Harmon Seaver wrote:
If a "voluntary association" injures me,
Associations - corporate or otherwise - are abstract, intangible entities. They don't perform actions. People do.
each and every person involved in it should be liable.
If a member of a club, to which you belong, commits an act of violence, are you liable for that act?
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First off, yes, corporations are creatures of the state. So, what
else is new?
They are an easy way to achieve limited liability. In the UK after
the South Sea Bubble popped (and in France, after the same thing
happened to the Mississippi Company did the same, see "Millionaire",
the story of John Law and the first central bank in France), they
banned joint stock companies and had to jump through many hoops to
get the same effect involving limited liability partnerships (trusts)
of various kinds.
After the US started to kick everyone's butt, the LSE and the Paris
Bourse woke up and changed the law.
Limited liability, fungible equity shares and efficient secondary
markets are still necessary if you want to raise lots of money to do
things with.
So far.
:-).
Cypherpunks are about using cryptography and code to replace law and
force-monopoly.
The way to do limited liability with financial cryptography is, of
course, fairly trivial in theory, and maybe we'll get to practice it
someday.
You do a Shamir secret-spilt of a key with m-of-n copies, and set n
to be a majority of m. Vote that key with a board, and you have a
board vote. Vote one or several keys to elect the board using
something like a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge with your
blind-signature bearer certificates to claim your key-pieces
according to the amount of shares you have.
Boom. An anonymously-voted limited liability business entity.
Look, ma. No state.
Kewl.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 8:59 PM -0500 3/25/04, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
Boom. An anonymously-voted limited liability business entity.
Look, ma. No state.
Oh. One more thing.
It'll *never* happen until the risk-adjusted (those nasty latin words
ceterus paribus) cost of doing so is *significantly* cheaper than
doing so with lawyers, legislatures and a monopoly composed of lots
of guys with guns.
Fine. Make it cheaper. Moore's Law creates geodesic networks, so
let's have geodesic internet bearer transactions.
I always throw around "three orders of magnitude" (divide the cost by
a thousand, for you philosophy majors out there :-)) as a WAG. It's
the price-point where I would wager that if functionally anonymous
bearer transactions were that cheap, for the same level of risk, that
book-entry transactions would go the way of the intaglio bearer bond,
armored transport of same, and clearing house vaults as a percentage
of modern total transactions by transaction count and dollar volume.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
R. A. Hettinga (2004-03-26 02:20Z) wrote:
blah blah (those nasty latin words ceterus paribus) blah blah
Those "nasty latin words" are "ceteris paribus". -- That woman deserves her revenge... and... we deserve to die. -- Budd, "Kill Bill Vol. 1"
At 7:20 AM +0000 3/26/04, Justin wrote:
Those "nasty latin words" are "ceteris paribus".
Thank you.
On a network full of experts the price of error is bandwidth.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
R. A. Hettinga (2004-03-26 12:41Z) wrote:
At 7:20 AM +0000 3/26/04, Justin wrote:
Those "nasty latin words" are "ceteris paribus".
Thank you.
On a network full of experts the price of error is bandwidth.
There's no reason to get all sarcastic. For all I knew you could have unintentionally mistyped it, the error not reflecting on your knowledge but on your keyboard. I'd just rather some ignorant boob doesn't read that and start using the incorrect form. Hell, there are legions of morons using "in nomine patri, et fili, et spiritu sancti" because they think they "heard" that in Boondock Saints. -- "If you don't do this thing, you won't be in any shape to walk out of here." "Would that be physically, or just a mental state?" -Caspar v. Tom, Miller's Crossing
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:38 PM +0000 3/26/04, Justin wrote:
R. A. Hettinga (2004-03-26 12:41Z) wrote:
At 7:20 AM +0000 3/26/04, Justin wrote:
Those "nasty latin words" are "ceteris paribus".
Thank you.
On a network full of experts the price of error is bandwidth.
There's no reason to get all sarcastic.
Dude. I wasn't being sarcastic. I meant it. Thank you.
I used to say "scientists" in the above schtick, back in the day, and
got a laugh, but "appropriate use" of academic resources went out
with state subsidies of Internic, and scientists aren't as thick on
the ground as they were then. :-). It seems that in an attempt not to
call you a scientist, I called you something worse. :-).
Anyway, I make mistakes. I forget, or ignore, my spell-checker. More
to the point, I forgot most of my latin, and don't remember half of
my economics. And, in general, autodydacticism, and 60's/70's
state-school education, is a bitch. :-).
Thanks for fixing the error. It's kind of like when somebody reminded
me, when I was thirty-something that it's "remuneration", not
"renumeration". :-).
Its and it's still give me fits. See below for details...
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
On 26 Mar 2004, Frog wrote:
Harmon Seaver wrote:
If a "voluntary association" injures me,
Associations - corporate or otherwise - are abstract, intangible entities. They don't perform actions. People do.
Corporations act as "legal persons" - they can enter into contracts, own assetts, sue people, etc. The problem emerges when a corporation enters into battle with an individual - it's pretty hard to fight a lawsuit when the "person" on the other side of the table has billions of dollars, thousands of lawyers, and is willing and able to protract the battle over dozens of years. It's even worse when your opponent has the resources to lobby to change laws. Can you say RIAA?
participants (4)
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Frog -
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R. A. Hettinga