All this talk about digital payments is a real blast from the past. Not just because it's all been said before; but because of how it demonstrates that cypherpunks are still stuck in the early 1990s as far as their world view. Every one of these discussions might have been made five or even ten years ago (with the possible exception of the details of Brands technology, which isn't fundamental). Yet the internet world has changed enormously since then. Most of these changes have passed the cypherpunks by. All the P2P work, file sharing, Freenet, IIRC, weblogs, WiFi, open source, open spectrum; for the most part it's as if none of this exists, in the world of the cypherpunks. The problem with these discussions of digital payments is so fundamental that it's amazing that no one mentions it: anonymous payments are useless. The world hasn't evolved the way cypherpunks thought it might, ten years ago. Yet the reality doesn't sink in. Anonymous payments for physical goods are pointless because you can't deliver them anonymously. Everyone has recognized that from the beginning. So they always envisioned them being used for information goods. Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today. You can't build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world where people expect to get their information goods for free. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read someone like James Donald claiming that MP3s are a micropayment market. Wake up, gramps! My God, nothing could make you sound more like a clueless refugee from the 90s than a statement like that. It's a perfect illustration of how irrelevant the cypherpunks have become. At one time, cypherpunks, with their libertarian and anarchocapitalist views, assumed that the online world was turning into Galt's Gulch, a world where people would constantly pay for exchanges of information. What they didn't foresee is that it turned instead into a communist utopia, where each supplies according to his abilities, and each takes according to his needs. And it works online, unlike in the physical world, because no matter how much each person takes, there's still plenty for everyone else. Information doesn't get used up. Unless cypherpunks open their eyes to the reality around them, instead of seeing what they want to see, they are going to continue to be part of the past rather than part of the future. Ironically, Tim May's racist prediction for "the colored race" has become the truth for the cypherpunks: they are "headed for the trash heap of history, courtesy of their own choices." And with views like those, cypherpunks are the ones truly deserving of his final comment: "Fuck 'em."