At 12:01 AM 9/10/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

At 5:10 AM 9/10/96, Jon Leonard wrote:

...

Duncan Frissell wrote:

...

Did anyone make the point (I gave up on the thread) that we already have a great Crypto Anarchy MUD with lots of the coding already done. We call it the Internet. Digital cash, strong crypto, remailers, everything.

Tim May expressed doubt that it was worth the effort: Not much easier than the real thing, and not as good. That's the closest to your point, I think. .... Finally, a MUD has the potential to spread crypto-anarchic ideas to people who would not otherwise have considered them.

It may be that I'm wasting my time, but I could come up with some useful new crypto protocol too.

Don't tar me with the "Tim said it was a waste of time" label. Rather, I said I thought it would be pretty tough to get a reasonable ontology, one with rich enough behaviors and reasonable incentives and disincentives. Simulations are an art...they were useful in nuclear war planning, where the degrees of freedom were constrained, and so on.

Jon Leonard made it clear to me that he was planning a human-assisted game/MUD, rather than a computer simulation. His explanation is that it is difficult to implement an unbiased simulation, because it is difficult to "simulate" a human. But putting people controlling characters into the equation restores the "human element" which arguably will make the results more realistic. Makes sense to me. The one item I suggested was that instead of people controlling individual characters in this MUD, they control a "weighted character" whose weight depends on the number of people of that type in the society. After all, in the path towards a crypto anarchy-type situation, people will naturally have to migrade away from government-oriented solutions, and towards other jobs. Some will be killed, some will retire, some will switch jobs, etc. Turning such a group into a weighted character would allow their number to reflect societal changes a more quantitatively than individual characters. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com