"That's a very powerful thing. Suppose the king of England, or the French government, for example, says that you must use our way of assigning identity, and if you do not use our way to assign identity you don't get to play. By doing this they get complete control over the system. Good points and bad points, but if they can make it stick, it's a very powerful position to be in. Indeed it's the position of the king or the sovereign. The identity by fiat." ... [Discussion of Microsoft/Visa proprietary, patented and non-disclosed CA system elided] "So if you allow this sort of a vertically-integrated system to come into place, whoever controls that vertically-integrated system will have control not only over the liquidity--that is, issuing you money--they will end up with a monopoly over the control of the content. Having a monopoly over the content, of course, gives them the power to tax, and the power to get revenues as a percentage of those sales transactions. "So we conclude by asking these questions: If identity no longer comes from your bank, but from your PC operating system, what role does your bank have in granting you liquidity? And if your identity comes from your PC operating system, why can't the PC operating system grant you liquidity? And, indeed, granting you liquidity is known as extending credit. And extending credit is, and has been, historically the function of banks and banks alone. "The point of this discourse into identity and liquidity is to get you to think a little bit about the power of the way that these different systems go together using the bionomic model. If we indeed live with historical, pyramidal kinds of structures, we step right into an economic world where there is, by default, the accident of handing someone else the ability to provide us taxation. If we, on the other hand, maintain autonomies--small self-organizing groups with a language that allows us to communicate from group to group--along with that economic freedom comes a social freedom." - Bill Melton, CEO-CyberCash Inc. Quoted in: http://www.upside.com/news/archive/speech/melton/melton.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA