-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 3:13 PM -0600 on 12/7/00, Somebody wrote:

I have enjoyed your contributions to the cypherpunks mailing list, and have noticed that you are very knowledgeable, particularly about the subject of anonymous digital currency. I was hoping that, if you have an opportunity, you could provide me with a list of published works you recommend for gaining more knowledge about the concepts behind anonymous digital currency and it's associated problems. I have referenced your web sites, and I am working may way through your Geodesic Economy writings. Any other sources you recommend would be very helpful.

Thank you. What a very nice thing to say. Cool. Fan mail. There are lots more people on cypherpunks, the above lists, and other places, who know way more about both finance and crypto than I do. However, I do try to make it up in enthusiasm, if not quality... I've bashed out bibliographies for people before, and this one may be different, but here's something to start out with. Probably I'd start out with Schneier's Applied Cryptography, making a beeline for the digital cash section. I've heard that the pros now use the CRC handbook of crypto, but this is the one I read first, when it came out in 1994 or so. It's the closest thing cypherpunks have to a Boy Scout Handbook. Then, I'd go to the Springer-Verlag site and order all the proceedings of the Financial Cryptography conferences since 1997. That, in theory, should back up all the grandiose claims I make in the Geodesic Economy articles on the IBUC site. Or, at least, I wave my hands in their general direction... Having read those, you now know everything I pretend know about cryptography, financial or other. :-). Then, I'd get a good history of money. My favorite these days is Gwynn Davies', um, "A History of Money". It's a marvellous tome of everything money. After that, I'd go get some finance in my head. The following stuff is dated, and there may be better, but it's what I ended up reading back then, and, at the very least, some of them are good pointers to more recent stuff. In the pre-Amazon days, I'd say go to a good college bookstore to find them, but now, we know better, right? :-). First off, I'd start with "Capital Ideas", a nice, and completely verbal, history of the rise of modern financial theory, from about 10 years ago, written by one of the premier academic editors in finance. After that, I'd get Fabbozzi's Fixed Income Mathematics, a small book as Fabbozzi's books go, but packed with lots of geeky finance formulae to turn into code, and what they all mean. Then, for fun, and so I had something to discuss with grey-haired guys in suits, I'd read Graham and Dodd's "The Intellegent Investor", sort of the principia (non-)mathematica of value investing, still relevant three-quarters of a century after it's writing, the touchstone of people like Warren Buffett. Finally, I'd go read what an MBA knows :-), and get Sharpe's "Investments" and follow it up with Brealey and Meyers' "Corporate Finance". For politics, I'd go read David Freidman, son of Milton, well-known law-and-economic professor and anarcho-capitalist. "The Machinery of Freedom" is a good start, because his thesis there is that we really don't need the nation-state for much. It's a pre-crypto book, 1970-something, and now that we think we know how to get there from here, it's a good idea to read a serious modern treatment of anarchy without 19th century pictures of swarthy European-Americans throwing bombs at guys in spats. In that vein, I'd also take a look at "Njall's Saga", an Icelandic saga about a, um, turn of the last-millenium multi-generation blood-feud :-), (the Penguin version is a good one), for a nice non-state governance example. And, of course, there's Vernor Vinge's story "The Ungoverned" for a more modern take on the same. The final political book is, Hayek's 50-year-old, and completely prescient, classic "The Road to Serfdom". Hayek's a good place to stop, because he's also a gateway to the so-called "Austrian" economists, like von Mises, who, while disdaining what they called "scientism" -- over-reliance on mathematical economics -- also believed, quite strenuously, in private currency. Hayek's arch-nemesis Keynes, of course, never saw a nation-state he didn't like, and thought that private currency should be illegal... There. How's that? Cheers, RAH Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQEVAwUBOjAQdcUCGwxmWcHhAQGvcgf/df+6qd5JOx/p8HLtIKZTmw04IWbv8OgR PLxlHB6fZfl2ms/UmtxcYo1EgpxlkRYIcpOzQ52YUv1JMTVJYaBi0vV46ZKUy4yo Bbgad71czy39h0UY66a/tlUWDDoOLQMmlSSfgWgzNAx0qX5g0ntvU4QjeNXBXxeH hJEMfx0maHavMKFGbliIYiptliHDTTs9j++/dbW80fY9F9fpEb7qXqW8JVTQoZFs R3ymtE7VMB50BQMa+u5/H4RJ7OgGJGLIc1uPD2WaIa5XduT34UmtO7uXL3y5VF57 DE/xVxaGjA28+ZhFH0WNqe5yW95s42ZCptaEY1oUzSTG2yC+jmCzlg== =IquT -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'