On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
At the June meeting I drew a graph which makes the point clearly. A pity I can't draw it here. (Yeah, there are ways. My new Web page should have some drawings soon. But this list is about ASCII.)
Plot "Value of Being Untraceable in a Transaction" on the X-axis. This is the perceived _value_ of being untraceable or private. Start with "little or nothing," proceed to "about a dollar" then to "hundreds of dollars" then to "thousands" then to "tens of thousands and more." (The value of being untraceable is also the cost of getting caught: getting caught plotting the overthrow of the Crown Prince of Abu Fukyou, being outed by a corporation in a lawsuit, being audited by the IRS and them finding evaded taxes, having the cops find a cache of snuff films on your hard disk, and so on.)
Unfortunately the situation is more multi-variant than a simple two-axis graph... There needs to be at least a time axis added as well as splitting out the 'cost of transaction' from the 'cost of anonmymity'. By combining the two a whole zoo of behaviours are ignored. Your graph, and any point from it, isn't worth looking at in anything less thana 5-axis phase space. -- ____________________________________________________________________ natsugusa ya...tsuwamonodomo ga...yume no ato summer grass...those mighty warriors'...dream-tracks Matsuo Basho The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------