--- begin forwarded text Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 13:58:24 -0400 (EDT) X-Sender: mcooley@tiac.net Mime-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> From: mcooley@nethorizons.com (Marianne Cooley) Subject: "So Says I", 10/24 ISIG Meeting fyi
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 15:45:27 -0400 (EDT) X-Sender: mcooley@tiac.net To: isig@bcs.org From: mcooley@nethorizons.com (Marianne Cooley) Subject: "So Says I", 10/24 ISIG Meeting Sender: owner-isig@bcs.org Precedence: bulk Reply-To: isig@bcs.org
Join us for a great evening at MIT, Building 6, Room 120 for the latest ISIG meeting. Here's the scoop on the main presentation which starts at 7 pm:
"So Says I**": Financial cryptography, microintemediation and the power of reputation in a ubiquitous geodesic economy.
< Actually, "I" is "Joe Nebuchannezar" ;-), RAH>
(That really means there's a whole lotta' shakin' goin' on in the area of electronic money!)
** "I" is Bob Hettinga, the founder of the Digital Commerce Society of Boston, and resident man with opinions on most aspects of e$$
Obviously, the net is going to give us the ability for anyone, anywhere, to buy anything. No matter where the buyer or seller is, or, for that matter, where the thing being sold is.
However, financial cryptography, the technology which underlies digital commerce, will have much more profound implications than merely the simplification of sales and distribution. It permits us to make anonymous *cash* transactions for everything from a billion-dollar foriegn exchange trade to possibly even switching internet packets themselves.
If this promise is kept, it could change the fundamentals of our entire society. It forces profit and loss responsibility further and further down into organizations until they break up into smaller competing operating units. It makes book-entry transactions like checks or credit cards obsolete, and replaces them with strange stuff like digital cash and personal digital bearer bonds. It creates cash-settled auction markets for practically anything. People joke about routers and switches which save up enough from their traffic-tolls to buy copies of themselves. About micromoney as processor food.
On a macroeconomic scale, all of government's revenue sources are book-entry taxes, like those on sales, income, and capital gains. "What happens when taxes become a tip?", some people have asked. That is, if government can't trace transactions anymore, because of the very way those transactions executed, how will government be funded?
Disintermediation is a common buzzword in the financial markets. It is usually meant to describe what mutual fund companies have done to banks. What happens when mutual funds become microintermediated?
In this talk, we'll look at all of this, and what the world might look like if Moore's Law and strong cryptography do manage to create a geodesic economy.
From 6:30-7pm, we had expected to have a demonstration of Black Diamond's web video software, but we haven't quite solved the technical details...(it is active X, and we can't get that on a UNIX machine yet ;) ) I am still expecting that one of their representatives will be joining us. We will also have the usual Q&A during that time.
If you don't know where Building 6 Room 120 is, the simplest way to describe it follows:
Go to the main entrance of MIT on Mass Ave and walk up the steps into the domed building. Go straight ahead into the long hall ("the infinite corridor".) Keep walking until you reach the sign that says Building 6,to the right. Turn down the hall to the right until you reach room 120 on your right.
Looking forward to seeing you all!
Cheers, Marianne *********************************************************************
Marianne Cooley Internet Special Interest Group NetHorizons Unlimited Coming Soon! A *new* Boston Group mcooley@nethorizons.com 617.433.0825
Join "Life at Internet Speed" on www.boston.com Wednesdays from 1-2pm! For a chat topic reminder, send an email to chat-reminder@nethorizons.com with your full name and email address in the body of the message. **********************************************************************
********************************************************************* Marianne Cooley Internet Special Interest Group NetHorizons Unlimited Coming Soon! A *new* Boston Group mcooley@nethorizons.com 617.433.0825 Join "Life at Internet Speed" on www.boston.com Wednesdays from 1-2pm! For a chat topic reminder, send an email to chat-reminder@nethorizons.com with your full name and email address in the body of the message. ********************************************************************** --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/