-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- That's not a threat. It's a promise. Cypherpunks have many different political and ethical views. Like other denizens of the Net, some tend towards libertarianism. In fact, some of us argued five years ago or more that the culture of the net was inherently libertarian because making realistic threats of force was difficult over a communications medium. People just hang up on you. Since the best way to get on in electronic interactions is to offer something somebody wants and use third party guarantor systems to assure the payment in cases where payment is required, people would get used to non-coercive mechanisms of exchange and this would shape their general attitudes. Note that 95% of the world's population were once peasants bound to the soil. They had zero status. They were born one place and were stuck there until they died. This was ordained by God. When the age of reason and the machine came along, the productivity and hence the value of peasants exploded. They were able to leave the land and work in factories. Even though they looked like they were worse off, the earliest factory workers were vastly wealthier than they had been on the land. The ancien regime was destroyed by technology. Since then, we have experienced the Century of Death during which national states murdered more than 100 million people. In 1995, the Government of the United States collected under threat of force some $1.4 Trillion in exactions. More than any government in the history of Mankind. Today's regimes seem as natural to us as did the former arrangements which bound the peasants in thrall. They are ordained by God. Once the peasants had an out, they flocked to the cities and they continue to do so today in the Third world. Some of us on cypherpunks merely predict that when freed of the restraints imposed by the modern nation state, today's "peasants" will do the same. For the factory and the city substitute cyberspace. Social systems that are "ordained by God" are often discovered to actually be sustained by secular power and when the balance of power shifts... DCF "God fights on the side with the heaviest artillery. These days MarketEarth has the heaviest artillery." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMYTRMYVO4r4sgSPhAQEufwP/bmZyYmNpBAMDJcAQ+enFvZDeCZwcMtvi 1wCuUsRvLmUcNlgYzDyVB22Pu03hi5TwG2+juFIMJ+QYJwCgApMtqI/lixlnuiuB SGua/yATB/AJ+Yg+l/cd8uY4GLKTWENlvlfFq1gMcqlRSGf+niAfalmvmoeTeBxv fBwG4T2MGoo= =NWDL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----