-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 6:09 PM -0500 on 12/1/01, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
I expect that "reputation" is something very close to "goodwill", which is a polite accounting fiction to deal with the fact that the calculated "worth", of an asset as carried on the books of a purchased entity, is less than what the market paid for it.
To go a little further, that calculation, like depreciation, is usually done at the behest of some taxing authority or another. (No, not always, of course -- transferring an asset's ownership on the books of one component of the same enterprise to another with its own books, and then accounting for that on the books of the whole enterprise, called transfer pricing, is one of the core problems of finance, a problem which led to much of what we call modern finance, including a Nobel or two...) Depreciation of an asset is usually a marvellous way for government to control a business, since, of course, the amortization/depreciation of capital against a revenue stream is pretty much what the average large industrial concern is about. Accounting for "goodwill" has caused the most bizarre regulatory-driven book-keeping shenanigans than practically anything else. Irony is a wonderful thing, however. It may be that if we can figure out how to do bearer ownership of assets, using various blinded, or mostly blinded cryptographic transaction protocols, we'll collapse the difference between calculated asset value, ala depreciation, transfer-pricing, and "goodwill", and the *real* value of something, which is its price, discovered in a free market. The more I've thought about this over the past few years, the more I think that "reputation" as a *calculated* value, is probably a wild-goose chase. But you can't blame a bunch of crypto-engineers for trying, I suppose. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.0 iQEVAwUBPAl1IMUCGwxmWcHhAQHokwgAlGPp34cjDJxMYoPs9V5T5Jif6sn6P1zH suWRYqDCxpK7J9iOLHLfUSQEAUzdnenrrImuUeDqmbyoPMQ8Az+XUv+h65gwNjrG g8z87tzykVzS8DD2vDfhUl+h4aWvWq559W1A9tcQCQwC+Qh2a84LejJD76FDZX9F k0t3kxNO75obC22VTCuL2jwbFrssDKyQp51dGC5hSQIvV7QITu+ywY8UKObwiM99 30FvVDX3tqDpzJ03Ok4KgoSHG4Dp+lo3yreNKqv4UR/zIY2+E5JfzUg4Gvz6nBrc LvNiTOTJTKbca54Xn7QFwkicpJb77haV89Apvc1EgOshBVbIIUtPZQ== =OXo7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'