-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Lex vincula justitiae -- Roman Aphorism "Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere." -- Persian proverb "Some people say that money can't buy happiness. I've found that it usually does, and, when it doesn't, it buys the most interesting substitutes." -- Rhett Butler, 'Gone with the Wind' "Reality is not optional." -- Thomas Sowell Truth and Justice, Grapeshot and JDAMs, Money and Happiness Geodesic Capital Robert Hettinga Boston, 4/26/03 I tend to think in terms of finance and economics, and not law and politics. Well, not legislation or regulation, anyway; private agreement, private law, is actually necessary for civilization -- go read the most of the shattered cuneiform on the floor of the Baghdad Museum if you need a hint. Even though most people think you can't *do* either finance and economics without legislation and force monopoly, cypherpunks in particular understand that this not necessarily the case in a world of ubiquitous networks and strong financial cryptography. However, I'm not one to believe in grand conspiracies against Truth and Justice, either. Even if violent repression is used to preserve the status quo, the status quo is not immune to physical environmental change, and, ultimately, the economics of a given physical change is what makes most of the human world change. You have to *pay* the guys with guns, after all, or they won't kill people for you. So, I think that, financial "corn-laws" or no, internet financial cryptography must significantly change *finance*, that is, people have to *make* money, and lots of it, or it's just "art", for lack of a better word. It's not even politics, because it has no effect on reality. Like art, it just becomes an entertaining waste of time. Otherwise, one might as well plant fake bombs in a courthouse, or dump mercaptan on the doorstep of the IRS, or hoover out somebody's property records from Lexis and post it on a mail list. Or, for that matter, decide that you're only going to use internet bearer transaction technology to finance dope-dealers, or child-pornographers, or terrorists, or father-rapers, or any other shop-worn horseman the infocalypse is selling this week. There's no serious money in it, for starters, and, if you make *everybody* money, in theory at least, your market's bigger. :-). That's why I say that internet bearer protocols should be three orders of magnitude cheaper to use than book-entry protocols, even internet book-entry clearinghouses like PayPal -- or book-entry financial cryptography protocols like Peppercoin -- or nothing will happen, no matter what one's political intent is. In fact, I started IBUC because I thought that those three orders of magnitude were possible at a time when nobody else did, and I have the arrows in my back -- and the creditors sitting back there as well :-) -- to prove it. When I started the company, I thought that there was enough capital sloshing around out there to give financial progress a shove, and make lots of money by being there first, because in three or five years the barriers to entry would be completely down, and any cypherpunk worth his code could underwrite bearer instruments on the net. It turns out that there wasn't much capital out there, for internet payments, much less for internet bearer transactions. All of the money we raised was just before the bubble popped, from family, friends and friends of friends, and, just before I pretty much quit trying to raise money at all, Declan McCullagh had written an article on us that reminded me for all the world of that feral kid in Mad Max, walking across a burned-over post-apocalypse throwing that steel boomerang at fat guys with a leather fetish. Which, in hindsight, was prescient by about 4 months, since it was written in the middle of June 2001. Nonetheless, we managed to get some financial operations consulting work to keep the company afloat to keep thinking about it, though that dried up, too, just before, and certainly after September 11th. So, four (founded, by coincidence, I swear, on April 15, 1999) of those three to five years have come and gone, the technology and financial networks have just about grown into each other naturally, and, at the moment, we're trying to be at least that first cypherpunk, hopefully one of many. We'll see what happens. Which brings me to happiness. People do what is in their own interest at all times. Altruism is just another form of selfishness, for instance, because people's lives are finite and one's reputation can outlast one's life. Even if one uses a pseudonym, one's life, and death, may be more pleasurable because of some altruistic sacrifice or another, and you gotta die sooner or later anyway. As Ayn Rand herself said once, life may be too painful if someone you love isn't in it, so you'd rather give your life saving theirs. On the macro level, the US is not the strongest and richest nation-state in the world because it confiscated its wealth at the point of a tank-barrel or missile-silo. It is the strongest nation-state in the world because it *bought* those tanks, and missiles, because its citizenry *earned* the money that was confiscated, by taxation, and papered over with the outright fraud of "social welfare", to build those weapons, mostly because of some external threat, and in spite of the attendant graft and budget-packing. And all of *that* was possible because the US is, to date, the freest country, and thus the freest market, in the world. It is the best place in the world for free people to maximize their happiness. So far. To the extent that it continues to be so remains to be seen. It is, frankly, orthogonal to whatever an individual's immediate *political* motivations are, violent, or otherwise, hostile to the state, or otherwise. Only outright economic results matter, and free people make much more stuff than slaves do. Or at least the right kind of stuff, as Mancur Olson demonstrated in "Power and Prosperity", his book on the political economics of the Soviet state under Stalin. Personally, I believe that, contrary to what God-Fearing Conservatives and Reasonable Libertarians think, markets themselves actually cause freedom. You may be born "owning" yourself all you want, but freedom is not given to you by God, or anyone else. *Nothing*, really, is actually given to us. Freedom is not, as most people here and elsewhere believe, a "right". It may have to be *taken* occasionally, but usually it is just bought and paid for, sometimes with the blood of altruistic people, but most often with what people earn after they feed, house, and clothe themselves and their families: profit, in other words. Again, as they always are about representing some triumph of socialism, Star Trek is wrong. The Farenghis are the good guys. Acquisition *does* matter. :-). But it's more fundamental than that. Much more than the platitude says, freedom is *earned*, usually by doing something well enough that people leave you alone about other things, or you won't do what they want for them anymore, either passively by refusing to work, or actively, by force of arms. And, even if that somebody has a gun at your head, it's still in *their* interest to leave you alone otherwise, if they want to get what they're after from you. As Mancur Olsen says, a force monopolist, like any bandit, can't kill all the people he steals from, or he'll run out of people to rob. Olson also says that the optimum theft-rate for a force-monopolist is something shy of 50% before the economy starts to fall over, by the way. Sound familiar? Contrary to popular belief, the richest force monopolists in the world, the ones who are statistically most likely to live to spend their money and give it to their children and otherwise be left in peace, are the ones who are ostensibly *hired* to operate Western free-market democracies, as kleptocratic as those governments still are. We just saw a failed example of force monopolist a few weeks ago in Iraq, in fact, and we'll be seeing more soon, I expect. Like any bad parasite -- and force monopolism *is* parasitism, and make no mistake, it's not symbiosis as statists would have you believe -- Mr. Hussein so severely weakened his "host" population, physically and economically, that it could be easily killed, or at least violently captured. Hussein was probably bombarded into fine organic mush in the bargain. The fact that Iraq's population was "violently captured" -- and, one would think, set free -- by a still socialist-riddled nominal republic with the world's largest free-market economy was no accident, however. Whatever one's Jeffersonian, or, more apparently, Jacksonian, motives are about "fighting the power" with a cryptographic "revolution" -- or any other kind of "activism", technological, political, or otherwise -- as if it were some kind of gallant Confederate cavalry charge into massed Union grapeshot, or even Rhett Butler running the blockade of Savannah, whatever, the *only* way that this stuff will happen is by making *more* money than the alternative book-entry transaction execution, clearing and settlement technologies. *Much* more money. Whether they're entrenched, or not; violently defended, or not. Then, if necessary, we can just *hire* the B52s and JDAMs to pound *their* horse-drawn field artillery troops into fine organic mush instead. The stuff's not called financial cryptography for nothing, after all. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPqrmpsPxH8jf3ohaEQJ5BACeP3avfSFiYCkSa5sBHD8I/E3Qp1AAn1AN JFy2UfVi6mPagzH2CzOyf2h5 =h8k2 -----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'