FC97: Anguilla, Anyone?, Part 2

Anguilla, Anyone?, Part 2 FC97 Update, Cypherpunk Edition. January 8, 1997 (FCountdown: A-47) (Pass this around. Please! :-).) Financial Cryptography 1997 Conference and Exhibition: February 24-28, 1997 Workshop: February 17-21, 1997 http://offshore.com.ai/fc97/ Sponsors: The Journal for Internet Banking and Commerce <http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/JIBC/> Offshore Information Services <http://www.offshore.com.ai/> e$ <http://www.vmeng.com/rah/> See your name here :-) <mailto:rackliffe@tcm.org> Just before the end of the year, Vince Cate posted a note to the FC97 organizer's list and noted that a.) we had a bunch of people signed up for both the FC97 conference (and for the workshop), that b.) those people's companies probably wanted to book the registration expenses in 1996, and c.) didn't we think it was time to charge their credit cards and thus d.) actually have a conference? Soooo.... We're actually going to have the world's first conference on financial cryptography. It'll be: a.) in Anguilla, b.) during last week of February, c.) while it's snowing here in Boston. (Hot damn!) Which, to confess all, is why I had the idea to begin with, though the idea has grown a bit since. :-). It's a good thing that we're actually going to have FC97, too, because, if you look at the "Deductible Junkets" section Wired magazine, we're the featured deductible junket for January. It would indeed be a drag to have made it to that pinnacle of net.trendiness and not have a junket to deduct, as it were. Not that said net.trendiness was unwanted. No-sir-ee. Somewhere after imagining what it would be like to *not* to shovel snow out of my driveway, and *very* shortly after remembering there was a cypherpunk on *Anguilla*, namely Vince Cate, who could help me with that problem, the absolute very first picture in my head was exactly that Wired article. FC97 as the featured deductible junket in Wired. I could actually see the headline: "Financial Cryptography, February 1997, Anguilla, BWI. The world's first peer-reviewed conference on financial cryptography." I also figured that only someone as pathogically possessed of the trait of schmooze as I was could conceive and pull off such a feat. So, now, I figure, I can die, right? I mean, I've just made the net.schmoozer's hall of fame. :-). Well maybe not die. Not just yet, anyway. I'm not quite finished, you see. For my next trick, I have to actually get *down* there for the conference. To do that, I pretty much need to sell the conference out. Which, if you haven't guessed, is why I'm currently in your face with another one of my gigantic "Anguilla, Anyone?" rants. :-). I have to practically sell FC97 out because, when you work with other people, the guy with the idea (that's me), especially a guy with an idea for something he has absolutely *no* capability to actually *do* at all, has to take a back seat to the folks who actually *do*, er, do things, and hope that their effort makes enough "thing" left over for him to, um, claim to have done a bit of it himself. (Yeah. That's it... Any questions? None? Good. Class dismissed...) So, the first thing I'd like to do here, now that we're actually going to have a conference, is to thank those "people actually doing things" for FC97, in chronological order of their involvement in this genuine, Wired-certified, deductible junket... Vince Cate, the aformentioned Anguillan cypherpunk, of Offshore Information Services, in Anguilla <http://www.offshore.com.ai/> is the most important person to thank. Vince's work so far has been positively heroic. Vince got us a place to have the conference, the InterIsland Hotel, a very nice 150-seat conference facility with space to spare for 10 exhibition booths (before we need to find an exhibition annex, anyway ;-). He's made arrangements with Cable and Wireless to give us as much bandwidth as we need, practically on demand, proving that, yes, you can have a technical conference -- with T1 access -- in the wilds of the eastern Carribbean. He also made deals with the banks down there to handle money wire and credit card processing, not to mention making arrangements with the vendors of every internet payment method our customers have requested so far. Including, I'll add here, ecash, from Digicash, BV <http://www.digicash.com/> and Mark Twain Bank <http://www.marktwain.com/>. This is important, because, with the help of Lucky Green of Digicash, and the folks at Mark Twain Bank, Sameer Parekh of C2NET <http://www.c2.net/> and FC97 will make the world's largest ecash transaction to date. C2NET will purchase its booth for FC97, sometime later this month, entirely with ecash. You heard it here, first, folks, and, of course, you'll hear more about it later. Believe me. :-). Lots more. I haven't even warmed up the tonsils yet... Right now, as we speak, Vince is the guy on the ground in Anguilla, doing all kinds of things, from renting tables and curtains and power for exhibition space, to specifiying the hardware and network for the workshop and exhibition, to scanning the blueprints of the conference space into GIF files so we could have a floorplan to sell booths with, to getting estimates so we could cost and budget the conference, to, heh, collecting the actual money (in nice round non-taxable numbers) at <http://www.offshore.com.ai/fc97/>. In case you haven't figured it out, Vince is at the core of the whole enterprise, and he deserves much thanks for all the work he's done. Not to mention all the work he's gonna do.:-). Remembering we're at A-47, and counting, and all. After I got Vince to step up to the plate for all this work, we talked to Ray Hirschfeld, <mailto: R.Hirschfeld@cwi.nl>, of CWI, who then graciously accepted our offer of the FC97 conference chairmanship, in exchange for untold hours of completely donated labor. (I mean, at least, if everything works out, the rest of us could actually get paid.) Ray organized a conference committee of absolute stars in the digital commerce and financial cryptography firmament, including our own cypherpunk law professor, Michael Froomkin. The list of conference committee luminaries, includes, to read my own latest press release, "the inventor of Millicent, the project manager of EU's CAFE digital cash project, the holders of Citicorp's digital cash patent, two famous scholars in cryptography and digital commerce law, the President of International Association for Cryptologic Research, and the Chairman of the Taskforce on the Security of Electronic Money for the G-10 Central Banks." One of these people is so far up the food chain at the Fed that people there practically have to cross themselves when they say his name. So, you can see, Ray is one amazing conference organizer. Vince and I should have known better, but we couldn't possibly imagine how successful Ray would be in gathering talent when we asked him to be the conference chair. Ray and his outstanding committee are now reading all the papers that have come in during the last few months; from all over the world, from a great bunch of authors, on just about every topic in financial cryptography. Submissions are now closed, but the announcement of the selected papers will be made to the authors on January 18th, and shortly after that, he'll announce the conference agenda to the rest of us. You heard it here, first, folks, and, of course, you'll hear more later. Believe me. :-). Right about the time I had the idea to ask Ray if he wanted to chair the conference, I thought about how I could possibly extend my "Island Time" back another week, and thus avoid the snow shovel even longer. :-). I thought about a feeder activity of some kind for the conference, and, for a peer-reviewed conference like FC97, there's no better feeder activity than a workshop of some kind. I thought about the need to evangelize, to big corporate cheese (technical and otherwise), about how the world was going to go when we started doing secure financial transactions on insecure public networks. About the technology of financial cryptography and digital commerce, and not just running the old Mastercard through a web-page form, either. Said cheese were the people most in need of understanding this impending new reality of ubiquitous geodesic markets, I figured, because, frankly, as people who made technology decisions for big companies, it was going to affect their businesses the most. Fortunately, they were also the people who could afford to pay for a week-long intensive workshop on the subject. Especially if it was in Anguilla. :-). A financial cryptography bootcamp, as friend Rodney Thayer called it later. I thought about how cool it would be to get actual cypherpunks-who-code, who were not likely to get to the conference under their own power otherwise, to run this workshop. After the week of the workshop was over, both cheese and cypherpunks-who-code could go to the conference and hang out like they owned the place. I'd pay said cypherpunks-who-code a competitive rate for their time, plus fly them there and back, and feed and house them for three weeks: the week before the workshop getting the bugs worked out, the week of the workshop/bootcamp itself, and then the week of the conference, again, hanging out like they owned the place. Everybody would be happy. So, when I thought about all that, the first person who came to mind to actually run this was, of course, Ian Goldberg <mailto:iang@cs.berkeley.edu>. Ian, besides making himself famous last year for breaking Netscape's SSL implementation into little bitty random bits (to their eternal gratitude, I'm sure), is one of the canonical cypherpunks-who-code these days, having done more pounding on the ecash code library than anyone else outside of DigiCash, *and* building an FPGA DES-cracker, all while getting a Ph.D in his spare time. :-). After much arm-twisting, because he was so busy -- and, because, frankly, before Ray got that amazing conference committee, we were all nervous about it -- Ian consented to running the workshop. Sometime next week he'll come out with the particulars of the workshop itself, including what they're going to teach, and, who's going to be there to teach it, contingent on how many workshop participants we get. We're planning on a 5-to-1 cheese-to-cypherpunk ratio, so how many cypherpunks-who-code we can bring to Anguilla depends on how many workshop seats we can sell. Fortunately, we've had people already pay for the workshop sight unseen, and, with a little push, I expect we'll have enough participants to actually have the workshop. When that happens, you'll hear about it. Believe me. :-). [Oh. By the way, notice that I've now weaseled myself onto Anguilla *two* weeks before the conference starts. But wait, there's more. Guess who has to be there one week before that, to get ready for the instructors. *All* February in Anguilla? Moi? Nawwww.... ;-).] Speaking of selling stuff, Julie Rackliffe, <mailto:rackliffe@tcm.org>, is someone I've known for as long as I've been in Boston. She was practically the first person I met when I started at Fidelity. She now does fund raising and function management for the Computer Museum in Boston, and has done some work in a similar vein for the Digital Commerce Society of Boston (DCSB), which Peter Cassidy <mailto: pcassidy@world.std.com> and 30 cypherpunks and geeks-with-suits started with me last year. When FC97 started to look bigger than a few guys on a beach with an internet feed, I knew I needed someone who could professionally manage a small but high-profile conference and exhibition, and I asked Julie to help us out. When we thought we couldn't do this without corporate sponsorship to cover our sunk costs, Julie stepped up and took on raising that too, even though it later turned out that we really didn't need sponsorships to make FC97 fly. ("Bootstrap" is now our collective middle name...) Anyway, we're still taking booth orders -- each booth ($5,000) includes 2 complimentary tickets to the FC97 conference -- and Julie's the contact for that <mailto:rackliffe@tcm.org>. Also, if your corporation wants to sponsor (for $10,000) an official, FC97-sanctioned, :-), lunch or dinner with accompanying recreational/schmooze opportunity, we'd be more than happy to oblige. You get a banner ad on the web site, your company's name on our outbound correspondence (see above), a nice discount on boothspace, and 4 conference tickets. And a tatoo on my forehead. Okay. Maybe not a tatoo on my forehead. Since I had to licence the name "Bob" from Microsoft a couple of years ago, there's not much room up there next to the Windows 95 logo, anyway. Again, email Julie <mailto:rackliffe@tcm.org> for information on sponsorships, and we'll *talk* about the tatoo. So, much thanks to Julie, who's also going to actually manage the conference,logistically and administratively, during the week of FC97, for all the work *she's* going to do, too. Finally, I want to thank someone who's not officially on the FC97 team. That person is Sameer Parekh of C2NET. Not only is he going to buy a booth at the FC97 Exhibition, he also graciously donated a copy of Stronghold, which we're going to be using as the Official Commerce Server of the FC97 Workshop, Exhibition and Conference. We're going to be teaching financial cryptography with Stronghold in the workshop (and Ian's new ecash server, by the way...), and it will be taking orders on www.offshore.com.ai real soon now. In ecash, among other things, which he'll be using to actually purchase his booth from us. Thank you very much Sameer. In that regard, we also want to thank Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> who got us set up with the ecash shopware to make digital cash transactions possible for FC97. Thank you very much, Lucky. <Shameless-Huckster-Mode, RDF=11> Okay. Now I'm going to talk about why it's in *your* best interest to *immediately* go to <http://www.offshore.com.ai/fc97/>, shell out big bucks, and register for either the conference ($1,000. Nice round tax-free numbers, remember?) or the workshop and conference ($6,000 total), or the exhibition (booths start at $5,000), or even sponsor FC97 itself (for a cool $10 grand), so that I, too, can go to Anguilla, and not shovel snow in Boston in February. Like the rest of this rant, feel free to hack out some of the points below and paste them into any appropriate form or application if you need them to justify your trip to someone with budgetary authority. :-). If you need better reasons, let me know, <mailto:rah@shipwright.com>, and I'll think up some more. One of them has to stick. It *has* to, or <shivver> I have a date with a snow shovel this February. 1. FC97's in Anguilla. It doesn't snow in Anguilla. :-). 2. FC97 is the very first conference ever on financial cryptography. If you go there, you'll make history. Since financial cryptography will change the face of economics and finance as we know it, you'll make economic and financial history. Since economic and finance make the world go 'round, you'll make world history. Pick a history. Any history. You'll have made it. But, you've gotta *be* there to do it. 3. The papers at FC97 will be peer-reviewed, and FC97 is sanctioned by International Association for Cryptologic Research. The papers to be presented at FC97 are being reviewed by some of the best people in the field, and the papers themselves will represent the best thinking in financial cryptography today. 4. The people who wrote the papers will be right there for you to talk to, because they've all committed to come if their papers are accepted. 5. FC97, like the Cannes Film Festival, was designed not only to show the state of the art in the financial cryptography business, but to provide time and space for that business to take place. There is exhibition space so that people can display their technology. The conference runs from 08:30 to 12:30 (with breakfast provided, to get you there that early), so that the afternoons and evenings can be used for business networking, for corporate presentations, or for individual or group recreational opportunities. Participants are encouraged to bring their families. 6. FC97 is in Anguilla. Anguilla is an interesting spot, politically and economically. It has no taxes of any kind except import duties (no, bringing your laptop to Anguilla is not importing it, because you're taking it home with you), and would be a great place to run an offshore transaction server, which, of course, is why people like Vince Cate are there now. In addition, having FC97 in Anguilla proves the futility of the current US cryptography control regime. We will have all kinds of cryptographically strong financial technology at FC97. That includes C2NET's Stronghold product, through which FC97's own registration transactions are being processed, and which we will be using in the workshop to instruct people in financial cryptography systems development and implementation. All of that technology will get to Anguilla, a tiny speck in the Carribbean Sea, just fine -- *without* being exported from the US. 7. If you were interested in negotiating with foriegn cryptographic businesses to *import* their technology into the US (a sad state of affairs, but a fact of the modern market), or, in contracting with foriegn businesses to license your cryptographic technology overseas within the limits of the ITARs or EARs, FC97 would seem to be an ideal time and place to do so. The market for financial cryptography is changing dramatically, and Anguilla will have the highest concentration of financial-crypto-clueful on the planet for the week of FC97. All of them talking to each other, networking, and doing deals. It is an opportunity which any prudent business developing financial cryptography, or significantly affected by it, should not ignore. 8. FC97 is chance for those of us who only know each other on the net to actually meet face to face and start to develop the kind of personal relationships and trust we'll all need to create the future of finance on the internet. Since legal enforcement of contract on a ubiquitous international network will be at best problematic, if not impossible, reputation and character will be the only enforcement mechanism we'll have for quite a while yet. (Actually, if it was good enough for J.Pierpont Morgan and the Rothschilds, it's probably good enough for us.) And, while the whole point to financial cryptography is that we won't need to have face-to-face contact for financial relationships, much less regulation, there's still, currently, more bandwidth in a conversation on an Anguillan beach to develop that trust relationship than there is anywhere on the internet. So, at the core of the business, people are going to have to actually *know* each other, at least until the market gets too competitive. This is no different from any other nacent software market. Steven Levy, in "Hackers", talks about how computer game software firms, ostensibly competitors, used to vaction with each other in the early development of that business. That makes sense. One of the reasons that Peter Cassidy and I started DCSB was so we would have a place to go to talk financial crypto with other people who actually cared about it. Do it for week, and add a beach and beautiful weather, and you've got FC97. 9. The FC97 workshop, February 17-21, is being taught by some of the best implementors of cryptography technology today. Ian Goldberg <mailto:iang@cs.berkeley.edu>, the workshop chair, knows more about the nuts and bolts, the implementation and construction of financial cryptography systems, particularly new systems using so-called digital bearer certificates, than probably any other person alive, including the people who invented and sell the technology itself. The people he's picked to teach the workshop with him have the most hands-on experience in developing and implementing cryptography, particularly in a financial context, of anyone in the world today. People who take the workshop will learn which cryptography is strong cryptography, what isn't, and why. They will learn all the current and proposed internet payment systems out there, which ones are worth knowing about, which ones aren't, and how to tell whether a new system is worth learning. They will learn how to set up a secure internet site from scratch. They will learn how to build a transaction server on that site which will use any of the current popular transaction protocols. And, finally, at the very frontier of financial cryptography, workshop attendees will learn the theory and operation of systems for handling and issuing digital bearer certificates. Systems which do not rely on offsetting book-entries, or financial regulators, to settle issues of non-repudiation, and are thus well suited to ubiquitous worldwide commerce. The workshop will consist of 40 hours of intensive instruction and lab time, with a 24-hour open lab and T1 internet access. The workshop admission is limited to 20 attendees. The cost of the workshop is $5,000. 10. It's in Anguilla. There's no snow in Anguilla. </SHM, RDF=0> :-). Okay. I've ranted. There will be more later, certainly. I expect there to be a press release from C2NET about Stronghold at FC97, and the purchase of their booth in ecash. And, as we sell more booths, press releases from the companies who buy those booths, about their products, and why they've decided to go to FC97. Again, if you're interested in buying a booth at FC97, please contact Julie Rackliffe, <mailto: rackliffe@tcm.org>. Sometime next week Ian Goldberg <mailto:iang@cs.berkeley.edu>, will come out with more formal information about the FC97 Workshop. If you know anyone who could benefit from such an experience, please have them contact Ian for details. Shortly after the 18th, expect to see, from Ray Hirschfeld, the selected papers and the actual agenda for the conference itself. So, if you have any questions about Anguilla itself, send them to Vince Cate <mailto: vince@offshore.com.ai>. If you have any questions about the content of the conference, you can send them to Ray Hirschfeld <mailto: R.Hirschfeld@cwi.nl>, but, bear in mind, he and the program committee are behind the old chinese wall right now, reading papers, so you probably won't get an answer from him until the papers are selected and the agenda announced. If you want a booth or to sponsor the conference, contact Julie Rackliffe <mailto: rackliffe@tcm.org>. If you want to talk about the workshop before Ian Goldberg <mailto:iang@cs.berkeley.edu>, cranks out the formal call for participants please contact him, because the contents of the workshop will depend to a great deal on the initial skill set of the participants. And, of course, if you want to thrash me about the length or content of this rant, feel free. All errors are mine, especially those said in shameless-huckster-mode. :-). <mailto:rah@shipwright.com> Finally, the website for FC97 is <http://www.offshore.com.ai/fc97/>. Register now. Please. My toes are *cold* already... Cheers, Bob Hettinga (one of two) General Chair(s, the other is Vince Cate), Financial Cryptography 1997 Conference and Exhibition: February 24-28, 1997 Workshop: February 17-21, 1997 http://offshore.com.ai/fc97/ Sponsors: The Journal for Internet Banking and Commerce <http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/JIBC/> Offshore Information Services <http://www.offshore.com.ai/> e$ <http://www.vmeng.com/rah/> See your name here :-) <mailto:rackliffe@tcm.org> ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox, e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/ FC97: Anguilla, anyone? http://offshore.com.ai/fc97/