I'm cc:-ing this to both lists just this once, because this message is more or less administrative. I'm not trying to merge www-buyinfo with cypherpunks. tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) said:

There is great danger in constantly "casting the net wider," in trying to reach more and more people. I understand the temptation for some on both lists to cross-post some messages. I urge that they do this, as Bob H. has done on occasion, by personally forwarding the message, with only _one_ of the lists getting it. (This because the real danger is as above, where multiple lists are in the recipient or cc: fields, and followups semi-spam multiple lists.)

I agree with Tim. I've been doing one-way forwards from cypherpunks to www-buyinfo for most of a year now. Most of the people on www-buyinfo are business people who understand that digital commerce *is* financial cryptography, but they don't have time to read all of cypherpunks to find the e$ juicy-bits. When I do this, I put a "(cpx)" in the subject line so that the sizable community of cypherpunks on www-buyinfo can filter them out and won't have to see double. I've gotten a lot of fan-mail for this, even though it's not really in keeping with the original charter for www-buyinfo, which seems to have been subsumed by other groups, like the e-payments list and others. Recently Dave Kristol has said that he's going to retool www-buyinfo, and when he does, I'm hoping to have set up my own structure of 3 hypermail archived e$ lists (a netwide e$ digest, a discussion list, and a newsletter). I'm talking to about 3 or 4 different people about it, and I should have the details worked out within a few days, with an announcement next week, if I'm lucky. Anyway, I've sent a few messages in the opposite direction on occasion (from www-buy to c'punx), but I do try to hold it down, mostly because whatever the topic is, we've usually talked about it on cypherpunks before. I should note, however, that there's a good-sized discussion, for www-buy, anyway, going on over on over there about anonymity, which has heated up over the past few days. I forwarded a message here from Nick Szabo as an example of it yesterday. The cross-posting Tim's talking about is a result of that discussion. There's a whole lot of "what do we need anonymity for, anyway?" opinion in the business community, and it should be addressed with as much reason as possible, and not by shouting them down with moral arguments to the contrary, no matter how right those moral arguments are. Fortunately, I believe there's a great business case for anonymity, and frankly, there had better be, because, in a cryptoanarchic geodesic economy like the one we're fixing to have, nothing is going to survive without a market. Anyway, like I said, I agree with Tim. If you want to post to cypherpunks, you should subscribe to cypherpunks, and suffer the firehose like the rest of us have to do. However, those of us who are on both lists, especially those of us longer-term cypherpunks like Hal, and Nick, and Adam Shostack, should be the ones to forward messages, if any, to cypherpunks, because they are the ones who know whether cypherpunks has seen this before. For instance, the posting of Nick Szabo's that I sent to cypherpunks was more of a rah-rah exercise (no pun intended) than anything else. It was so well thought out that I thought it bore passing around a bit. However, as an actual contribution to the information content on cypherpunks, what Nick said has been said on cypherpunks before, if not typically with such eloquence. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell

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