Re: Pricing Mojo, Integrating PGP, TAZ, and D.C. Cypherpunks
Some thoughts on digital cash. First, using anonymous cash to purchase physical goods online means giving up much of the benefit from the anonymity. If you have to give a delivery address, they obviously know who you are. It's still slightly better than using your Visa card because only the seller learns your address rather than a centralized agency that knows all of your purchases. But it's hardly worth it. Second, using digital cash for purchases in the real world (grocery stores etc) is pretty much impossible today and relatively pointless anyway since physical cash exists. There might be some slight advantages in terms of not having to carry cash, resistance to theft, etc., but from the privacy perspective, things are about as good as they are going to get in the physical world. It's only going to go downhill from here. It may not be as bad as Scott "Get Over It" McNealy claims but realistically the use of surveillance cameras and face recognition systems is going to increase. Third, this leaves the use of digital cash to purchase information goods and services online. The problem is, few companies have succeeded so far in selling information goods online, and the problems have nothing to do with the payment system or privacy issues. With self-contained products like music and software, piracy is rampant. There are some service businesses which are producing and selling information successfully, but usually they are in the B2B market where privacy is less of an issue. Fourth, the significant exception is of course pornography, and we've had debates about whether it would make sense to create a privacy-protecting electronic payment system that catered to the porn market. It's profitable, it's information, and there are significant privacy considerations for some customers. Unfortunately the greatest sensitivity to privacy comes with illegal products like child pornography. And the Reedy case has to be a significant cautionary tale. Thomas Reedy was proprietor of an age verification service which had a couple of overseas child pornographers among its customers; he ended up with life imprisonment for what was essentially a payment collection service. Any digital cash system for the porn market would therefore have to screen its clients (the sellers) very closely. It's the buyers to whom you are selling privacy, not the sellers, so this is not inconsistent with the business model. But it could be expensive. And by eliminating illegal porn you would be turning away much of your potential business, leading to a constant temptation to cross the line as Reedy did. Can we identify other markets, other applications where cash or cash-like technology can be useful? MojoNation is a good example. Their mojo is intended to be a cash substitute to optimize load balancing and data distribution. Unfortunately the MN network lacks compelling content and the economy is still crude. But the idea is sound; P2P networks which reward providers of information should flourish. The slashdot quota system is another example. Also, various "warez" sites work on an exchange basis, where people get credit for uploading files which gives them authorization to download. Imagine if all these systems could be served by a single virtual currency, where resources and work donated in one forum earned points which would entitle you to privileges in another. Eric Hughes proposed something similar back in the days of the text-based MUD and MOO online games, so that you could transfer quota from one system to another. Or consider the example recently where several people expressed interest in having someone go back to the early cypherpunk archives and select interesting threads. What if each of us had some virtual cash we could transfer to whomever did the work. The point is that there is a possibility today for an online market in informal, peer to peer style information services. There is work to be done, services to provide which remain entirely in the virtual world. If you could be rewarded for work you do online with "cash" that would allow you to request similar services from others, the monetary system can get off the ground. This might be a more promising start for a virtual currency than attempts to tie it immediately to dollars.
I don't mean to take issue with much of what Anonymous writes, but some of the examples mentioned can be taken care of adequately by existing payment systems. Using Amazon's payment system (they have two types, voluntary and pay-for-content), a webmaster can charge as low as $1, I believe, for content, and Paypal is another option. Naturally, they don't do micropayments, and they don't offer the type of anonymity that other systems do, but the early-cypherpunk-archive- editing project, for instance, wouldn't require anon payments in ha'pennies either. -Declan On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 05:04:03PM -0700, Anonymous wrote:
Imagine if all these systems could be served by a single virtual currency, where resources and work donated in one forum earned points which would entitle you to privileges in another. Eric Hughes proposed something similar back in the days of the text-based MUD and MOO online games, so that you could transfer quota from one system to another. Or consider the example recently where several people expressed interest in having someone go back to the early cypherpunk archives and select interesting threads. What if each of us had some virtual cash we could transfer to whomever did the work.
The point is that there is a possibility today for an online market in informal, peer to peer style information services. There is work to be done, services to provide which remain entirely in the virtual world. If you could be rewarded for work you do online with "cash" that would allow you to request similar services from others, the monetary system can get off the ground. This might be a more promising start for a virtual currency than attempts to tie it immediately to dollars.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 8:57 PM -0500 on 11/20/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
I don't mean to take issue with much of what Anonymous writes, but some of the examples mentioned can be taken care of adequately by existing payment systems.
Using Amazon's payment system (they have two types, voluntary and pay-for-content), a webmaster can charge as low as $1, I believe, for content, and Paypal is another option.
Naturally, they don't do micropayments, and they don't offer the type of anonymity that other systems do, but the early-cypherpunk-archive- editing project, for instance, wouldn't require anon payments in ha'pennies either.
In other words, the cost of anything is the foregone alternative? You get what you pay for? :-) The risk-adjusted transaction cost of a new payment mechanism, or of any market using those payments, has to be significantly cheaper than anything it replaces or nobody will give a damn. Think of the enormous cost differential between batch or interactive book-entry settlement and the former physical delivery of paper bearer certificates if people want a good example of that kind of supply-push phenomenon. Path dependency, is, of course, a crock, or we wouldn't have progress. The reason that Windows, or VHS, or QWERTY won is because they're the same cost, or cheaper to use, than Mac, or Betamax, or Dvorak, and just simply because everyone uses them already and they're too 'stupid' or 'lazy' to change to something 'better'. Nonetheless, the accumulated comparative advantage of a currently-universal transaction method like book-entry settlement can become considerable over time, which is why I don't think simple anonymity, even in specialized internet markets, like those for information goods and services -- or illegal transactions -- is going to ever sell very well all by itself. In order for the adoption of anonymous payments, universal or otherwise, those payments have to be valuable to *everyone* in a given marketplace. Even if early adopters might have special circumstances for trying them in the beginning, those transactions have to be cheaper, and less risky, than any other way of exchanging, clearing, and settling a given transaction. That's for each and every single user of that transaction, and not on some nebulous, transfer-priced "social-cost" basis, but in the raw reduction of transaction cost at the time of the transaction's execution, and in the reduction of risk in the period between the transaction's execution and its clearing and settlement. Fortunately, there are lots pieces to the transaction-cost calculation, and they are all breaking our way at the moment, hard though that may be to see right now through all the smoke and debris and panicked attempts to maintain order at the expense of personal freedom. As we saw during the multi-day NYSE "holiday" in September, the risk of *not* having an instantaneously-settled, internet-dispersed transaction mechanism has gone up considerably in the past month or so. The resulting market distortion and its economic effects would probably have even been worse if the NYSE had actually been up and trading at the time. Millions of shares worth of transactions would have executed, but might not have then been unable to clear or settle, which could have caused damage to the entire planet's financial system, collapsing float times and inter-market custodial links being what they are these days. This is nothing new for long-time subscribers to this list. As Eric Hughes kept saying when I first got here in 1994, it is immediate and final settlement that attracts the capital and payment system markets to cryptographic protocols like Chaum's blind signatures, and not particularly anonymity. Of course, as cypherpunks probably knew even back then, if you set out to create an instantly-settled network-dispersed transaction settlement mechanism, you converge, quite rapidly, to the use of internet-based financial cryptography protocols which create a pre-authenticated bearer asset transfer, a transaction which executes, clears, and settles all at once, and which, as a result, is completely identity-independent. In fact, it's so secure that you can do the transaction anonymously, which, not entirely coincidentally, is what the best of those protocols were designed to do in the first place. So, ceterus parabus, it's cheaper to operate these anonymously than it is to operate them "transparently" by adding on ledgers and audit trails to something that already works without them. And, anonymity is what we end up with, whether it's what nation-states want or not. Physics causes finance, which causes politics, and not the other way around. That, I believe, will be the great, thumping paradox in all of these erstwhile constrictions on personal freedom. The steadily increasing requirement for absolutely secure, transaction-risk-free robust transactions using the internet will eventually create transactions that regulators can't use at all in law-enforcement, much less repression, and precisely at the time regulators intend to rely on increased transaction surveillance to accomplish their job the way they used to. Even more strangely, the use of those transaction protocols will be inexpensive because they don't require the supervision of regulators -- at all -- in order to prevent transaction fraud. Transparency, as a result, ends up increasing risk-adjusted transaction cost, instead of reducing it. So, that said, I disagree with the crypto-winter scenario, even though as late as last week, and, certainly looking around in September, I would have probably agreed with that distressing assessment. However, I do agree that it's probably time to crawl out from the rubble and make stuff happen again, though for other reasons than the crushing of individual liberty at the hands of a rapacious, totalitarian nation-state... There will almost certainly be further incidents of terrorism, but even now they're already part of the universal background radiation, as it were. If bin Laden and company had nukes they would have used them by now, for instance. If someone, Moslem or not, had figured out a way to aerosolize biochemical agents, rather than putting them into the mail, they would have done that by now as well. It doesn't mean that people won't try, or even succeed later, and maybe even on a larger scale than September 11th, but certainly things aren't going to all fall down immediately, and, in the meantime, making the world safer for freedom, or more properly using freedom to make the world better, is the same priority it has always been, and can be attended to much easier for the time being, with Al Qaeda undergoing a massive reorganization of its staff at the moment. So, as has ever been the case, whoever builds a robust, instantly-settled, identity-independent, internet-ubiquitous transaction mechanism that actually works in production for assets people want to trade in large quantity is going to do quite well for themselves by saving the entire economy a whole lot of money, and not just people suffering from the depredations of an increasingly powerful nation-state. In fact, it's probably safe to say that if further acts of terrorism do happen, they will only accelerate demand for such a system given the technological and economic paradox I talked about about above, and not just from criminals, revolutionaries, or any infocalyptic horseman in-between. It's certainly legitimate to argue, as some do, that freedom is some kind of quasi-religious inherent good. But, as LaGrange said to Napoleon's question about the place of god in celestial mechanics, we have no need of the hypothesis to get the result we want. To my mind, at least, freedom is a necessary and sufficient thing, but it's not *ethically* necessary, or, at least, the ethics of requiring freedom are more economic than mystical, which is as it should be. The reason free economies so dominate the landscape today is because they're more ferociously efficient than tyranny ever is at at developing and allocating resources, precisely because they make their citizens more money in the process. See Mancur Olsen's "Power and Prosperity", for some nice stuff on this idea. His first assumption, that a prince is a bandit that doesn't move, should resonate warmly with cypherpunks everywhere, for instance, and his description of exactly how Stalin was able to compel phenomenal industrial output from an enslaved Soviet labor pool -- and why it didn't matter in the long run -- is a warning to modern thinking Americans if there ever was one. So, seen that light, Britain was much more dangerous than Napoleon or Bismarck ever could have been. America was more dangerous than the Kaiser, Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or their successors. And, now, the emerging geodesic market, including America and the rest of the West, and, more important, an increasing number of meta-national businesses large and small, -- and in spite of a gaggle of quasi-governmental "non-profit" organizations, including, of course, all of Al Qaeda's organizational remorae -- is currently proving itself more dangerous than any neo-feudal totalitarian, national, trans-national, or otherwise. For lack of a better way of putting it, each of those oppressors, like King George and Caligula before them, were bad for business. The technology of economic liberty, including modern finance, ubiquitous internetworks, and secure anonymous cryptographic transaction protocols, will always win over oppression in any form -- political or theological. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.0 iQEVAwUBO/tRf8UCGwxmWcHhAQFYbwf/YSFTRIH4ikeIQQBZm+JcGZCrUNNj59Pl T9GABMCs2ad/V1Z04JYtZ909bIMdzEYhjQR+xAUkBfMu7hC5MvKUGJHgcI77Vtkw eoQvQnv56XvCHrACply6EO3X7Q+DDG42wWpPilSEOaYN4GNXvxYuSDgtL2pSyLSi xZF9PUud6xAoF+AeENkoHH4THhCqWXN1rOHBOIasPj5Chh0YapE8m1TxYVxyxbMh rWsiXMSSdiZoCPyokugHE35PSo/eueqdL81QE0961TLKPyxeei3Jn2EMFetwoxLc 7Jc9KQQycniIfLN/PAvN8zVUO1kVDcToDLQQ3JNIwC4pmyOypx/Irw== =Bp80 -----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'
From R. A. Hettinga:
:So, as has ever been the case, whoever builds a robust, :instantly-settled, identity-independent, internet-ubiquitous :transaction mechanism that actually works in production for assets :people want to trade in large quantity is going to do quite well for :themselves by saving the entire economy a whole lot of money, and not :just people suffering from the depredations of an increasingly :powerful nation-state. ------------------------ But sometimes it seems like it will be a Cold Day in Hell before that happens. (Ryan, would you make this your next project? We'd all appreciate it *ever* so much.) .. Blanc
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 1:09 PM -0800 on 11/21/01, Blanc wrote:
From R. A. Hettinga:
<only operative bits included for brevity>
actually works in production for assets people want to trade in large quantity
But sometimes it seems like it will be a Cold Day in Hell before that happens.
Helps if you're actually plugged into and loading value from, say, the ATM network, or, more fun, something like CREST, or even DTC, getting us what Schear and I called unsponsored network depository receipts, back in the day. Relying on those networks for debit/credit authentication for the loading problem looks sucky on a first approximation, nothing can be farther from anonymous, obviously, but once a fungible, and more important, exchangeable, asset like cash or securities in a custodial account is subsequently reserved in the account of an underwriter and represented in bearer form on the net, it can go anywhere it wants -- until, anyway, it has to go off the net to be put into an identified account again. Someday, of course, the money stays on forever, and that's when things get interesting, and that might happen sooner than we think. Certainly lots of people as has been noted, have figured out ways to mix the money around once it's there, if that's necessary for one thing or another. When IBUC did some work with CRESTCo earlier this year, we figured it would cost about a million pounds to demo, including the work on CREST itself, about 2 million pounds for the lawyers, :-), and a few more mil to go from there into production, not including marketing, if any. Since the white-label ATM hardware/software/account service is out there already, and FSTC's done lots of net-side work already, a plain-old retail cash product might even be faster to do, once the banking community -- and, oddly enough, the regulators who weren't *that* negative on the idea once it was explained to them -- crawl out from their desks someday.
(Ryan, would you make this your next project? We'd all appreciate it *ever* so much.)
Not to un-swash his buckle, and all that, because he really deserves massive kudos for what he's done with HavenCo., but Ryan's already tried that, once before, on Anguilla, if we all remember, and it wasn't at all pretty (cf. Declan's articles earlier this year about the E-Gold/Systemics pissing contest). I figure this is going to have to be a front-door operation, actually resident in a financial-center city like London or New York (Boston would do, I suppose :-)), and not something with servers parked on an artillery platform, however cool that might be to think about at a distance. Fortunately, the economic/technology front door keeps getting opened wider, which, I suppose, was the point of my post to begin with. It's going to happen, sooner or later, and it doesn't really matter who does it first. Even more fun, doing a bearer-form depository receipt instrument collateralized by any security in CREST, including the S&P 500, is completely doable right now, up to and including an ATM patch from CREST to the Link network in the UK. We had proposals flying around as early as March/April last year from people you've heard of and they were completely serious. They just got dot-bombed. Transaction volumes at London depositories, custodians and underwriters, of course, went in the shitter, and nobody wanted to talk about tomorrow anymore while they were dodging bullets today. Pretty spooky, having actual appreciable assets on the net in bearer form, but it really is that close. Or, at least it was that close until September 11. And, like I said before, people shouldn't even afraid of even that anymore. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.0 iQEVAwUBO/wuzcUCGwxmWcHhAQGrvQf/R6DNBfZxtOAcITJwjROWxttZje4iwlv1 GZRP8fl1D4IJBhzJe+t8PgQ37mTaL92wD+Li39Ucf80mYJH1iWEEwHHmWPu1BZ+O hcQheuLcBGoRofnlpMKFZ+tlzI+s7tHfRTtDbGvBn1X+/5o5pddY6n/xFuEPuonb cIVcP9l2/fASh50QqQEm+QtKz9d0EGehde1QTcZgLGITFGIRjiTVgsjdZFeCK0uF moQrP2iWTCj76bN8AiXhQG1AsxA9wBdnRz9Lt2ig9hckpZUmi0zcdxXQvWF5vXVy gTgBtYu/sGDKZevHcx2cAzLtuGqcj6Kj/EA70rcx/SFIkxg8BcTFzQ== =eCLn -----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'
-- On 21 Nov 2001, at 2:02, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
This is nothing new for long-time subscribers to this list. As Eric Hughes kept saying when I first got here in 1994, it is immediate and final settlement that attracts the capital and payment system markets to cryptographic protocols like Chaum's blind signatures, and not particularly anonymity.
People want immediate and final settlement when purchasing rights over assets. They do not want immediate and final settlement when purchasing services, or goods that must be physically delivered. Rather, for physical delivery, they want the final settlement to be as closely tied to actual delivery as possible --they want the arbitration provided by the credit card companies.
So, as has ever been the case, whoever builds a robust, instantly-settled, identity-independent, internet-ubiquitous transaction mechanism that actually works in production for assets people want to trade in large quantity is going to do quite well for themselves by saving the entire economy a whole lot of money
In such a system, the digital certificates must ultimately reflect control over assets, in other words they must be functionally equivalent to bearer bonds and, more importantly, bearer shares. Needless to say, bearer shares are illegal almost everywhere. Any system that does what you describe must be located in a haven, and will be met by great wrath. Often repressive countries, notably Ireland and China, offer very free market conditions to foreign investors, while keeping the assets of their own nationals under rigid control. In this situation nationals furtively export their capital, then reimport their capital under the appearance of being foreign capital. Havens are used to launder this capital, and bearer shares and similar mechanisms are used by the nationals to keep control over this seemingly foreign capital. Thus even if the system you describe is simply a more efficient settlement system, it is also a system that will immediately enable large numbers of people to illegally escape repressive controls on capital. Thus just as any genuinely privacy protecting micropayment system will promptly be used to pay for child pornography, any genuinely efficient assets trading mechanism will immediately be used to escape governmental controls, and is already illegal on that basis. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG /HCJqlSn3M4Klt9t8tiB0gTVB2FE73axuvLxehHY 41FYMJp89a/coN4Ux+WrfrKr0lti8BSoMRE2htbET
On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Anonymous wrote:
than using your Visa card because only the seller learns your address rather than a centralized agency that knows all of your purchases. But it's hardly worth it.
A friend of mine was considering a business plan for physical remailer+ "infomediary" for a class project a year or two ago. Precisely to get around this problem. Sell learns the remailer's address. More than a few remailers and you can chain them, etc. etc. He was thinking about it in terms of the single proxy model, but if the idea ever took off enough to have multiple competitors, you could try a MIX-net. I don't think I ever pointed this out to him. I'll have to ask him whatever came of the project.
technology can be useful? MojoNation is a good example. Their mojo is intended to be a cash substitute to optimize load balancing and data distribution. Unfortunately the MN network lacks compelling content
Right - it's for optimizing load balancing and data distribution. Roughly stated, it seems to me to be a DoS prevention mechanism. It's not at all clear that Mojo will ever be meaningfully convertible to "real" money, at least not to me. but then again, I'm often unclear.
and the economy is still crude. But the idea is sound; P2P networks which reward providers of information should flourish. The slashdot quota system is another example. Also, various "warez" sites work on an exchange basis, where people get credit for uploading files which gives them authorization to download.
and that in turn is a holdover from the old BBS days. BBSes seem special in that the resources available are so *drastically* limited. A BBS with one phone line could serve one user at a time. When one person is on, nobody else has a shot. So a BBS without upload/download ratios runs the risk of collapsing pretty quick under the weight of leeches and m0es. When I ran a BBS, I ended up removing the files section altogether; I thought messages were the most important part (and in any case, didn't have a large enough HD to hold files...plus didn't want to deal with the tension bewteen running a "free speech" BBS and screening for pirate warez so as to not get arrested.) I think this accounted in part for the obsession with "access level" which seemed common to many BBS users. (On the other hand, I also gave everyone a 90 minute time quota; way more than most people ever used. So perhaps this "quotas or die" doesn't hold true universally. Anyone else have anecdotal evidence from BBSing? ) Anyway, the point is that in such a resource-limited environment, quotas and ratios are basic rationing tools. Use them or die(mostly). When you move to an environment which has more resources, things seem to change. You can get away for longer with less in the way of resource control. So the principle that "networks which reward providers of information should flourish" may be tempered by less which selects for those networks over others. another question -- is Slashdot popular because of its moderation system?
If you could be rewarded for work you do online with "cash" that would allow you to request similar services from others, the monetary system can get off the ground. This might be a more promising start for a virtual currency than attempts to tie it immediately to dollars.
OK, I should *know* this, but -- what about "flooz" and "beenz" ? weren't they something along these lines before they folded? -David
On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 11:45:57PM -0500, dmolnar wrote:
BBSes seem special in that the resources available are so *drastically* limited. A BBS with one phone line could serve one user at a time. When one person is on, nobody else has a shot. So a BBS without upload/download ratios runs the risk of collapsing pretty quick under the weight of [...] (On the other hand, I also gave everyone a 90 minute time quota; way more than most people ever used. So perhaps this "quotas or die" doesn't hold true universally. Anyone else have anecdotal evidence from BBSing? )
Hmm. In the 1980s, I ran a BBS using GBBS on an Apple IIe and later an Apple IIgs with first a Sider ][ 20 MB and then some SCSI 40 MB HDs. GBBS just supported one user at a time, of course (I recall the DiversiDial or somesuch software on the Apple II allowed as many users as you had Super Serial cards or AppleCats), so I had the leech problem. Another way around it was to limit access to the download area to pre-approved users or folks who came with recommendations or folks, as you say, who contributed something first. Some BBSs took this to a bit of an extreme and asked pretty pointed questions, like "what are your latest/best warez?" before assigning an account. -Declan
At 11:45 PM 11/20/2001 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
distribution. Unfortunately the MN network lacks compelling content
Right - it's for optimizing load balancing and data distribution. Roughly stated, it seems to me to be a DoS prevention mechanism. It's not at all clear that Mojo will ever be meaningfully convertible to "real" money, at least not to me. but then again, I'm often unclear.
Very early in its lifetime, the Autonomous Zones/Mojo Nation people said that maybe Mojo would someday be exchangable with real cash, though the assumption was that during the early stages of software development, people were playing with worthless currency for proof-of-concept, and that at some point the old Mojo would be useless or disabled, and people would start using New Mojo instead, where New Mojo might have real value. Since then (that description is meant to be of the state of the Mojo Nation in October 2000 or so), they've abandoned plans for making Mojo valuable and/or convertible to other currencies, and it is only intended as a resource allocation tool and/or DoS prevention mechanism. As far as I know - I stopped paying close attention to them when they shifted focus from a currency-based publishing system to a load-balanced content delivery system - they also give out all the Mojo you care to ask for, free, 10 million Mojos at a time - so it seems very unlikely that the current tokens will ever be convertible to real value, given that sort of inflationary history. And that problem seems to be at the center of Nomen Nescio's sotto voce suggestion that some unnamed cypherpunks work up a currency which can be used to "pay" people for providing information which is of value - I get the impression that s/he is imagining some magic fairy would mint up piles of the currency, and assign it equally to every subscriber, who would then be empowered to pay it to the content providers they liked best. That's very warm and fuzzy and hippy-like, but if these tokens are handed out for free, then what, exactly, is their value? I think the Extropians did something like that, which ended in some sort of fiasco which some cypherpunks were involved in, though I don't know the details and was never a participant in that list/social circle. -- Greg Broiles -- gbroiles@parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961 5000 dead in NYC? National tragedy. 1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National disgrace.
Greg wrote:
That's very warm and fuzzy and hippy-like, but if these tokens are handed out for free, then what, exactly, is their value?
I think the Extropians did something like that, which ended in some sort of fiasco which some cypherpunks were involved in, though I don't know the details and was never a participant in that list/social circle.
I am unfamiliar with the Extropian electronic token experiment, but I as the first person on the planet to have conducted an Ecash-to-fiat currency transaction, I can assure you that somebody out there may well be willing to pay real cash for freely minted tokens. (I was on the Ecash selling side. The USD 35 for which I sold my Ecash beta tokens are still in my filing cabinet). --Lucky
On Sunday, November 25, 2001, at 07:05 PM, Lucky Green wrote:
Greg wrote:
That's very warm and fuzzy and hippy-like, but if these tokens are handed out for free, then what, exactly, is their value?
I think the Extropians did something like that, which ended in some sort of fiasco which some cypherpunks were involved in, though I don't know the details and was never a participant in that list/social circle.
I am unfamiliar with the Extropian electronic token experiment, but I as the first person on the planet to have conducted an Ecash-to-fiat currency transaction, I can assure you that somebody out there may well be willing to pay real cash for freely minted tokens. (I was on the Ecash selling side. The USD 35 for which I sold my Ecash beta tokens are still in my filing cabinet).
I believe Greg may have been referring to a "reputation market" experiment, circa 1993. Each list subscriber was given some number of tokens and then a market in reputations was "declared." People could buy and sell shares in the reputations of anyone, including themselves. The thought was that prices would go up on those reputations people thought the price would go up on. Issues of the "real" reputation were secondary issues (i.e., if people thought someone was a turkey, they probably wouldn't expect his rep to go up, despite the artificial nature of the market). I think the guy who wrote the market software was living in Salt Lake City at the time, but I could be misremembering. I don't remember his name, and my archives from back then are in a jumble. One thing that was interesting was the opportunity to manipulate the market. I offered to buy tokens from others, for cash. One person sold me all of his tokens for the agreed-upon price of $20. I sent him the money and he mailed his tokens to me. I then proceeded to use my extra "wealth" to bid up the value of my own reputation. The tokens were not cryptographically-strong forms of digital cash, but they worked for the intended purpose. (That is, no one tried to forge them, at least not successfully.) --Tim May "The great object is that every man be armed and everyone who is able may have a gun." --Patrick Henry "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." --Alexander Hamilton
On 20 Nov 2001, at 22:54, Greg Broiles wrote:
Very early in its lifetime, the Autonomous Zones/Mojo Nation people said that maybe Mojo would someday be exchangable with real cash, though the assumption was that during the early stages of software development, people were playing with worthless currency for proof-of-concept, and that at some point the old Mojo would be useless or disabled, and people would start using New Mojo instead, where New Mojo might have real value.
Here's my recollection as to how this was supposed to work: 1) people who participated in the beta got free mojo as a reward for participating (they'd keep their mojo when the beta period was over) 2) In the non-beta, people would have to pay (or something) to get a starting stash of mojo 3) I don't think the "Evil Geniuses" ever expected to act as mojo-cash brokers; rather, anyone who had a supply of cash and mojo could act as a cash-mojo broker, and mojo would find its own price.
And that problem seems to be at the center of Nomen Nescio's sotto voce suggestion that some unnamed cypherpunks work up a currency which can be used to "pay" people for providing information which is of value - I get the impression that s/he is imagining some magic fairy would mint up piles of the currency, and assign it equally to every subscriber, who would then be empowered to pay it to the content providers they liked best.
That's very warm and fuzzy and hippy-like, but if these tokens are handed out for free, then what, exactly, is their value?
Right. If the tokens are EVER going to be worth anything, there can't be a way to accumulate then for free. If people have this psychological block against paying "real money" for tokens, maybe it's a good idea to make them trade CPU time for them in one of the seti-like projects. Somebody mentioned something about one involving protein-folding that sounded like it might actually be useful. George
I think the Extropians did something like that, which ended in some sort of fiasco which some cypherpunks were involved in, though I don't know the details and was never a participant in that list/social circle.
-- Greg Broiles -- gbroiles@parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961 5000 dead in NYC? National tragedy. 1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National disgrace.
At 05:04 PM 11/20/2001 -0700, Anonymous wrote:
Some thoughts on digital cash.
First, using anonymous cash to purchase physical goods online means giving up much of the benefit from the anonymity. If you have to give a delivery address, they obviously know who you are. It's still slightly better than using your Visa card because only the seller learns your address rather than a centralized agency that knows all of your purchases. But it's hardly worth it.
Coin (or better yet eGold) operated rental, non-USPS, parcel delivery locker business.
Second, using digital cash for purchases in the real world (grocery stores etc) is pretty much impossible today and relatively pointless anyway since physical cash exists. There might be some slight advantages in terms of not having to carry cash, resistance to theft, etc., but from the privacy perspective, things are about as good as they are going to get in the physical world. It's only going to go downhill from here. It may not be as bad as Scott "Get Over It" McNealy claims but realistically the use of surveillance cameras and face recognition systems is going to increase.
ATMs dispensing currency for ecash
Fourth, the significant exception is of course pornography, and we've had debates about whether it would make sense to create a privacy-protecting electronic payment system that catered to the porn market. It's profitable, it's information, and there are significant privacy considerations for some customers.
Unfortunately the greatest sensitivity to privacy comes with illegal products like child pornography. And the Reedy case has to be a significant cautionary tale. Thomas Reedy was proprietor of an age verification service which had a couple of overseas child pornographers among its customers; he ended up with life imprisonment for what was essentially a payment collection service. Any digital cash system for the porn market would therefore have to screen its clients (the sellers) very closely. It's the buyers to whom you are selling privacy, not the sellers, so this is not inconsistent with the business model. But it could be expensive. And by eliminating illegal porn you would be turning away much of your potential business, leading to a constant temptation to cross the line as Reedy did.
Offshore operation from less prudish countries.
Can we identify other markets, other applications where cash or cash-like technology can be useful? MojoNation is a good example. Their mojo is intended to be a cash substitute to optimize load balancing and data distribution. Unfortunately the MN network lacks compelling content and the economy is still crude. use
Automated publication from file names and meta-data. Removal of limitations of file size enabling publication of high quality video content.
Imagine if all these systems could be served by a single virtual currency, where resources and work donated in one forum earned points which would entitle you to privileges in another. Eric Hughes proposed something similar back in the days of the text-based MUD and MOO online games, so that you could transfer quota from one system to another. Or consider the example recently where several people expressed interest in having someone go back to the early cypherpunk archives and select interesting threads. What if each of us had some virtual cash we could transfer to whomever did the work.
eGold is already available.
The point is that there is a possibility today for an online market in informal, peer to peer style information services. There is work to be done, services to provide which remain entirely in the virtual world. If you could be rewarded for work you do online with "cash" that would allow you to request similar services from others, the monetary system can get off the ground. This might be a more promising start for a virtual currency than attempts to tie it immediately to dollars.
eGold has shown a substantial and profitable, though still not mainstream market, exists for an unregulated electronic currency. A similar system tied to dollars, pounds or marks, is greatly desired. steve
-- On 20 Nov 2001, at 17:04, Anonymous wrote:
Third, this leaves the use of digital cash to purchase information goods and services online. The problem is, few companies have succeeded so far in selling information goods online
As you mention below, pornography is the big exception. Of course, control over assets is also an informational good, though not one that has been successfully put online yet. The cypherpunk dream will be close to realization when liability is limited not by the decree of the state but by the difficulty of discovering who the owners of a business are. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG omb+0fl57agPOUEzge7hMd8nVf7S5Qhuhj8H1YWY 4y+BQDxfgXp2UJcabXRe61UEv+6AWGmQpItvkZ9ym
participants (11)
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Anonymous -
Blanc -
Declan McCullagh -
dmolnar -
georgemw＠speakeasy.net -
Greg Broiles -
jamesd＠echeque.com -
Lucky Green -
R. A. Hettinga -
Steve Schear -
Tim May