At 02:19 PM 12/22/2001 -0800, Tim May wrote:
Yes. The best work has always been done by one or two people at a time. This applies to software as well. (Not so much to chips anymore, at least not for the past 20 years. Another topic.)
A person with the dedication and skill of a Stallman could probably implement digital cash without having the Herman Miller chairs, the hot tub up on the roof of the office building, the staff of marketdroids, and the espresso machines.
There's some hope.
Espresso is important, basic machines are cheap, and the real decision is whether walking down to Starbucks to avoid making it yourself is more an interruption to your concentration or an opportunity to spend time in the real world and to check out the Mondex smartcard machine that Starbucks gave up on using :-) But the easy part of doing digital cash is the software, and it doesn't take years of Stallman-level or Chaum-level or Ian-or-Ben-or-Lucky-level wizardry to produce it, though it's really helpful to have their insights into what didn't work and what pieces were useful for consumer-quality realizability. Lots of people can turn the algorithms into reliable code; lots of people can build user interfaces, though you if you want it to run on the latest Microsoft GUI API environments and all Mac environments from 6.5 through 10.1.2Coca you'll need a few extra helpers to add the ugly details. (*I* could even do the programming, though you'd get a basic web forms interface and a text interface that looks suspiciously like "throw stone knife at dwarf", "404 Knife Not Found", with none of that modern Javascruft or "ncurses" aesthetics in it :-) The hard part is getting people to take the stuff. 30 years of Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson, 20 years of Stallman and Gilmore, 15 years of X and Gosling, and 10 years of PGP & Linux has gotten us partway to World Domination in technical areas, often by getting the good parts stolen badly by the bigger commercial interests, but money's harder to change; Black & Scholes and Fair & Isaac and Milken and Visa/MC/AX and Schwab and later E-Trade and just possibly PayPal have changed things, but Mondex didn't happen, and Micropayments didn't happen, and in spite of all of Hettinga's enthusiam and Chaum's business acumen, anonymous digital bearer cash hasn't successfully rocked the world. It not only takes technical skills to ship working stuff, it takes business skills to find a market where it works and promote it enough that enough people are using it that some level of anonymity can actually happen. Lucky and the Mark Twain Bank had the technology, and had the service working in the abstract, aside from the minor problem that there was nothing to buy except pictures of Cypherella before they stopped allowing that, though perhaps if they'd been a bit later to market and jumped into E-Bay when PayPal did they could have pulled it off (or perhaps not - that's a market where reputations have a really high value, and you'd have to structure an escrow market around your digicash that would undo most of the anonymity even if the digicash provided it.) Doug and the Austin Cypherpunks Credit Union folks had the technical skills, and the interesting hook that in the US, Credit Unions have much less regulation than Real Banks, but figuring out how to make money from such an activity was tough, and unlike MTB, they decided not to launch a business they didn't know how to make money with :-) Getting the real thing working requires real marketing skills and being in the right place at the right time; occasionally you can hit it off, like the kid who wrote WinAmp and was pressured by his parents into making it Shareware and not just freeware, or the Hotmail folks causing the free-web-based-email wave (and catalyzing many of the appallingly stupid Dot-Com Business Plans.) Perhaps one advantage of the dot-com crash is that people starting businesses today are much more likely to do the solid business planning and the initial technical decisions before they get enough funding to leave the garage and hire the 200 programmers that it takes to prevent any real work from being done while you're having meetings to coordinate development of the hot-tub-scheduling website. But if you're not going to use the marketdroids, you have to find some really solid alternative to get the stuff widely used. Maybe it's as simple as finding the next Ochoa brothers and showing them how selling bearer cash cards can help their business, now that the tough part is moving the green paper and not the white powder, but the nearest recent equivalent was The Napster Brothers, and they didn't successfully capitalize their need for a payment system. Mojo Nation may have been a bit closer, as a small dedicated group of enthusiasts working on a payment system combined with a transport mechanism for the goodz, but they didn't pull it off either.