At 06:19 PM 4/29/2003 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
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At 12:52 PM -0700 4/29/03, Bill Frantz wrote:
This view of the Digital Silk Road is quite different from the one described in the paper, "The Digital Silk Road" by Norman Hardy and Eric Dean Tribble <http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html>. However, Robert will enjoy the section, "No Junk Mail!".
Fine. We'll call it the "original silk road". :-).
It's Eric Hughes' sanctioned "piracy" distribution scheme, then. Sorry if I thought they were one and the same.
I attended Eric's July 1996 Defcon IV talk on what he called "Universal Piracy". He anticipated many of the potential problems with "recursive auctions" and assumed that most successful content creators would get their money through guarantors, like those that provide movie production investors "completion bonds." Creators would establish themselves by giving away content until they established a sufficient reputation that they could raise money prior to completion or even before commencement of a new work, product or product update. These ideas are now widely credited to J. Kelsey and B. Schneier from their 1998, Third USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce Proceedings paper, "The Street Performer Protocol" http://www.counterpane.com/street_performer.html, and later more widely publicized in a First Monday review article http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/rasch/. Eric refined his ideas at a Cypherpunks meeting that fall (the first one I attended) in his Berkeley house. Its too bad he never published his ideas and got the widespread credit he deserved. steve