Bob, let me do a minor vent here.

Fine, Tim. Vent away. In a minor key, even.

You are critical of E. Allen Smith's viewpoint, and essentially question whether he has anything to sell. Not much of an argument.

It's a damn good argument, which I'll get to in a minute. It was just done rudely, and for that I apologise to the list. What I got was a reactionary flame which had nothing to do with the (admittedly flag-waving) post I put up, which I should have ignored, but instead I responded with a reactionary flame of my own, which got me a reactionary flame from a Senior Member of the List, one with Maximum Reputation... It has been ever thus, for those of you who've been around here since I showed up a year ago last April. I just can't seem to color inside the lines, as far as Dr. May is concerned.

1. I'm not selling anything, and won't sign up just for "moral support."

I believe that was my point, Tim. You're *not* selling anything. I was sending a message to people out there who *are*. People who are, or are going to, use non-certificate payment methods, like credit cards, and who, if they're subscribed to this list, should be clueful enough to do this and know why they should do it. Besides that, it's free. Until Friday. ;-).

2. I wish Mark Twain Bank well, but the success of the kinds of digital cash we hope to see will not likely hinge on the success of one particular operations, such as MTB.

Nope. But if people completely ignored the Wright Brothers, would Curtiss have entered the market? (An interesting example, as the Wrights sued Curtiss for patent enfringement and lost, I think.)

3. The success of BankAmericard (later renamed Visa) came when real customers and real shops started to use it, not when early pioneers set themselves up as clearinghouses and whatnot.

I am talking about real shops. With real customers. I bet you haven't even looked at the list of shops yet. What I'm planning to do is to offer subscriptions and sponsorships of the e$ lists we're putting up on an ecash server. Putting my money where my mouth is. Literally.

I have more interesting things to do, personally, than to be a pioneer so I can then have nothing to sell, and little to buy....when "interesting markets" start to appear, I'll look at it again.

This is a straw man, Tim. Actually, it's post hoc. "If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs." or, "If we lived here, we'd be home now." Feh. You can do better than that. I've seen you do it. But, to answer your nonexistant point, yes, people *are* starting to sell things on the net. We know that the best way to do that in the long run is with cash, and with other digital bearer certificate technologies. Not just because these methods are secure. Not because they allow anonymity. They're just starting to, and when they've been accepted in the market, they will be nothing else but. All we need is a scenario where the digital cash underwriter relies upon the ATM system for validation of identity, and the second an anonymous bank account uses the underwriter, we have totally anonymous digital cash. We're very close here.

But when you urge people to be pioneers, and they express reservations or doubts about the system, attacking their motives or implying they have nothing to sell anyway is not too helpful.

Yes. it was rude. I apologise both to the list, to Dr. May, and to (soon to be Dr.) Mr. Smith. Mostly for stopping discussion with a thinly veiled insult.

Just my views, but, then, I don't have any customers either.

Which brings me to my real point, here. Why I used an informal fallacy of my own, and lashed out with an ad hominem attack against someone with an .edu domain on their e-mail address, after they dissed something I think is a good idea, at least for a start. So, why did I do this? I didn't understand it at the time, but it's probably class warfare. :-). I just heard something on an NPR(!) talkshow with a guy talking about his book about the three power group of american culture. It used to be what he called the "episcopacy", the Groton-Harvard-State Department types who ruled both government and the guts of American business until say, the depression and World War II. These people were there primarily there because their families were there. They were "the nice people of Boston" that Rose Kennedy had so many problems with. In 1953, say, it may interest you to know, that the standardized test scores for Harvard were the same as those for the population at large. George Bush was one of these, but so was FDR. Nowadays, this guy says, (I can't remember who he is, but he wrote a book about it, so we'll find out soon enough), we have *three* power elites in this country. The first class is the class he called the "mandarins". These people have inherited most of the trappings, and titles, of the old episcopacy. These are people who tested well, who were typically plucked from obscurity to go to the best schools, and go on to places like Harvard, where the scores are now way above average, and is now pretty much pure meritocracy as far as admission is concerned, political correctness aside. Mandarins go on to get advanced degrees. Camille Paglia, Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan, Billary Clinton are all mandarins. This is good. The best and the brightest get the best educations. They're also the people who start things like the Viet Nam war, and the welfare state. The second class are the "lifers". These people who go to state schools, get uninspired grades, and spend their working lives in the same institution. Colin Powell, most Fortune 500 CEOS circa 1983, Lyndon Johnson and Bob Dole are lifers. The third class are "talents". Newt, and Edison, and most computer or internet entrepreneurs are talents, especially if they have no formal computer science training except what they taught themselves. Like any set of categories, nobody is exclusively one class or another, except that credentialism has allowed mandarins to capture the cultural flag for the time being. Einstein and Whit Diffie are talents who got mandarin credentials. Richard Stallman is a talent who will probably get mandarin credentials posthumously.;-). Bill Gates is a proto-mandarin who figured out he was a talent. Sloan was a talent with mandarin credentials who created a whole industry full of lifers. Pioneers tend to be talents, Tim. They tend to talk in generalities, and not color between the lines. They tend to make up rules as they go along, and sometimes, like Mr. Bill, they create rules the rest of us have to follow whether we want to or not. One of my messier theories about the internet is that it was invented by mandarins. Now the talents, the people you call pioneers, have moved in, and they're much more pragmatic, and have little patience for crystalline perfection, because inefficiency and chaos is where they find beauty, joy, and all those other nasty imprecise concepts. When thing settle down a bit, the lifers will come. They're trying to do it now, by building sites like www.time.com, or buying into sites like www.wired.com. Even though you're an iconoclast, Tim, I couldn't help but think of you and the proto-Dr. Smith as mandarins when I got you're response to my post. I was trying to shout over your heads to all the talents out there trying to make money on the net. Even though you may think of yourself as a mountain man -- or maybe a cowboy -- watching the settlers come, I feel more like I've upset the decorum by hollering in the faculty tea room. Having embarrassed myself that way, I'll try not to do it again. Because, oddly enough, we need each other. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://www.webstuff.apple.com/~vinnie/Rah

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