At 5:35 pm -0400 on 4/29/97, Tim May wrote:
This is really for patent lawyers to argue,
Indeed, which is my point. If the patent lawyers are arguing, life is hard for anyone trying to make money with the technology the patents allegedly cover. Kind of like those "SLAPP" suits companies like to throw at "activists". Remember PRZ? Same shit, different day. Economically, anyway.
"Contributory infringement" is one possible avenue of going after such systems which bypass Chaum's patents, but this is a complicated issue.
See above. :-).
I would guess that Chaum is also planning to try to get more comprehensive patents covering the "entire system" of using digital cash in financial transactions. Bad as software patents usually are, this trend is even worse.
Say amen, somebody. I personally think software patents are useless in the long run, but they're still bad for business in the meantime. In which meantime, until we can nonrepudiably pay people who invent financial crypto protocols without the intervention of the nation-state, we need to live with said patents.
For the desired market for digital cash, that of black market and anarchistic transactions, ignoring the patents seems an obvious choice. For the hoity-toity bankers, they'll probably avoid such things completely.
There are lots of other "desired" transactions for digital bearer certificates besides digital cash for black markets. Everything from "collectables" (no accounting for taste, I suppose), to any current financial instrument (and a few we haven't dreamed up yet), to micromoney for those micromoney "mitochondria" I rant so much about. All of them will be extremely economical because they're untraceable and still negotiable. Nonrepudiable without the "assistance" of a nation-state. Remember, proto-wings were evolved by pond-skimming insects so they could skim across ponds faster. Eventually, when those proto-wings evolved into actual wings, flying insects didn't need ponds anymore. With that idea in mind, digital bearer certificates are going to have to interface with the book entry world of meatspace for a while, in order to be convertable into other assets. Eventually, at some point, those assets won't be book-entries anymore. <sfx: "slap!"> > I know which side I'm on, but I'm not sure which side Bob is on. </sfx> Bob just wants to make a buck. Something you don't have to worry about any more about, anymore, Tim. <he said, rubbing the red spot on his cheek...> The point is, if it makes money it'll happen. If it doesn't make money, it won't. Reality is not optional. Nation states are so powerful, requiring the invention of strong cryptography to save us from their totalarian excressance, because they can take our money at gunpoint. The reason they can is because money can be traced, either in physical form, or lately, in electronic book-entry form. The reason it can be traced is because our economic system physically requires a nation state to enforce any repudiation of its transaction protocols. To punish fraud, in other words. Financial cryptography saves us from the nation state not just because it hides information about ourselves, but because it out-competes the old book entry transaction system, especially in terms of non-repudiation. It outcompetes the old system on it's own turf. Which means, of course, in banks. "Hoity-toity" or otherwise. Think about it this way. Personal computers didn't really start to kill mainframes until they were networked into mainframes and could hoover data out of them with impunity, and out-process the information. Excel killed 123 that much quicker because it could read .WK1 files transparently, macros and all, and then do much more with it. Soon, this upcoming "protocol conversion", between the net world of bearer certificates and the meatspace world of book-entries, will be done by a financial trustee. A trustee which will be, for all intents an purposes, and certainly in the earlest stages of a digital bearer certificate infrastructure, a bank. The hoity-toitier, the better, because they have the best reputation to rent to transactions on the net. So, that means avoiding unpleasantneess, like "cutting out" transactions on the net from a bank's shareholders by having a bunch of separate entities, underwriters in other words, marketing and validating the actual certificate transactions. That keeps Mrs. Grundy from standing up in the bank's boardroom one afternoon and cancelling all the net.porno operators' accounts, because they don't have accounts in the bank. The underwriters do, and they underwrite certificates for thousands of customers apiece, customers the underwriters don't even have know, because the trustee is blindly passing those ATM and wire transactions to the right banking correspondents on those networks, who in turn validate their customers against their account base. Anyway, getting back to the point, "avoiding unpleasantness" also means not having patent lawyers sue those very essential "hoity-toity" trustee banks for rediculous reasons, like patent infringement, actual or not. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Lesley Stahl: "You mean *anyone* can set up a web site and compete with the New York Times?" Andrew Kantor: "Yes." Stahl: "Isn't that dangerous?" The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/