Re: Making Money in Digital Money
All this talk about digital payments is a real blast from the past. Not just because it's all been said before; but because of how it demonstrates that cypherpunks are still stuck in the early 1990s as far as their world view. Every one of these discussions might have been made five or even ten years ago (with the possible exception of the details of Brands technology, which isn't fundamental). Yet the internet world has changed enormously since then. Most of these changes have passed the cypherpunks by. All the P2P work, file sharing, Freenet, IIRC, weblogs, WiFi, open source, open spectrum; for the most part it's as if none of this exists, in the world of the cypherpunks. The problem with these discussions of digital payments is so fundamental that it's amazing that no one mentions it: anonymous payments are useless. The world hasn't evolved the way cypherpunks thought it might, ten years ago. Yet the reality doesn't sink in. Anonymous payments for physical goods are pointless because you can't deliver them anonymously. Everyone has recognized that from the beginning. So they always envisioned them being used for information goods. Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today. You can't build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world where people expect to get their information goods for free. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read someone like James Donald claiming that MP3s are a micropayment market. Wake up, gramps! My God, nothing could make you sound more like a clueless refugee from the 90s than a statement like that. It's a perfect illustration of how irrelevant the cypherpunks have become. At one time, cypherpunks, with their libertarian and anarchocapitalist views, assumed that the online world was turning into Galt's Gulch, a world where people would constantly pay for exchanges of information. What they didn't foresee is that it turned instead into a communist utopia, where each supplies according to his abilities, and each takes according to his needs. And it works online, unlike in the physical world, because no matter how much each person takes, there's still plenty for everyone else. Information doesn't get used up. Unless cypherpunks open their eyes to the reality around them, instead of seeing what they want to see, they are going to continue to be part of the past rather than part of the future. Ironically, Tim May's racist prediction for "the colored race" has become the truth for the cypherpunks: they are "headed for the trash heap of history, courtesy of their own choices." And with views like those, cypherpunks are the ones truly deserving of his final comment: "Fuck 'em."
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 10:30 PM +0200 4/28/03, Nomen Nescio waxed all Fermi on us and popped his bulb with the following bit of incandescence:
Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today. You can't build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world where people expect to get their information goods for free.
Who here actually believes that digital goods and services are
actually free to produce?
Hands?
Anybody?
No?
I thought so.
Right now, the way things are going, according to the popular wisdom,
there is *one* way to have auction markets for digital goods and
services on a public network. You can have digital rights management
and book-entry is-a-person transaction execution, clearing, and
settlement all the way through I/O: *through* the processor,
*through* the display device, *through* the keyboard. Sniffers and
bugs everywhere, biometrics everywhere. Internet property as
perpetual proctology.
I say that that's too expensive, no matter how you count the cost.
So, yes, using *1992* era ideas, you can have digital bearer cash
settled auction markets in the internet for anything you can digitize
- -- the only stuff that matters in an information society where the
price of raw materials is fast approaching 1% of GDP, where the cost
of manufacturing is falling through 15% of GDP, and where, frankly,
the cost of even *software*, stuff you can copy, by definition, heck,
even digital financial assets, the assets that matter, even now, all
of that, is going to fall in the same direction, because copying and
distribution costs are almost perfectly efficient across a, say it
again, class: ubiquitous geodesic internetwork.
So, how do you do this? Easy. For software, the first copy is
auctioned for cash. Then the second copy, wherever it is on the
network, is auctioned for cash, and so on, until nobody's buying any
more copies, across the whole network. This is the oldest model of
trade there ever was. It's how red ochre from Maine ended up in
Neolithic tombs in Ireland. It's how Homo Habilis traded raw rocks
for finished hand axes across hundreds of miles of African savanna.
The Agorics guys called it the "digital silk road" for obvious
reasons.
For most digital goods, you just need to digitally sign the copies,
and you're done. Look Ma, no lawyers. Okay, no legislators and
regulators. No intellectual property attorneys. No "is a person", or
"know your customer", or other mystifications of identity. Funny
thing about this is, you'll notice the people who make the most new
stuff the most often get the most money in a single product's value
chain. Which is, oddly enough, exactly what we do now -- ask a movie
star -- only we'll be doing it cheaper.
For financial assets, you use the same kinds of financial
cryptography protocols that you used to do the cash, only you trade
some other asset using another, or even the same, protocol, depending
what kind of asset you want. Actual bits that can only exist on the
net in a single place at a time and keep their value accordingly.
Just like we used to do before the dominance of the telegraph and the
Hollerith card, only cheaper than we do Master Card, SWIFT, or DTC --
or PayPal. Only cheaper.
For digital services, discrete (single opinions) or continuous
(streaming telepresence or -operation), the person whose key has the
best reputation in the market gets the most money. Just like now.
Only cheaper.
So, like Fermi said, why isn't it here, already?
Easy. We haven't *really* built it yet. For any of a number of
reasons, including what I think is the most important, the book-entry
networks hadn't grown themselves into the internet well enough yet.
Maybe, by now, they have. I think so, personally, but like the
proverbial orifice, everyone's got an opinion, and most people don't
want to hear them.
They want to see code. More to the point, they really don't give a
damn about code, really, either. They want to see money on the net,
dramatically cheaper than money on the net is now. Money that enables
them to buy things they couldn't buy before. Even if they got it for
"free". What they "expect" now has nothing to do with what they
"expect" in the future. That, boys and girls, is a fundamental fact
of financial economics: The price of something today, or in the past,
has absolutely *nothing* to do with the price of that same thing in
the future. Go run a few scatter plots and figure that out for
yourself; though you're too late for the economics Nobel. That's so
1970's.
So, let me ask you this, folks: the second there *is* money in what
you do, *exactly* what you're doing now for free, do you think you'll
do it for free anymore?
Show of hands?
Anybody?
No?
I thought not.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
On Tuesday 29 April 2003 00:00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
Who here actually believes that digital goods and services are actually free to produce?
Hands?
Anybody?
The same people who believe that government services and benefits come at no cost: (US-style) liberals and other mental defectives. -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel Guns will get you through times of no duct tape better than duct tape will get you through times of no guns. -- Ron Kuby
At 9:00 PM -0700 4/28/03, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
So, how do you do this? Easy. For software, the first copy is auctioned for cash. Then the second copy, wherever it is on the network, is auctioned for cash, and so on, until nobody's buying any more copies, across the whole network. This is the oldest model of trade there ever was. It's how red ochre from Maine ended up in Neolithic tombs in Ireland. It's how Homo Habilis traded raw rocks for finished hand axes across hundreds of miles of African savanna. The Agorics guys called it the "digital silk road" for obvious reasons.
This view of the Digital Silk Road is quite different from the one described in the paper, "The Digital Silk Road" by Norman Hardy and Eric Dean Tribble http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html. However, Robert will enjoy the section, "No Junk Mail!". Cheers - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Due process for all | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | used to be the | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@pwpconsult.com | American way. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 12:52 PM -0700 4/29/03, Bill Frantz wrote:
This view of the Digital Silk Road is quite different from the one described in the paper, "The Digital Silk Road" by Norman Hardy and Eric Dean Tribble http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html. However, Robert will enjoy the section, "No Junk Mail!".
Fine. We'll call it the "original silk road". :-).
It's Eric Hughes' sanctioned "piracy" distribution scheme, then.
Sorry if I thought they were one and the same.
Vamping on this a bit, an encrypted copy that I have a key for is
*my* property. Somewhere, Ronald Coase is smiling...
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
At 06:19 PM 4/29/2003 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
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At 12:52 PM -0700 4/29/03, Bill Frantz wrote:
This view of the Digital Silk Road is quite different from the one described in the paper, "The Digital Silk Road" by Norman Hardy and Eric Dean Tribble http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html. However, Robert will enjoy the section, "No Junk Mail!".
Fine. We'll call it the "original silk road". :-).
It's Eric Hughes' sanctioned "piracy" distribution scheme, then. Sorry if I thought they were one and the same.
I attended Eric's July 1996 Defcon IV talk on what he called "Universal Piracy". He anticipated many of the potential problems with "recursive auctions" and assumed that most successful content creators would get their money through guarantors, like those that provide movie production investors "completion bonds." Creators would establish themselves by giving away content until they established a sufficient reputation that they could raise money prior to completion or even before commencement of a new work, product or product update. These ideas are now widely credited to J. Kelsey and B. Schneier from their 1998, Third USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce Proceedings paper, "The Street Performer Protocol" http://www.counterpane.com/street_performer.html, and later more widely publicized in a First Monday review article http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/rasch/. Eric refined his ideas at a Cypherpunks meeting that fall (the first one I attended) in his Berkeley house. Its too bad he never published his ideas and got the widespread credit he deserved. steve
On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
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At 10:30 PM +0200 4/28/03, Nomen Nescio waxed all Fermi on us and popped his bulb with the following bit of incandescence:
Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today. You can't build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world where people expect to get their information goods for free.
Who here actually believes that digital goods and services are actually free to produce?
Irrelevant and most decidedly -not- the point he was addressing. A weak strawman at best is what you offer. -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------
At 12:00 AM 4/29/03 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: ...
So, let me ask you this, folks: the second there *is* money in what you do, *exactly* what you're doing now for free, do you think you'll do it for free anymore?
I suppose that explains why nobody ever has sex except for prostitutes. Geez, Bob, sometimes you do it because it's *fun*. This is no less true of making music or writing fiction than it is of having sex or cooking or writing code. (Didn't most good programmers start programming because it was more fun than most anything else they could find to do? I did.)
Cheers, RAH
--John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:33 AM -0400 4/30/03, John Kelsey wrote:
Geez, Bob, sometimes you do it because it's *fun*.
Agreed.
However, try have fun all your life and not getting paid for it.
Artists are a good example, but you can't do that all your life
without money either. There aren't a whole lot of landed aristocracy
in the world, for instance, or even those who live on trust funds. Or
who are even retired. :-).
(Apropos of nothing, some of the worst jobs in the world are those
where one is getting paid to have "fun". Prostitution and bartending,
come to mind...)
Yes, people try to do work that's fun. But the point is to get
*paid*, right?
Like rock and roll, the minute it is possible to get paid to do
something you like, a vast majority of thinking humans would rather
get paid than *continue* to it for free.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
At 12:38 PM 4/30/2003 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
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At 9:33 AM -0400 4/30/03, John Kelsey wrote:
Geez, Bob, sometimes you do it because it's *fun*.
Agreed.
However, try have fun all your life and not getting paid for it. Artists are a good example, but you can't do that all your life without money either. There aren't a whole lot of landed aristocracy in the world, for instance, or even those who live on trust funds. Or who are even retired. :-).
I believe it was Albert Einstein that suggested budding physicists not strive for professional careers but engage in full-time work in some other area (perhaps in a trade). Treat science as an avocation, something that can be successfully pursued in one's spare time. (He did some of his most important work while engaged as a patent examiner). Today, there are still quite a few people engaged in amateur astronomy. They toil night after night taking measurements and making observations. Many might think its all for naught, what could they possibly contribute to serious science now that there is Hubble and are so many large instruments managed by professional astronomers and staffs. And they would be wrong. In the past decade appropriate electronic image sensors have dramatically improved in performance and dropped in price. Smaller amateur instruments, some not all that small, now have many of the capabilities that formerly were the province of the large professional variety prior to such sensors. Also, the sky is vast and most of the professional instruments have very small fields of view. Someone has to tell where to look. Often its the professional astronomers pursuing some esoteric work, but increasingly its the thousands of astronomers and their keen eyes which first spot important amateurs. The result, amateurs (who were not long ago looked upon by professionals as charming relics) are now receiving increased respect and increasingly partnering with professionals on important work (and being named as co-authors of published papers). Of course these amateurs aren't paid, so why or how do they do it? Many are retired and rather than touring in country their mobile homes or watching the grandchildren have embarked on a sort of second or third career. Others take advantage of computers and the electronic sensors to run sky patrol cameras so the telescope does most all the work and they still have their full-time careers. I see no reason why important security, crypto or financial crypto developments must be linked with direct or immediate financial compensation. steve
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 10:58 PM -0700 4/30/03, Steve Schear wrote, at the end of a rhapsody on amateurism:
I see no reason why important security, crypto or financial crypto developments must be linked with direct or immediate financial compensation.
Guys, I'm not saying that people won't do cool stuff for free. I'm
saying that if actual markets emerge for that cool stuff, they'll
damn sure *not* do it for free anymore.
Your exemplar, Einstein, last time I looked, was a *professional*
physicist most of his life. Why? Because various institutions could
hire him, and make money in research budgets, endowment increases,
etc.
To bring this back to digital money then, creating a market, a market
for internet-delivered digital goods and services in this case, is
all bound up with transaction cost. It's literally too expensive to
move the money across the net in direct exchange for bits, so people
exchange those bits for other things, like, say grins, for lack of a
better word. :-).
Right now, to pay for things over the net, even digital goods and
services, we literally send *signals*, instructions, to move money
somewhere *off* of the net: cryptographically tunneling credit card
instructions, or ACH records, for instance. Even PayPal really
happens off the net, and increasingly so -- try to *pay* money from a
PayPal account that's unlinked to a bank account or credit card
sometime. The gold transaction systems are getting closer, to the
extent that transactions execute, clear, and settle on a machine on
the net, even though at least one of those requires is-a-person
identity. Paradoxically, if PayPal were to allow "cul-de-sac"
accounts, accounts where people couldn't move money in and out of
PayPal, but were able to buy and sell stuff in PayPal nonetheless,
with a simple account/password, you'd be closer. e-Gold has done this
for most of a decade, now.
It won't be until we have the ability to get paid, and to be paid --
and, frankly, to invest and earn a return -- all without *ever*
needing recourse to off-net settlement that transaction costs will
fall. The ultimate form of that, and I would claim the cheapest, will
be transactions using internet bearer financial cryptography
protocols.
You put money that's cheap enough to pay for bits as they come down
the wire, and watch the world change.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
On Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 07:44 AM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
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At 10:58 PM -0700 4/30/03, Steve Schear wrote, at the end of a rhapsody on amateurism:
I see no reason why important security, crypto or financial crypto developments must be linked with direct or immediate financial compensation.
Guys, I'm not saying that people won't do cool stuff for free. I'm saying that if actual markets emerge for that cool stuff, they'll damn sure *not* do it for free anymore.
Your exemplar, Einstein, last time I looked, was a *professional* physicist most of his life. Why? Because various institutions could hire him, and make money in research budgets, endowment increases, etc.
Einstein did his 1905-published work on special relativity outside of his paid job, which was examining patent applications for the Swiss government. This would be fully comparable to someone here doing his crypto or CP work while working as a drone (on something else) at Cisco or United Technologies. By the time he did his 1915-published work on general relativity, he had of course received various honorary position at universities. The issue is not that people like you or me or Steve or Einstein should not seek to be paid for our work (good if one can get it). The issue I raised, and that perhaps Steve is agreeing with partly, is that way too many people have had the "Hey kids, let's put on a _show_!" view of doing crypto and digital money startups. The script goes like this: -- have a vague idea that crypto, anonymity, geodesic blah blah, etc. is important -- see a few other companies (RSA, Verisign, ...) which have gone public and made their founders a lot of money (before the crash, of course) -- decide to "seek funding" -- without a specific technology or product already in hand! -- the plan being to raise the several millions (dreams of $30 million) and then hire a bunch of eager programmers and then figure out what, exactly, the product should do Well, this is a flawed "pre-business plan," to coin a phrase. We could spend hours discussing the particular circumstanced which allowed RSA to eventually succeed, what happened at ZKS (as the Adams note, still surviving, but in a dramatically different business), and so on and so forth. And Digicash. Suffice it to say I don't think there's _any_ chance that an MBA type can put together a funding package and _then_ develop a technology...not in this market. --Tim May "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." --John Stuart Mill
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:17 AM -0700 5/1/03, Tim May wrote:
The issue I raised, and that perhaps Steve is agreeing with partly, is that way too many people have had the "Hey kids, let's put on a _show_!" view of doing crypto and digital money startups.
Actually, we're talking about markets for digital goods, copies of
bits that have been made already. Or digital services, selling
opinions, or telesurgery, or whatever, and whether people would make
new bits for free if there was a market for those bits already.
The fact that you can sell them, means that you won't do them for
free, was my point, made, what, 5 times now.
That's just plain common sense, right?
So, having attempted to make a point 5 times, I'm going to quit
repeating myself.
The proof will be data, after all, and we'll see that it means when
and if we get some.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
-- On 28 Apr 2003 at 22:30, Nomen Nescio wrote:
Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today. You can't build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world where people expect to get their information goods for free.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read someone like James Donald claiming that MP3s are a micropayment market. Wake up, gramps! My God, nothing could make you sound more like a clueless refugee from the 90s than a statement like that. It's a perfect illustration of how irrelevant the cypherpunks have become.
At one time, cypherpunks, with their libertarian and anarchocapitalist views, assumed that the online world was turning into Galt's Gulch, a world where people would constantly pay for exchanges of information. What they didn't foresee is that it turned instead into a communist utopia, where each supplies according to his abilities, and each takes according to his needs. And it works online, unlike in the physical world, because no matter how much each person takes, there's still plenty for everyone else. Information doesn't get used up.
If this was true then the proportion of wealth spent on informational goods, and income earned from informational goods, would be smaller and smaller. Instead it is larger and larger. Some kinds of Information continually get used up, as in being no longer relevant to the individual or the situation. This is the kind of information people still pay serious money for. Most of us on the cypherpunks list earn our living producing or transforming information. We expected that by now we would be telecommuting from some tropical isle and being paid in anonymous untraceable money. We were wrong, but it certainly is not because the provision of information has come to accord with some communist utopia. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Ht0YkK2RTNeNCc5cXweyAVYnLJJ0ZbBrk0UKh/gJ 4m0pzbE233OxKkrmLmFD3DqbVBOxPOswAto3cjDOd
On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, James A. Donald wrote:
If this was true then the proportion of wealth spent on informational goods, and income earned from informational goods, would be smaller and smaller. Instead it is larger and larger.
What he was speaking of was the cost to the end user, not the cost to produce. If your point was valid then we wouldn't even be having this discussion, Sony and et al would be smiling not crying. -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------
Anon, I guess Apple then is also stuck in the '90's and their pay $1/song or $10/album is also pining for the golden 1990's. Only time will tell. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Nomen Nescio wrote:
All this talk about digital payments is a real blast from the past.
Not just because it's all been said before; but because of how it demonstrates that cypherpunks are still stuck in the early 1990s as far as their world view.
<SNIP>
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read someone like James Donald claiming that MP3s are a micropayment market. Wake up, gramps! My God, nothing could make you sound more like a clueless refugee from the 90s than a statement like that. It's a perfect illustration of how irrelevant the cypherpunks have become.
<SNIP>
On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Nomen Nescio wrote:
All this talk about digital payments is a real blast from the past.
Not just because it's all been said before; but because of how it demonstrates that cypherpunks are still stuck in the early 1990s as far as their world view.
Most of these changes have passed the cypherpunks by. All the P2P work, file sharing, Freenet, IIRC, weblogs, WiFi, open source, open spectrum; for the most part it's as if none of this exists, in the world of the cypherpunks.
Well, some of them perhaps...
Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today. You can't build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world where people expect to get their information goods for free.
Information wants to be free. Hell, really everything wants to be free. Government and Economics are technologies that mankind developed to sustain their psychologicaly driven societies. Fortunately our societies are becoming technology (ie applied information) driven and this will eventually spell the end of both 'government' and 'economics' as anything resembling what we know today.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read someone like James Donald claiming that MP3s are a micropayment market. Wake up, gramps! My God, nothing could make you sound more like a clueless refugee from the 90s than a statement like that. It's a perfect illustration of how irrelevant the cypherpunks have become.
Don't waste your time doing either, spend that energy on working on the issues that you mentioned that you feel or most important to you. Good luck! -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------
At 10:30 PM 4/28/03 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote: ...
Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today. You can't build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world where people expect to get their information goods for free.
Just a nitpick: Information goods are generally free when they've already been produced, because the second copy costs approximately $0.00 to make. But getting the initial information produced can cost quite a bit. I have worked for many years as a consultant, doing work remotely, and I certainly don't give the information away. Similarly, when I go to the doctor, or have my taxes done, all I'm really paying for is information, but my doctor and accountant expect to be paid. (Alas, the cost of *duplicating* my medical or financial records is very low, which is why there are big privacy issues there, but they weren't so cheap to produce in the first place....) Whether any of that will really ever be worth doing anonymously is an open question. Most of the time, I'd be pretty scared to do business with a doctor that dared not show his face or have his name known to the world, for example. On the other hand, I chose my accountant based on reputation, and generally do business with him remotely. --John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
participants (10)
-
Bill Frantz -
James A. Donald -
Jim Choate -
John Kelsey -
Nomen Nescio -
R. A. Hettinga -
Steve Furlong -
Steve Schear -
Sunder -
Tim May