--- begin forwarded text Sender: e$@thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Mime-Version: 1.0 From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 21:21:19 -0500 Precedence: Bulk To: Multiple recipients of <e$@thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: Wired didn't like this one.... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ...but I like it. Said it was a little too "fast paced". (For WIRED???) I'm starting over on another, so you guys might as well see this one... It *was* supposed to go into their Idees Fortes (Or, as my brother Mike in Albuqerque says, in his best Jose Jimenez, "Stron' Gideas") section. Now something else is, once I write it. Feh! It's 800 words. Exactly. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ------------------------ Geodesic Capital? Robert Hettinga I've just finished a bit of anonymous consulting on the net for an anonymous client, being paid, of course, in anonymous digital ecash(tm). I could just store it, offsite even, anonymously. But, I'm saving it for that special retirement habitat in the Belt ("Gerry's Habitats, Inc.: Pie in the sky, Nano-Built(tm) *before* you die!"). I have to *invest* it somewhere. I buy a page of mutual fund reccomendations from a LipperBot(tm). In my case, I just want to buy a broad market index, say, the (ahem) Hettinga Million(tm), and shop around for the fund server which approximates closest the HM's price over time. I link to the server, and buy anonymous bearer certificates for that server's HM fund. Later, when I cash in my certificates, I have enough appreciated capital to buy the custom Bernal sphere of my dreams. Of course, if my tolerence for risk is higher, I could buy shares from a fund manager (bot or otherwise, no way to tell with anonymous cash markets) with a hot hand for picking stocks. OK. Say I don't actually *save* money. I'm someone who borrows money for very short term "assets" like resturaunt meals, and pays the incurred debt off over the long term at some userous interest rate. How do I do this? I issue a personal digital bearer bond for the amount of the transaction. All I need is someone to underwrite the risk. Fortunately, I always have an efficient real-time market to auction it into, one that always knows my payment reputation, thanks to all those money-bots in the ubiquitous network. Voila'! Bring on the chateaubriand for one, waiter, and don't spare the bearnaise, all this thinking about money's made me hungry. What we're talking about here is nothing new, of course. We've had trade ever since we've had artifacts. The ancient "red-paint" culture was just a trading network which ran around the north Atlantic from New England to as far as Ireland. So much for the "New" World. The oldest surviving Babylonian money is a piece of clay saying "three cows" wrapped in a clay "envelope" saying something like "three cows, payable on demand, so say I, (signed) Joe Nebbuchenazzar". This happened shortly after writing was invented, which was actually invented for *accounting*. Mechanical signatures like chops and seals have been around since. Digital signatures and bearer certificates are just a new implementation of some *very* old stuff. Ornate paper certificates, representing shares in companies, or actual stuff, was physically traded for other ornate paper certificates (cash), or actual stuff, at places like the famous buttonwood tree on Wall Street. Pretty soon people didn't have to be there to trade. We built fast industrial communications (staged horsemen or coaches, then ships or trains, then telegraphy, then telephony) but we still had slow switches (people), so we had to build all the communication/organization/market hierarchies we know and love today. In addition, the power of the state (another industrial communication heirarchy) provides a sizable argumentum ad bacculum for people who repudiate trades. If you don't pay, I throw you in jail. Like every thing else, Moore's law changes that. Proportionately, semiconductor switches get more and more cheaper than lines, so the telephone network is no longer a hierarchy. Nodding to Buckminster Fuller, Peter Huber called it the "Geodesic Network", the title of the 1986 government report he wrote describing it. Ironic. I'm here saying this in a magazine founded by deciples of Stwart Brand, himself a one-time Fullerite. All threads lead to Bucky. When you combine a geodesic network with strong cryptography, you get a geodesic economy, which needs geodesic capital. Just change the size of players in either equity or debt scenario, and you're looking at what any large business organization does today. The only thing you're missing is how to deal with non-repudiation. If the state can't tax transactions or financial assets because strong crypto makes them all invisible, states can't exist, much less "bacculize" very well. The solution is the same it ever was: reputation. J. Pierpont Morgan said, when hauled before Congress one afternoon, "Character, sir. I wouldn't buy anything from a man with no character, even if he offered me all the bonds in Christendom." In a geodesic economy, reputation is abstracted to keys, not people. Geodesic capital scales up to bigger stuff than we can do now. A chaotic hoarde of autonomous money-bots swarms on the minutia of the necessary financial complexity. It also scales *down* as processor prices fall. Real time, MicroMint(tm) cash-on-the-router-head auctions for packet switching, anyone? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMWR/ovgyLN8bw6ZVAQHCkQP7BPmSNibfRQLeZETvRkUVGJdPB0WOYrTM yU33wwqDPBEcwfYLgX4oBcAfHv/Kfvr1vH4bBTioEVyanVDtJLt9KL/62kn+Ot+/ BLDdBM6Km1R/xRD9xnvQd5Kyz2INQCmNU7ZJk3BQpK484V74aW6We155fH2ovjr3 TgQ6mYMe7rs= =GVNA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -------------------------------------------------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info@hyperion.co.uk See your name here. Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws! See http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ or e-mail rah@shipwright.com for details... ------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/