At 11:45 AM 7/1/94 -0800, Jamie Lawrence wrote:
My own personal opinion is that waiting for governments to collapse due to crypto and tech is gonna have you waiting a long, long time.
God. What I do when the brain's offline. I'm looking at my wife's copy of this month's Harvard magazine, which is about, of all things, trees. It seems that the american chestnut used to be a great big tree. Remember the doggerel about the spreading chestnut tree and the smithy? Anyway, at the turn of the century an imported fungal disease killed all the chestnut trees to the ground. Someone in the article is quoted as saying "...chestnuts are continuing to sprout from the base and the tree is in the process of becoming a shrub." This apt metaphor is what I expect will happen to large organizations as a result of hyperdistributed (ubiquitous) computer networks and strong crypto. Of course, like the "expectation" that extraterrestrial life exists in the universe, it might as well be a religious tenent until we actually see it happen. Having political discussions like this one only gets us in the mood to make it happen if it's possible, but it certainly don't make it so. I don't think I could call myself a crypto-anarchist, even after that somewhat hardline paragraph. I call myself a "congenital republican". That's inconsistent enough to keep my friends and family happy, and myself gainfully employed. What I realy think is my own business. As usual, Tim is right. This really isn't crypto. It's just "about" crypto.
Jamie "Is a Mayist Like a Janist?" Lawrence
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