At 8:03 PM -0700 4/3/01, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
Declan and Jim both seemed to have missed the point about Cypherpunks. I've attended physical meetings, off and on, since meeting #2 or #3 in the Bay Area.
I'm not uncomfortable being called--or calling myself--a libertarian, but one of the first things that the meetings revealed was that we had attendees from all corners of the political arena. And as a result, we soon saw that nothing would ever get discussed--much less done--if we focused on our political DIFFERENCES instead of our community of interest.
Indeed, and this was apparent at the earliest meeting. I make no effort to hide my political views, especially in my writings, but at physical meetings there is very little political debate. (Sometimes it cannot be resisted, as when a well-meaning-but-confused liberal lefty called for a Cypherpunks-endorsed "master root key" (or whatever the top-down key hierarchies are pushing). I just _had_ to leap up and explain why we don't need no steenking heirarchical key bindings and why the distributed, anarchic, peer-to-peer model is so much more compelling.) Because people are freer to make their politics obvious in writings, as opposed to a limited amount of time forum like a physical meeting, the _list_ is in many ways more political than the physical meetings are.
What is that community of interest? It is the fight for privacy, against those who would deny it to us, primarily through technological (as opposed to political) means. As long as we all kept our eyes on that prize, we had no problem getting along. When we got diverted into other areas of politics/philosophy we ended up accomplishing nothing.
So, do the participants of this list wish to actually get something done with regard to securing privacy, or shall we just spin our wheels in internecine warfare?
I don't see this internecine warfare. I see a few mild comments. I see a newcomer, Seth Finkelstein, harshly criticizing Declan and others. Easy to ignore someone who was even't here the day before yesterday. In fact, much got accomplished over the past nine years. Many on the list moved into positions at various crypto, software, and digital signature companies. This is the curse of success, or the curse of being on a cresting wave: many are called away. The most obvious lacking bit is a workable 2-way-untraceable digital cash system. Magic Money was a start. Ian Goldberg and Doug Barnes had good ideas on implementing a kind of Pretty Good Digital Cash, but both were heavily tied-up over the past several years in commercial ventures, of course. The list is not what it once was, for various reasons. So be it. Part of the natural cycle of things. We can hope that the key ideas have already been well-publicized. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns