On Wednesday, November 21, 2001, at 08:51 PM, dmolnar wrote:
Declan's comment on operating a physical remailer for suitably valuable cargo, plus some of Tim's recent comments about integration, made me think of the question in the subject line. So far I see at least three possible answers.
1) Make lots of money.
2) Spread awareness (that "funny feeling in the stomach" recently discussed) and save our fellow man. Make the world safe for privacy.
3) Ensure that cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies have uses besides "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse," so that they aren't banned.
anything else?
I'll take the other side of the argument. Not because I have anything against Joe Sixpack using strong crypto, remailers, anonymous markets, markets for assassinating tyrants, data havens, and all the rest. But.... * Many have knocked themselves out trying to get the masses to encrypt all of their e-mail...guess what? Most people don't want to jump through hoops to send innocuous messages to their friends. Even more so, fewer of us want to be lectured at that we "should" be using crypto at all times. * The "sell to the masses" argument is largely why the focus of crypto has been spinning its wheels in issues of "integrating with common programs." Sounds great to do so, except that the fast rate of change of mailers and other programs means the established programs tend to "break" with distressing regularity...with not enough people around (and being paid) to fix the new incompatibilities. * Worst of all, the "how do we get Joe and Alice Sixpack to use PGP?" focus, and the similar focus for remailers and digital money such as it is, has shifted the efforts into the "millicent ghetto" part of the value of crypto vs. cost of crypto space I have discussed. Instead of looking at what makes Swiss banks worthwhile for people to fly to Geneva to deal with, we have schemes for people buying things they can buy with cash or with VISA cards just as efficiently. And instead of anoymizing child porn, we have schemes for anonymizing hits on Yahoo's Sports pages. No surprise that the customers who live in this millicent ghetto say "Huh?" Put bluntly, I don't see sophisticated money traders and offshore bankers beating the drum to get Joe Sixpack using Swiss banks. How the world might be _different_ or _better_ if crypto and remailer and ecash uses were very widespread is not the issue. The issue is that selling to such users is difficult for many logical reasons and that efforts are better spent developing the technologies and markets in such a way that maybe Joe Sixpack will someday follow. I am willing to admit that it is possible that Cypherpunk notions could be "driven from the bottom up." but I see no evidence for this. And I see much evidence that the technologies will be adopted by "those who care" (those who have something to hide, in common parlance). An interesting topic, to be sure. --Tim May "Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events following 9/11/2001