At 5:45 PM -0700 4/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:

Okay, as some have pointed out, I've been a little too flip in assuming that people's nyms will "vanish" if they get into real trouble.

It's true that nyms like "Pr0duct Cypher", which represent the authorship claim to years of code and writing, are not going to be abandoned over a $10 transaction, and if P. Cypher were to put that nym on the line for a deal, I wouldn't hesitate to accept it.

The problem arises because the means of building reputation are so utterly ill-defined. Having read P. Cypher's list contributions and software, and having a public key to check his/her/their signatures against, suffices in an individual case.

"Ill-defined," yes. Just as the form of corporations was ill-defined in the 1850s. Just as the form of derivatives markets was ill-defined as recently as 1980. Just as many things have been ill-defined...until the form emerges. It's a failure of analysis to assume that because the form of a market, or a medium, or whatever cannot be imagined in advance that the market or medium or whatever will not come into being. This is the burden of central planners, to try to imagine how all the little bits and pieces will work, how money and labor will flow from one place to another. No wonder they usually opt for simple brute-force controls (which fail, of course). The emergent behavior point of view, outline in Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control," is that we don't know the form of most structures yet to emerge. Reputations are very common, in many walks of life. The movies we hear about and choose to see or not see are a composite coming together of many reputations of actors, directors, themes. Is the algorithm for this "ill-defined"? Sure. I doubt anyone knows even their own algorithms for deciding to see "Blow" instead of "Enemy at the Gates." Does the fact that reputation systems for restaurants, books, employers, people, and politicians are so vague, so nebulous, so proteanly malleable mean that we don't make choices?

But commerce - large, heavy, routine commerce between relative strangers, which is the fundamental strength of our markets, requires there to be some standard format or method of presenting reputation capital that can be checked. The only thing I can think of is a set of endorsements verifying deals done already. But that is exactly the information that most of you say you don't want disclosed.

You again are trying to solve the Whole Enchilada. You look for ways that the existing economy can be transformed into a crypto anarchy. No credible commenter here has ever said this is a realistic thing. I look for interesting markets to become Blacknet kinds of markets. Then we'll see what structures evolve.

Escrow agents and reputation agents definitely help -- they can overcome a lot of difficulties involving who gets paid what and when. But now you've got a third party in your deal, charging vigorish when one of your main hopes was to get away from the tax man charging vigorish.

Again, you misstate what you think the intended use is. In any case, the clearing costs of many such transactions are not likely to be anywhere as high as taxes are. In the case of the offshore/cyberspace credit ratings, for example, there is no reason to expect the transaction costs to be even as high as they are in the U.S. Probably lower, as legal fees will will be lower. The motivation for this particular market is not avoiding taxes on the transaction. --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