfmY 4329r9mslLpf9vCab84XldJZB62EuEgr4rFOkqyeIkrima4F5kXAEvP/G23dGdU1 XNAsk4p8AdQ= =CJKZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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