I strongly endorse this post. It says things I have been planning to put into a post. A few comments, but the original left unsnipped so it can be read in full as part of my post. On Friday, December 21, 2001, at 08:42 PM, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
-- On 20 Dec 2001, at 21:00, Steve Schear wrote:
We should all be ashamed. The main reason we don't have the private payment system many have discussed is lazyness/"better things to do with their time" by those with the technical ability to create the SW (if I were one of them the SW would be done by now, as I've easily spent 1-2 many years and $10Ks trying to get others to write the code). Funding the payment system, as Tim has noted, is not that hard.
I have been working on this project for several years, and have not got much done. It is a big project, to do it right, with a user interface that is going to be reasonably usable and intelligible for a casual user, I would say it is about eighteen months full time work if done at home, and if done as a dot com business, a couple of million dollars.
This sounds about right. Pr0duct Cypher, whoever he was/is, gave us a crude form of digital cash almost 9 years ago. Chaum had a team of N (probably 3-8 at any given time, over 10+ years) working on various levels of digital cash implementation. However, Chaum was hobbled in various ways, and a smaller team could probably do it. Why don't certain indviduals, like moi, fund digital cash? Several reasons: 1. As James notes, a dot com business would consume a few million dollars. Absent a concrete business plan, and funded only by the funder, this would mean about twice that in stocks and investments would have to be sold to fund the "few million dollars" to (maybe) complete the project. 2. Even with a few million in dot com funds, or several million in investments liquidated to generate the few million, no guarantee of success. Besides the fact that Chaum's company apparently spent upwards of ten million dollars, nothing significant came out of it (and he had all the patents, all the cachet). I watched the Xanadu and AMIX groups spend a huge amount of money. Fine people, moslty, but they missed the boat. (Had some person liquidated $15 million in order to fund a $7 million Xanadu effort, I'd say they have a right to be pissed that little came out of it except some joking business cards reading "Chief Ontologist and Bottle Washer" and things like that. Don't get me wrong: a lot of the Xanadu and AMIX folks are my friends, but I watched them blow throw many millions of dollars in salaries and rentals and office space with almost nothing to show for it.) (Side Note: And then there's ZKS, which apparently (according to estimates I have read) raised upwards of $60 million. A staff of 200 at one point, with latte and chai bars and hot tubs and all the rest of the dot.com shtick. And now, what? They tried reinventing themselves as some soft of "privacy consulting" firm. Maybe a few bucks in that, but I expect most of that $60 million has evaporated. And for individual investors, it would take liquidating and paying taxes on $100 million in assets to raise this amount of investment capital...) 3. Anyone funding this kind of effort had better do it very anonymously. Big Brother is constantly expanding the boundaries of the conspiracy laws, and the civil courts will also be called on to avenge any financial losses by supposedly aggrieved rights holders. While I have no idea who "James Donald" really is, he'd better be even more untraceable than he is now if he introduces a system which can by any interpretation "aid the Evil Doers and do harm to the children."
Doing it right requires a reasonably competent programmer, someone with experience in producing consumer products. Such people tend to be busy. I have kids to put through college. Because of the illegality of likely applications, this is not a project that bodes well for making a lot of money.
Way too much focus has been put on making money. Not that there is anything wrong with making money. But too many people have tended to think that if they have even a glimmering of an idea, that a start-up is the way to finance their explorations. Not surprisingly, most of these developmental companies have failed miserably. (Useful to look at companies which have succeeded. Sun commercialized, with Stanford's permission and partial ownership, the Stanford University Network (SUN). Cisco commercialized some networking systems _also_ deployed at Stanford. A moral here. Ebay went after the low-hanging fruit of computerizing simple classified ads and adding auctions (even as my friends at AMIX had earlier been working on more sophisticated versions of Hayekian agoric markets...thus missing the Pez collectibles!))
This project is the upper edge of what can be done by an enthusiast. Having done it, then comes the scary part -- deploying it. No way can I deploy it -- I have too many assets. Anyone that has the skills and time needed to create this is apt to have too many assets to himself deploy it.
This is my fear as well. Even _donating_ to such a development effort can expose one's assets to seizure. (Pace the recent seizures of pro-Palestine contributors. In Amerika, your money is not really your own anymore.) People with assets could flee the country, renounce, blah blah, and maybe, if the Feds let the assets escape the country, have the funds and the freedom to fund such an effort. But what would they get? Only a handful of people seem to have the skills to independently develop digital cash. The chances are very good that the effort would be by some people who really didn't know what they were doing, who spent their time shopping for Herman Miller chairs and espresso machines for the company entertainment pod, and who basically were drones. We've seen it happen a dozen times. Is there any hope at all? Yes. The best work has always been done by one or two people at a time. This applies to software as well. (Not so much to chips anymore, at least not for the past 20 years. Another topic.) A person with the dedication and skill of a Stallman could probably implement digital cash without having the Herman Miller chairs, the hot tub up on the roof of the office building, the staff of marketdroids, and the espresso machines. There's some hope. --Tim May "The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat