Some thoughts on the recent meetings and what we're doing: 1. The importance of trading physical goods in the Crypto Anarchy Game. This, in my view, has been given undue and misleading importance. Physical goods are inherently easy to trace through remailers (via sniffers, radioactive tracers, weight of packages, and many other physical cues), are hard to store physically (imagine getting 100 parcels for later remailing), and, most importantly, have none of the "envelope within envelope within...." protection accorded to the bits of a cryptographic remailing, or DC-Net, system! The elegance of cryptographic protocols is lost with physical goods. Furthermore, physical delivery of any good, whether drugs, stolen missile components, antiquities and art items, whatever, is fundamentally a hard problem to solve...smugglers and thieves have been dealing this since the beginning of time. Stings can be easily arranged, delivery is not anonymous (one merely watches who takes delivery, or who opens a train station locker, etc....this is all SOP for narcs and counterespionage types), and a raid on a remailing entity will result in confiscation of the physical goods and (likely) prosecution of those caught holding the stuff. (Raiding a bit remailing entity produces only random-appearing bits...granted, the authorities may well outlaw bit remailing, or use the RICO and conspiracy/sedition laws to prosecute, but that's another topic.) Our recent emphasis on physical goods, and all the ideas pouring in on what other kinds of "contraband" besides drugs can be used, is misleading. None of the richness of the cryptographic world is faithfully preserved. I urge we get back to our roots and deal only with things that can be expressed purely in bit form. 2. The "colonization of cyberspace" does not mean there is no interaction with the physical world, of course. But that interaction can be mediated with money made by converting information or digital money into physical money. Several methods for this conversion path can be considered: -Alice sells information in the cyberspace domain for the equivalent of, say, $30,000. She converts this to "real" dollars by using an escrow entity which hold both sides of the transaction until it's completed. They then mail the information to the purchaser and send an ordinary check "for services rendered" to Alice for $30K. She reports it on her taxes, probably as a "consulting fee" (for which essentially no government supervision currently exists, nor is likely to....), and the conversion has taken place. (Note: there are still elements of trust involved, notably involving the escrow agent, but trust works pretty well for many things, especially when reputations are at stake. Understanding how real businesses depend on reputations is a missing part of modern cryptology analyses of transactions...the protocol analyzers and number theorists almost never take into account how reputations work in the real world, But I digress.) -Alice and Bob trade information such that Bob gets the information worth about $30K, as above, and Alice gets another piece of information she can use in the "real world" that is worth about $30K. This might be stock tips, or, better, information she can turn around and sell in the "open market" of a service like AMIX! There are lots of wrinkles, inefficiencies, etc., to be worked out. -And then there is digital money. You all know about this, or should. David Chaum, DigiCash, blinded notes, credentials, etc. The handout for the first meeting had a glossary of terms. (IMHO, we should be spending more of our time at our meeting discussing this, and less in playing more interations of the Game.) The fascinating novel "Snow Crash," by Neil Stephenson, makes a mistake in having Hiro Protagonist a very wealthy man in the Metaverse (Stephenson's term for the virtual reality cyberspace) but a very poor man in the Real World. Information _is_ money. Information is liquid, flows across borders, and is generally convertible into real money. (One simple conversion strategy, alluded to above, is for Alice to sell her information for, say, $500K, and then to receive a "consulting contract," perhaps called a "retainer," of $50K a year for the next 20 years. Her retainer is fully legal, is perhaps handled through cut-outs who specialize in this kind of thing, and is a low-risk way to "launder" money from cyberspace into the real world. I have a lot more to say on these schemes, perhaps later.) 3. Are we emphasizing "The Game" too much? If the goal is to produce a paper-based game, similar to "Monopoly" or fantasy role-playing games, then I suppose more practice is needed. But I'm not sure how worthwhile it is to try to design such a game. (Those who wish to should do so, then commercialize it, and become the Avalon Hill of crypto games!) If the goal is educational, for newly interested folks, then I also question how much more effort should be put into it. The ideas of anonymous remailers, of digital money, etc., are, I think, gotten across in the first 60 minutes of the game, especially if some of the formalism is first explained (as it was at the first game, where digital mixes, tamper-resistand modules for implementing mixes, the "Dining Cryptographers Protocol," and digital money had all been freshly covered, so participants were putting the theory to test). I found the first game was instructive, the second much less so (and _not_ because of the focus on drug selling...that was a relatively minor issue). My impression is that many of the newcomers--and they should jump in here with their own reactions (too bad we don't have hypertext links!)--didn't really know how remailing mixes work, how digital psueodnyms can protect privacy in transactions, and how the "Game" was intended to exercise these concepts. 4. We need to talk about the charter or purpose of the "Cypherpunks" or "Cryptology Amateurs for Social Irresponsibility" (CASI--Eric Hughes's term) group. -Is it mostly educational? -Is it a lobbying group, as are EFF, CPSR, and the like? -Is it to produce remailers, digital money, and other programming? -Is it subversive? Now clearly we can't say it's subversive (any bets on who's gatewaying these messages to Other Listeners?). But we also don't want to skew things toward "YALG" (Yet Another Lobbying Group), nor do we want to be a spoon-feeding educational group for people with a casual (and transient) interest in crypto stuff. 5. There have have been several messages so far about worries about the legal implications of these topics, about how some corporate-affiliated subscribers will desubscribe "real fast" if certain discussion trends continue, and so on. Now we can't please everybody, but maybe we ought to talk about this sensitive issue soon, and _in person_. Since it relates to our charter, Point 4 above, I recommend we do this at our next meeting. I'd favor that over another iteration of the Game. In conclusion, we are in at the beginning of Something Big. While I'm somewhat skeptical about the claims for things like nanotech, I see this whole cyberspace/cryptology/digital money/transnationalism ball of wax being _much_ easier to implement. Networks are multiplying beyond any hope of government control, bandwidths are skyrocketing, CPUs are putting awesome power on our desktops, PGP is generating incredible interest, and social trends are making the time right for crypto anarchy. I look forward to hearing your views. -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP 2.0 and MailSafe keys by arrangement.