At 11:00 PM 1/24/95, Don Doumakes wrote:
But I don't buy your other implication, that it is a Good Thing to unleash the unlicensed.
'Scuse me while I pound on scripture a bit. I tend to concur with the esteemed Milton Friedman, who said, in summary, that the primary benefits of any regulation, licensing regulation in particular, accrue to the licensee. The people left standing after regulation prices their competition out of the market tend to do very well indeed. There is a point here for cryptoanarchy, and I'll get to it in a minute. Let's take the most hardened example of your point, and apply the logic of Mr. Friedman, through the twisted filter of my logical processes, of course. The poster child for this argument is of course, medicine. If, in the late 19th century, the Food and Drug laws weren't passed, and the guildification of the medical business didn't occur, what would medicine look like today? I believe that the same scientific rigor would be applied to the technology of medicine as has been done already. Too much money to be made here finding real cures. Mobs would lynch/sue people who were proven frauds by science and exposed as such in the press. So much for licencing improving the "quality of practitioners". I expect that medicine would be less like Magick to us mere mundanes, and the apprentice/arcana system that prevails may be in fact more subject to the laws of supply and demand. In addition, if there weren't so many "rules" in the medical business, the medical insurance business wouldn't be so non-competitive, besides the inherent silliness of "insuring" a basic service like medicine. Imagnine food insurance, or car repair insurance, patently uneconomic "extended warrantees" notwithstanding. OK. So what does this have to do with crypto. First, the whole cryptoanarchic thing, which I include in this argument by fiat by pointing to the Cyphernomicon: in this case, cryptodocs and their "Blade Runners" (see Burroughs' book with the original title) will be able to practice their trades with impunity, using regulatory arbitrage and outright anonymity to defend themselves, relying on their success records with other patients as their credentials. Second, instant settlement and electronic commerce. With these tools you can buy any software (Video, Sound, Text, Data) and their appropriate processing mechanisms from anywhere. You can even buy "wetware" i.e. the time of an actual doc, and settle the trade instantly. Speaking of settling trades with guilds, I had something beat me over the head while watching CSPAN's nth replay of October's "Networked Economy" conference. (Tape number 48765, $35, CSPAN, 202-737-3220) As much of this stuff as I try to read or see, I hadn't seen this before until about three weeks ago. A comment made on a panel discussion by Scott Cook, the president of Intuit (Quicken), and erst-while-Mrs. Bingamon's-not-looking Vice President of Electronic Commerce at Microsoft, really got my attention. He was on this panel with the president of Mosaic (now Netscape), and the Prince of Darkness Himself (I think this was still before the MS/Intuit merger announcement), among others. To wit, You can sell anything digitable on the net. Now we know about doctors ;-), movies, songs, information feeds, jokes-of-the-day, and software, but how about this: Financial Services. Financial services? Sure, Mr. Cook says. All we need is a little "mainframe peristroika". Securities are mostly traded on a book-entry basis, that is, in IBM mainframe(still!) computer accounting systems . The back offices are all automated. So what about the people at the front of the house? When you call up Fidelity and talk to a phone rep, what are you doing? You're talking to someone on the phone who's punching what you want into a computer for you. You can do that yourself on any good World-Wide-Web browser, all of which are forms-capable, and even secure, now. I've been doing consulting jobs with Fidelity off and on for a quite a few years now. I thought I knew where the people who would say "yes" to the idea of web-publishing net-able information were. The same bunch had just posted an opening for someone to go swing deals with the online services (AOL, Compu$erve). So, I figure, how much could it possibly cost to hang a web-server on the net with mutual fund blurbage, perspectuses, etc., on it. A whole bunch less than it would take to negotiate and develop a Fidelity-zone in AOL, yes? Obviously, the next step would be to put up fund quotes, and then, when secure-HTML and digital signatures work for real, the ability for people to move their own money around by themselves. They can do that now with a PIN number and Fidelity's voice response system, so why not on a Web server with NSA-proof security? Someday, there may even be digital cash, or a reincarnated bearer security business. Chaum and others talk about anonymous voting schemes which make great substrates for anonymous internet securities markets where anyone can trade their securities without a stockbroker... Sound familiar, anyone? Perry and Eric and I beat this to death six months ago or so. I took the better part of the beating, if I remember... So anyway, I went on a hunt for the bunch which was going to build Fidelity's web-server. I found a huge mess of domain-name registrations belonging to Fidelity. I found out that they have a T1 hooked up to NearNet, that they had shown several people I know the pages they had for Web server they're building, and it looks like they're bringing it online real soon now, like a few weeks. Evidently, they've been there, done that, or they're going to, anyway. Sigh. Another new business idea bites the dust. Undaunted, maybe I should go to Franklin/Templeton (Bahamas, anyone?), or Vanguard, or Pioneer, or Scudder, and see if they're interested in keeping up with the Johnsons. :-). Or maybe not... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923