-- When a mailing list is full of crap, it dies, even though the regulars set killfiles to silence the offending posters. The reason is, no new people arrive. New people subscribe, see nothing but crap, unsubscribe. A mailing list or newsgroup needs a strong personality who is a prolific poster who keeps discussions on track, issues lots of good stuff, and reprimands trolls and nuts. That person, of course was Tim May. (past tense) It also needs a continual stream of new people, who bring new ideas, and unfamiliar ways of recognizing old ideas. The relentless mass spamming by professor rat and Jim Choate keeps new comers away, since 99% of the posts to the list is from people who hate the ideas that the list was created to further, and seek to shut it down, to prevent thought about and discussion of such ideas, and Tim May has succumbed to terminal grumps on discovering that the crypto transcendence is not coming soon. So when is the crypto trancendence coming? When does an encryption enabled internet start to undermine the power of the state? Well it is a little like web groceries. During the Dot.com hype, lots of web grocery companies popped up, and made about a cent on the dollar. They vanished, but, surprise surprise, there are now some real web grocery firms, and they are making a little bit of money. Darknet (frost over freenet) is going tolerably well, mostly in its Japanese incarnation, the repression being stronger in Japan. The Japanese experience tells us that any repression short of communist levels of repression will make darknet stronger, not weaker. The big threat to frost over freenet is the natifying of the net which makes more and more people into clients, not peers. Theoretically frost over freenet serves even those behind NATs, but really it does not, and cannot. Private money on the internet remains a small, non anonymous, backwater. There is no Chaumian anonymity. There is some "trust us" anonymity, located on offshore islands, controlled by people quite susceptible to US pressure. Account based money without true names or the mark of the beast is a tiny but profitable business. E-gold is probably the largest player, with about two million dollars a day changing hands, and twenty thousand micropayments a day (payments of less than a dollar) Two million a day is one five hundred thousandth of the turnover on the US$, and it is not growing very fast. Of course e-gold is just one of several, but it probably a large portion of the total. Suppose no-true-name account based money grows at thirty percent a year, which seems plausible. In due course some substantial portion of it will be chaumian. Then the US$ goes into crisis in 2060. As Adam Smith put it, "There is a lot of ruin in a nation.". Even if we suppose that the institutions of the crypto trancendence undergo remarkably rapid growth, the kind of growth that the dot bombs predicted in their business plans, the crypto trancendence does not hit until around 2025. But right now today, the internet is undermining the power of the state. The Japanese government went as far as democracy can go, and perhaps a bit further, to shut down file sharing. The result: Widespread adoption of software based on freenet. Cypherpunks 1, state 0. We have a long way to go, but we are going. Oh yeah, and once again I declare the mailing list that gave the name of this movement to be dead, though the fact that I am still posting on it would seem to prove it is alive, though breathing its last. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG dcuOonOpNgPgqZpgbJF0j6ClGa0j1it1Uk51kc/Q 4Nnby2D6L0GGqj2rwXsyWpY1xoKh901QBG9bsYjxG