RE: Your source code, for sale
Michael_Heyman writes:
Finney, Hal (CR):
The problem is that if the source code you are purchasing is bogus, or if the other side doesn't come through, you're screwed because you've lost the value of the torn cash. The other side doesn't gain anything by this fraud, but they harm you, and if they are malicious that might be enough.
Quick fix for seller incentive: the seller rips some amount of their own cash in such a way that they cannot recover it unless the buyer provides the remainder of the buyer's ripped cash.
Yes, I'm looking at ideas like this for ecash gambling, but you have a who-goes-first problem. One side or the other has to "rip" their own cash first, and then the other side can just go away and leave the first side screwed. The act of ripping cash is relatively atomic and involves a transaction with the ecash mint, so they can't both do it at the same time. I guess the best fix is for each side to rip a little bit of cash at a time, so that the guy who goes first only loses a trivial amount if the other side aborts. Then after a few rounds both sides are sunk pretty deep and both have a strong incentive to complete the transaction. Hal
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 10:18 AM -0800 11/5/04, Hal Finney wrote:
Yes, I'm looking at ideas like this for ecash gambling, but you have a who-goes-first problem.
Whenever we talk about financial applications, where the assets represented by one bearer certificate are exchanged for those represented by another, what's really happening is a redeem-reissue process anyway. Since it's the underwriters' reputations you're trusting anyway, we've always assumed that there would be communication between the underwriters in order to execute, clear, and settle the trade all at once. For streaming stuff, we figured that since we were streaming cash for streaming bits, like movies, or content of some kind, you'd just do tit for tat, one stream (cash, probably signed probabalistically tested "coins" in the last iteration that we called "Nicko-mint" :-)) against another, the movie, song, etc being streamed. There's the "missing last 5 minutes" problem, but I think that, in recursive auction-settled cash market for digital goods like this (Eric Hughes' institutional 'pirate' scheme, the 'silk road' stuff, whatever), that there will always be another source to buy what's left from, once the intellectual property issues solve themselves because of the auction process. For things that aren't useful except in their entirety, like code, or executables, (or storing money :-)), I've always been a fan of the Mojo/BitTorrent stuff, where you hash the file into bits, ala m-of-n Shamir secret splitting, and store/buy them from lots of places at once. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQYvH6cPxH8jf3ohaEQIGGACgiS/Uv3KxDK4rM9lozOoxfI5Fg1QAoP7d 4Xw6/SwfaBOqgyh9uQTS/5oa =XMiK -----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'
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