At 09:46 AM 3/1/2001 -0800, Tim May wrote:
Is it all hopeless? Are we destined to see a world of a few corporations like Yahoo and Ebay and Amazon being choke points for any tinhorn dictator threatening to sue them and arrest their employees?
The answer is, of course, decentralized networks, decentralized markets.
Gnutella, Open Napster, Freenet, Mojo Nation, Cypherpunks-style remailers. (Some of these still have elements of centralized control. But the centralized control and corporate points of attack may someday be discarded as unnecessary, pace the discussions we've had of "everyone a mint" in digital money systems.)
The Cypherpunks future lies with these decentralized systems. Obvious, but true.
This is a reasonable description of my current project - I gave a presentation in it at the O'Reilly P2P conference, slides are at <ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/conference/p2p2001/1178/broiles_1178.sdd>.
Centralized control is a more general problem than just "men with guns" controlling others. Centralized control is also a target for other centralized controllers. Ebay and Yahoo are finding this out in a big way.
Let a billion buyers and sellers bloom.
Exactly. Control freaks and lazy people hoping to exploit designed-in architectural weaknesses or choke points in commerce systems will find themselves hoisted on their own petards, like Napster and Ebay. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@netbox.com "Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler