interview

Freematt asks question 1: How do you describe yourself? What is your world view? Ian Grigg responds: I'm not sure how a paragraph could do justice to that question! I'm Australian by passport, although I consider that to be just part of the mix these days. I've lived for many years in Spain, Amsterdam, Britain, and now in Anguilla. Each has its own perspective, although Spain had the greatest formative influence on me in my adult years. ---------------------------------------------------------- Freematt asks question 2: How have thinkers such as Menger, Von Mises, and or Hayek influenced your thinking? Are there any fiction books that have had an impact on your ideas? Ian Grigg responds: Von Mises is a hazy influence. His writings are hard to get to, unlike Hayek, who is accessible to someone without an obsession with deep economic thought. Mises came with two big ideas that I've found central. One is the calculation argument, wherein he argued that central planning could not work on any large scale, simply because there is no way to calculate the outputs from the number of inputs. He said that Moscow needed too big a computer, and he was eventually proven right. Hayek believed that the market was about information. In Misian terms, Hayek's market is the great big free computer that saves us from central planning. The other big idea is that Mises questioned why it is that we believe the government could solve problems. Take a complex situation, and decide as a populace to have the government sort it out. Well, he questions why it is that we believe that the government would have the tools to do that? Is it that we believe that the government is somehow smarter than us? Are they better educated? In some sense are they capable of being more objective, more fair, more beneficial? The answer to all of those is no. Government people are generally not smarter, if anything, the converse, smart people make more money in industry. Better educated? Not really. More objective? Fair? All of these things are just too impossible for words; as what is fair to one is inequitable to another. When you think in those sort of Misian terms, it really is a bad idea to pass the buck to government. We have to sort out the problems ourselves. And, with government, probably the best we can hope for is an honest bureaucracy. Hernando de Soto has done some good work in Peru with the measurement of corruption and costs in starting firms. Harvard economists took his idea and measured it across 75 countries and are now providing the data to support a whole new view of government and bureacracy: that it grows to create tollways, create chances for private benefit out of public power. We used to think that regulation was a barrier to entry, that it arose to create easy conditions for big players. Now, we're seeing some good data that supports the view that these barriers are their for the ones who erect the barriers. All of this thinking is coming out of Mises and Hayek. If the market is so good, why do we have such big governments? It's no longer a libertarian or crackpot debate, the serious part of economic thought is looking at these questions deeply. There's a long way to go -- the Harvard work assumes too much when it measures the formal economy and not the informal -- but we are seeing a great change coming. Out of Hayek, out of Mises. ---------------------------------------------------------- Freematt asks question 3: Do you still think financial crypto depends on cryptography, software engineering, rights management, accounting, governance, value, and finance? Ian Grigg responds: Sure! Well, it's a model, it's a simplification. There are other things that go in there. Since I presented that paper in 2000, I've not heard any serious criticisms or ommissions. On the other hand, this is only a small field, there aren't that many companies or people actually testing and advancing the art. We've only had two successes in the field of FC so far, being the PayPal and e-gold experiences. So there's not a lot of hard data to go on. I think we are still at the point where we can compare and contrast using the model, but we can't condemn. The lower layers are better done in e-gold, but it's always been clear that PayPal understand the application better, that part that I called the Finance layer. ---------------------------------------------------------- Freematt asks question 4: Are truly anonymous electronic cash systems the future or do you see governments viewing them as too threatening to the health of the state and too easy for untraceable blackmail, extortion, money laundering and asset protection? Ian Grigg responds: The public perception of the "truly anonymous electronic cash system" is a little rosy. There are problems with that. Every money system has inbuilt protections against what we call "the bank robbery problem." No matter how we secure the system, we as builders have to deal with the fact that we will be forced to turn over the keys, the data, the money, some how some day. Most of the knowledge of this is internalised or lost to the current financial system. It's like trying to ask a banker what banking is, very few of them have the first idea. How do we cope with a system where one key can sign over millions of dollars on demand? Or the smart card world's nemesis, the evergreen card that keeps debiting, debiting, debiting? The answer is in a series of defenses, in a practical layered defence rather than the one-big-idea approach that is the espoused by the blinded school. That means we build in the defences up front that we can, but we also assume that it is going to happen one day, so we build in the back up plans or the contingency plans. Mondex did it for their cards, they called it the meltdown scenario. One of their ideas was that they could send signals out to all the cards and have the cards switch algorithms, thus anticipating a crack. Technically, I think that's a bad idea, but they thought about it, that's the important thing. However you do it, a survivable system for money has to have an ability to open up under system-threatening circumstances. What's the point in having truly anonymous cash if the cash suddenly becomes worthless because the issuer goes broke redeeming the stolen float? For all the brave ideas of those who write about freedom, anonymous trading, ownership, that all goes to pot the moment the consumer realises that the system itself cannot survive. A system has to survive, elsewise it's not money. But, if you make the system openable, this will result in a privacy breach for the average user. So, the trick is to make it costly. Come up with something that costs so much that fishing trips are not plausible. Something that assists good detective work, but doesn't obviate the need for good detectives, doesn't assist the current pass-the-buck philosophy so comfortably prevalent in financial crime circles. At Systemics we do it with a hybrid system of nymous light-weight accounts. The nymous approach implies that we can trace every transaction in the system, but we cannot identify who is doing what. That's very powerful -- I can see that you might be spending 10c followed by $1000, or whatever, I just don't know who you are. Without some other, contributory information, your 10c is just like any other 10c, and a certain pattern of expenditure is just some random walk in the transactions of life. But, when someone busts in and holds my daughter to ransom, demanding the keys or an account stuffed with booty, we can simply hand it over. No fear. When the dust settles, we'll start the detective work and trace that value wheresoever it went. I'd feel comfortable about having a daughter under those circumstances, but if I was guarding the keys to a fully anonymous system, then I'd rather not have any external stimuli attached to me at all! ---------------------------------------------------------- Freematt asks question 5: Which nations do you think are the most free and do you think borders will be more or less important in the future? Ian Grigg responds: It's a tough question. I hear over and over again that the US is the most free, and that the rich countries are free because they are rich. Or some such. That view troubles me. How can you consider a country free when they hold jurisdiction over you wherever you are? The US is so powerful, the brand is so dominating, that they can stand alone in the taxation world and insist that their citizens file for taxes wherever they are. That's not freedom to me. Where it takes you 10 years to leave the country? My neighbour gave up his passport for crypto reasons, he's got another 8 years or so before they release their hooks. There was a wave of legislation in the early 90s whereby you couldn't leave the country if you were in some way suspect. In Australia it was the deadbeat dads; a database of fathers with responsibilities stopped these people leaving the country. That's not freedom. Freedom is the right to cast aside your responsibilities, leave the country and set up in a new land, a long long way away. It was this freedom that created most of the new countries; waves of immigration were perceived to be a new life and a new workforce for growing nations, but that's only the pretty side of the coin. On the other side, those people made the judgement that the time had come to cast aside the taught view of responsibility. As a society, we have to allow the escape valve to exist, elsewise we abrogate our humanity. Only the individual knows when it is a lost cause, only he or she knows that it's time to start over again with a new life. ---------------------------------------------------------- Freematt asks question 6: What exactly does your company systemics.com sell? Ian Grigg responds: Systemics primarily licenses its Ricardo Issuance Server, which is a product that you can use to issue and run an Internet currency. Or a share, bond or other fungible thing of value. The client side is the WebFunds.org open source group, and program, that we are setting up. Systemics tries to make money on the issuance side, and we encourage all of our issuer customers to pitch in and improve the software on the user side. We also sell some applications. The design goals for our value architecture, Ricardo, was to support the specific application of financial trading. The buying and selling of stocks, bonds, and other things. We have an exchange and a user plugin to WebFunds which enables those things. For retail, we're working with Intertrader, a Scottish company that provides interfaces for facilitating transactions. They hope to demonstrate at the Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering conference in a couple of weeks, we're hoping to see a seamless transaction flow from retail side, into the financial system and out again, back into the retail side. All crossing from one payment system to another. ---------------------------------------------------------- Freematt asks question 7: Where do you see yourself in ten years? What do you want to accomplish both personally and professionally? Ian Grigg responds: I want to see this financial system built. For that, we need partners, lots of them, all acting as equals, as peers. Intertrader is a good example. Their area is in facilitation software for other people's transactions, our area is in the primary transactions for trading. Neither of us wants the other's patch, so we can work together on a range of projects without egos and greed getting in the way. We need other partners that want to issue. The Hansa Bank, here in Anguilla, issues our Ricardian dollar. We'll do the technology, they do the contract that the users rely upon. That's really as far as Hansa is prepared to go for the moment, which is a double-plus for us. Firstly, we get that critical money instrument, and secondly, they are minding their knitting, not trying to create a franchise in wool supply. We're in the process of creating independantly issued instruments for trading. Some of the most exciting opportunities is based on the work I mentioned above by Hernando de Soto. We're looking to take our efficient trading and value management into one of the world's most inefficient but far-reaching financial systems, that of microfinance. I can't really talk about the details, they are still under wraps, but I can talk about the obvious parts. At the moment, microfinance is based on huge chains of volunteer or otherwise soft labour. Hundreds and hundreds of transactions are needed to get a circle of five their first loan, in western terms, the first ten transactions would swallow the principal, let alone any return on investment. We aim to change all that, by giving them transactions and financial industry techniques that work at their level. To know that the ideas that we developed are pushing capital out to small villages, that's a challenge! Where I can get a $2 transaction in 100 milliseconds and $10 trade in less than a second, efficiently. And, do all this into a place where it would take me 5 days to get there physically; places with just a single PC and a satellite dish, but with a repressed urge to work and work and honestly build their way up and out. Knowing that our ideas helped that, that's where I want to be in 10 years. -- iang ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt@coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************