I'd rather see a company starting on a shoestring, with surplus desks from Repo Depot, with crowded offices, and with no money wasted on frivolities. Especially if I'm an investor!<<
(I faced a similar choice in 1974: some of the places I was considering were known for their lavish expense accounts, their nice offices. Other
And you'd probably be wasting your money cos good code needs quiet private reasonably pleasant surroundings.Not digbert cubicles run by simon legree. places were more spartan (that's a good word to think about). I chose one of the spartan places, Intel. A lot of those other companies I could have gone to went nowhere.)<< Yes we all know how much you prefer Sparta to Athens.Arbeit macht frei.
This applies to marketdroids as well. Startup companies get larded-up with marketing departments when there is little to market. The huges staffs of some of the companies we all know about is an example. (Just as bad: the hiring of ex-government officials, regulators, etc. But I digress.) <<
YAWN<
I agree and disagree. I agree that the core crypto is sort of established. However, how many examples of it do we see? Few. How many of the programmers here on this list (there must be a few dozen who call themselves programmers, professionally) have ever implemented anything remotely similar to digital cash? (I don't call myself a programmer, but I fool around. The closest I have come to the above is when about 10 years ago I wrote a simple RSA implementation in Mathematica, just to make sure I had all the "Euler totient function" kind of crapola down straight.) <<
PayPal took off pretty fast. So did VISA and MasterCard in their day. I
I don't think things happen because of "evangelists." Evangelists didn't give us the transistor, the IC, the microprocessor, the early personal computers, or even the Mac (where Apple was famous for hiring "evangelists," e.g., Guy Kawasaki). Discussing this would require a longer
Lucky can tell us what the real level of technology was. My impression is that it was a cleaned-up version of Chaum's earlier code (or the code of his early 90s programmers, that is) and did "uninteresting" things. And since it wasn't payee-untraceable, interesting uses for trading banned materials were not possible. (My recollection, though I could be wrong, was
would waste our time and money opening a Mark Twain Bank account so we could flash our account cards, or whatever, at local parties and meetings. I don't know of anyone, besides Lucky, who ever used the system. It is
They don't care that their "Fast Pass" turnpike passes can (and sometimes are) be used to track their movements, to find out when they were on the New Jersey Turnpike and which exit they got off at. 99.9984% of them
More drivel,Tim getting senile? The ronnie raygun of the cypherpunk pantheon? think and hope someone will cut through all of the b.s. and do something that takes off. As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the reasons we wanted to have a session on "implementing digital money" was to brainstorm these issues. Maybe we should try again. By the way, if "lots of people can turn the algorithm into reliable code," where _are_ the implementations? I see bits and pieces. << I see dead people.Especially people like timmy. article here than I'm interested in writing. To be sure, advertising BankAmericard (VISA) and other credit cards was and is a big business. People have to know a technology exists and then want to use it. Evangelizing digital cash, when no real digital cash implementation exists, is getting things backwards. << Bollocks and stale to boot.Not the 1st time tims got things ass about though.(can provide examples on request.) that Mark Twain Bank also had the usual ISP-like junk about acceptable uses and how accounts could be cancelled for "inappropriate uses.") A lot of these applications are just "toy uses." Not even the True Believers, most of us, << Ahem,True believers? The next steps,evangelists.Shurley some mishtake. true, and we've talked about it many times, that most people don't care about anonymity and untraceability.<< They are even taking the "let it all hang out' road with APster! and flashing more than account cards! figure no one will bother to check. So the market for Chaumian ecash for car passes never materialized. A big part of the problem is the lack of evolutionary learning. << Is that when you learn the meaning of the basic words you use,like 'anarchy',ferinstance?
This is a problem with our patent system, especially for software. A number of years ago I wrote an article about how patents for hardware work because the produced good "meters" the patent: no one cared what uses were made of the microprocessor because every sale was a sale, thus paying for all of the various R&D and patents and so for the chip companies. With software (*), there is much concern about what uses are made. Because of replicability of the product. (* I don't mean a software product like Microsoft Office. It is true that no one cares what use is made of a copy of Office, provided it was legitimately bought. I mean software like "RSA," where sale of a general license has to be very carefully planned.) Because Chaum wished to make money (not an ignoble goal), he limited access to the core of his system. (Whatever you want to call it, the algorithms, the implementations, the ability of others to build products, etc.) There were a series of "future by design" projects, but little evolutionary learning. (Contrast to the aircraft or chip businesses, where hundreds of companies failed, planes crashed, new designs were tried, patents were cross-licensed or bought, companies rose and fell, products proliferated...) It's not easy to build a company around an algorithm.<<
Or a reputation on blithering blather,Its like cypherpunk elevator muzak isnt it? RSA succeeded, but it faced years of shoestring operation troubles (I visited their crowded offices in Redwood Shores, circa 1990-1). And it had arguably the most important patent portfolio of all. (Levy's "Crypto" details the history, and the almost out of business experiences.) I see way too many Cypherpunks jabbering about "raising money." Most don't.<< I dont see enough cypherpunks raising money to have this embarrassment put down,but its early days.
It's time for a return to the older models. > <<
Like Operation soft drill,BUMs and K.I.S.S ferfucksake.
Getting the real thing working requires real marketing skills <>See above. I doubt a marketing group makes a hill of beans' worth of difference. <<
Tims opinions are definitely worth a large hill o'beans.
and being in the right place at the right time; occasionally <True enough. <<
Look up at that full moon tim.
you can hit it off, like the kid who wrote WinAmp and was pressured > by his parents into making it Shareware and not just freeware, > or the Hotmail folks causing the free-web-based-email wave > (and catalyzing many of the appallingly stupid Dot-Com Business Plans.) <
We saw a lot of appallingly-stupid Cypherpunks Business Plans, too. << And the appallingly stupid adoption of crypto-anarchy instead of cyber-liberty.Whoops.
"And then at this point the world adopts the use of Bearer Bucks (TM) and we get 2% of every transaction!" >
Perhaps one advantage of the dot-com crash is that people starting > businesses today are much more likely to do the solid business planning > and the initial technical decisions before they get enough > funding to leave the garage and hire the 200 programmers that > it takes to prevent any real work from being done while you're > having meetings to coordinate development of the hot-tub-scheduling > website. Yep. Premature commercialization, mythical man-month, burn rates, and all
Anarcho-capitalism would never encourage such lunacy,right timmy? that. << Wisdom from on high,take notes,cypherpunks.Tim may not be with us forever.(It just seems like it sometimes)
But if you're not going to use the marketdroids, you have to find > some really solid alternative to get the stuff widely used. I'll say it again: the best commercialization is done for stolen products. <<
(Or, to head off frivolous charges that I am libeling Sun or Cisco, below, products which were basically already developed and faced a ready market.) The Stanford University Network (SUN) machines were largely ready to go when the founders of Sun (gee, where'd they get that name?) sought
And words,see mattd's posts on how I stole the word "anarchy."I'm TM master Thief! permission (and investment) from Stanford to commercialize them. Ditto for Len and Sandy's work at Stanford on routers. This is how Sun and Cisco were able to "hit the ground running." They didn't squander precious startup dollars on roof-top jacuzzis and meeting rooms for researchers to sit around trying to develop a product. Investment money went into production facilities, wire-wrap guns, etc. Even RSA was basically just commercializing an already-extant thing. Intel was making and selling actual products within 6 months of its formation. (It did _not_ get funding and then sit around in opulent surroundings thinking about future directions. In a way, it also "stole" its technology, in that its founders had worked on silicon-gate MOS at Fairchild and knew how to get rolling quickly. I'm not accusing Intel of stealing in any prosecutable sense, but in the sense that this is the way evolutionary learning happens:<< May I interject some Proudon at this point: "Property is Theft"
the children of successes create more successes.) By contrast, I've watched dozens of companies (some of them started and staffed by my friends) raise some seed capital and _then_ begin their research and development! Bad move. For lots of reasons I could write about for hours. (Xanadu and AMIX were examples, several Cypherpunks startups are other examples.) (Nutshell: research proceeds unevenly. Breakthroughs. Evolutionary learning. Dead-ends. <<
A lot of naive people seem to think the capital markets exist to help
Anarcho-capitalism,racism,fascism,ayn Rand,robert Heinlein,Gun nuts and militia wackos,sexism,Libertianism,etc.Yep. Redirections. "Exploitation of rich veins of ore," punctuated equilibrium, time value of money. When a company gets investment money, it _must_ begin to use that money _immediately_. Ideally, for production facilities, for actual product advertising, for _immediate_ uses. The time value of money dictates this. It _cannot_ use its money to hire people to sit around and think about future research directions. If there is not a _real_ business plan (I don't mean a "spreadsheet business plan") with a real revenue stream beginning _soon_, why form a company?<< Why indeed,become a true anarchist name.Corporations wont last 5 minutes without the state to back them up. them fund their dreams, their vague ideas about becoming the next Bill Gates. Maybe the recent dot com collapse has changed things.) There _is_ a place for "service businesses." ISPs, for example. (The founders of ZKS made their initial money by setting up a successful ISP in Canada and then selling it when the great wave of ISP consolidations was cresting. Interestingly, some of the early remailer operators in Holland did something very similar, selling their ISP business. Looks like this was the real way to make some money. No exotic cutting-edge technology, just paying customers.) There's a saying that "the best is the enemy of the good." This is part of the long debate in computer science between "doing the right thing" and "doing what works." The "Right Thing" is the elegant, the crystalline, the pure. "What Works" is the crufty, the cobbled-together. LISP versus Perl, perhaps. Richard Gabriel has some fun essays along the lines of "Worst is Best" (use Google to find them), discussing why the workstation and language market developed in the way it did. In our community (and related orbiting communities), "the cool is the enemy of the good." Hence we see multi-year efforts to the really cool implementation of hypertext developed, thus running out of money and missing the boat on the Web. (Xanadu.) Ditto for digital cash, as comparatively low-tech and uncool products like PayPal move in to take the low-hanging fruit. Paying people to sit around and dream about rilly, rilly cool products is the kiss of death. << Oh death! Where is thy sting? Why is this bore still breathing?Will no one rid me of this turgid capitalist priest?
Lastly, the focus on commercialization has been very weird these past several years. Nearly everyone jabbers about how to make money off of remailers, or data havens, or digital money. But little in the way of new ideas are being discussed here. <<
Anarcho-capitalism had nothing to with this and neither did I,Im TM crypto-anarchist.
Our last Cypherpunks meeting was refreshing in that we had a couple of good talks on real things and very little of the "lawyer" and "startup evangelizing" junk. And we ended with a heated discussion of remailers and such, which Len and Steve and others have been writing about. <<
Len and Steve may still have something new to say,Im sucking wind and have been for years.
Even more lastly, you folks out there thinking about how to do a startup or make money should be thinking about what I said, and which I am certain is basically correct: start up companies are not the place to do basic R&D. That's the place for universities and for established companies (with the companies either spinning-off divisions or selling the products themselves or losing their staff who "steal" the work). The cost of money is just too high for anyone to fund blue sky dreamers. Except as charity. (I can't resist: Look at Interval Research. Paul Allen, who has almost as much money as Bill Gates, decided to try to replicate the success of Xerox PARC and funded Interval Research some years ago (around '92-'93, IIRC). He gave it a wad of money, they set up shop, they hired Brenda Laurel and Lee Felsenstein and all kinds of other bright thinkers and dreamers. What came out of it? Nothing. Nada. Nil.) --Tim May <<
You folks,you anarch-capitalists should listen to me.The cost of money is to high.Milton Friedmans probably to blame.
"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself." -- David Friedman <<
Tim,(and david) don't even believe their own arguments.See.http://world.std.com/~mhuben/leftlib.html And...http://world.std.com/~mhuben/ddfr.html I guess Tim still loves capitalism to death,He just has to bash her sometimes.