Black markets vs. cryptoanarchy
Cryptoanarchy will have arrived when you can openly _advertise_ these services and still stay in business indefinitely. Most of the things we talk about - even Jim Bell's assassination market - already exist, but they cannot be advertised. You have to go looking for them, at some risk to both buyer and seller. If the seller is visible enough for you to find him, he is visible enough to get caught. For example, there is plenty of 'pirate' material on the net, but it tends to go away as soon as the addresses become well-known. Cryptoanarchy will be here when you can advertise yourself as a distributor of pirate software (or anything else you want to sell), do business with a publicly known contact address, and still not get caught. 'Black markets' exist due to the inability to do this. Currently the techniques of anonymity are limited to two: indirection for source anonymity and broadcast for recipient anonymity. We are more or less where crypto was before the invention of public key. You can gain security by spreading risk among multiple parties (key distributors for crypto, or remailers for anonymity) but you can't 'make your own anonymity' like you can make your own security with public key crypto. A theoretical discovery is needed particularly in the area of recipient anonymity. Good sender anonymity and weak recipient anonymity leads to 'hit and run' behavior such as spamming email and newsgroups, but not to anonymous markets. Mike
Crypto-anarchy benefits the poor more than the rich. The underlings of society are going to love it.
In fact, they basically already practice it. Not with computers, of course, but in terms of not reporting cash income, not reporting tips, engaging in barter work with others, and gambling in various non-sanctioned markets.
(Numbers games and sports betting are huge markets. Interestingly, such markets also validate much of what we say about "reputations." After all, when was the last time you heard about a bookie being sued in court for not paying up? And private justice is administered, as welshers are disposed of directly, without a long, expensive trial. Nearly everything in "crypto anarchy" has direct parallels in "underworld and black markets." Some say they are really the same thing. Perhaps.)
--Tim May
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Sat, 9 Nov 1996, Mike Ingle wrote:
A theoretical discovery is needed particularly in the area of recipient anonymity. Good sender anonymity and weak recipient anonymity leads to 'hit and run' behavior such as spamming email and newsgroups, but not to anonymous markets.
The current nymservers offer pretty good security. The only problem is they are vulnerable to traffic analysis. If an attacker wants to find out whether a particular person is using a pseudonym, he could send a lot of messages to the nym and if the suspected user receives that same amount of messages in anonymously remailed traffic. This would confirm the attacker's suspicion. There are a few ways to protect against this. One way is for a person to request that email stored on the nym server be delivered. The email could be delivered as one large encrypted message. The user could also request each email individually, but this does have some drawbacks. Delivering each message as it is received is a Bad Thing. Mark - -- finger -l for PGP key PGP encrypted mail prefered. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBMoaT0yzIPc7jvyFpAQFJWQf9FiQUfKlgs0oI1rLx6qFB7tbxkNkMnzsx fGG4QDh8XxokWF6eJW5550mlC/kpZF81/QUHQMkbQqpqWud8Pvzxo1dBxRkhcKsC xnI44ICR2t4xDww0DOt5P3XG0FbBoQUYfeJkD3Mjw1ZNq838hSJrZjF+06sB2y7V fMd5JXJtqLWsHMvlXYpu1oHr0K4aB+iddBIERZjyDLDsXf4ejuQapio7OO1fSE1n Rk1cR+zHIh5iWLMYyHzFXMyLCOVE1PhwndOfiUlwIlI59ISu40Anl+qJ+7I7rEQu i3BJipswUOZ47V1c0Ek/DixI1F5rV6NFxd4zJlYRYB3KvcOrNwWThg== =WWzM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Mike Ingle:
Cryptoanarchy will have arrived when you can openly _advertise_ these services and still stay in business indefinitely. Most of the things we talk about - even Jim Bell's assassination market - already exist, but they cannot be advertised. You have to go looking for them, at some risk to both buyer and seller. If the seller is visible enough for you to find him, he is visible enough to get caught.
actually "cryptoanarchy" has a lot of different definitions, and as an exercise, during at least on cpunk meeting in SF there was a roundtable discussion about what it meant to each person. the definitions did vary widely. the most optimistic view of cryptoanarchy would say that its early phases are already upon us in the crypto inside browsers and the govt paranoia and posturing. other more restrictive definitions would be similar to your own. another view would be that "cryptoanarchy" in the sense of people living in a society where they evade govts have already existed. in my view cryptoanarchy is a quite Machiavellian concept and I would suggest that there are strong parallels. TCM, originator of the term, is a bit mushy himself in his definitions and refuses to be pinned down on many specifics. however he has a pretty good paper out on the subject.
Currently the techniques of anonymity are limited to two: indirection for source anonymity and broadcast for recipient anonymity. We are more or less where crypto was before the invention of public key. You can gain security by spreading risk among multiple parties (key distributors for crypto, or remailers for anonymity) but you can't 'make your own anonymity' like you can make your own security with public key crypto.
A theoretical discovery is needed particularly in the area of recipient anonymity. Good sender anonymity and weak recipient anonymity leads to 'hit and run' behavior such as spamming email and newsgroups, but not to anonymous markets.
an encrypted reply block using remailers is pretty secure technology. the remailers are not all that reliable however and these reply blocks are always breaking; they depend on every link in the chain working perfectly. I've proposed having an anonymous pool in which remailers post status information when they successfully pass on messages, such info could be used to make the remailers more reliable, although possibly at the expense of having to buffer messages. has anyone set up a remailer that accepts payment right in the message itself? that would probably solve a lot of the economic problems, and it seems that the technology, i.e. digicash, has evolved to the point it would be possible to implement this. (note I am aware of c2's web page anonymous sending feature, but as I understand it the digicash payment here is not automated in the sense of being contained in the message). with the ability to include a payment in the message itself, you could pay "buffer services" that would be a layer of abstraction on top of the current unreliable remailer network and have much greater reliability. it seems to me the main proponents of "cryptoanarchy" tend to suggest a government structure is a completely useless construction. perhaps so but they would end up erecting othre systems to deal with the void they might not call "govt" but would have most of the features of one, imho. something "govtlike" is a measure of a civilized society, imho, hence my distaste in cryptoanarchy with its seeming naivete on the legitimate and crucial role of govt in a society. the specifics may vary between implementations, but imho in general something "govtlike" is crucial to civilized society.
Vladimir Nuri <vznuri@netcom.com> writes:
an encrypted reply block using remailers is pretty secure technology. the remailers are not all that reliable however and these reply blocks are always breaking; they depend on every link in the chain working perfectly. I've proposed having an anonymous pool in which remailers post status information when they successfully pass on messages, such info could be used to make the remailers more reliable, although possibly at the expense of having to buffer messages.
Perhaps it would be feasible to provide in each hop of the reply block, a second address to send errors to. This could be a newsgroup (alt.anonymous.messages), and a key to encrypt the error message with. Looking at a.a.m now and then would then be sufficient to check on the status of your reply blocks. Bouncing messages to your own reply block to `ping' it, is another way. I'd like to see ways to have reply blocks which are more resilient to single remailer failures, both transient failures, and remailers decomissioning without warning. My thoughts so far are that it may be possible to acheive these goals by having a reply block secret split across remailers, so that the chosen proportion, k of n remailers are sufficent for your reply to get through.
[...] it seems to me the main proponents of "cryptoanarchy" tend to suggest a government structure is a completely useless construction. perhaps so but they would end up erecting othre systems to deal with the void they might not call "govt" but would have most of the features of one, imho. something "govtlike" is a measure of a civilized society, imho, hence my distaste in cryptoanarchy with its seeming naivete on the legitimate and crucial role of govt in a society. the specifics may vary between implementations, but imho in general something "govtlike" is crucial to civilized society.
Perhaps you may to prefer to think about it in terms Harry Browne's campaign slogans, about reducing government to 10% (or whatever). It's not that easy to get rid of government all at once, and you'll get to see how having less government works out in practice, as it is shrinking. You've got to admit government is too big, at least! Adam -- print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com> writes:
it seems to me the main proponents of "cryptoanarchy" tend to suggest a government structure is a completely useless construction. perhaps so but they would end up erecting othre systems to deal with the void they might not call "govt" but would have most of the features of one, imho. something "govtlike" is a measure of a civilized society, imho, hence my distaste in cryptoanarchy with its seeming naivete on the legitimate and crucial role of govt in a society. the specifics may vary between implementations, but imho in general something "govtlike" is crucial to civilized society.
This concluding paragraph got me to thinking of something I read recently in "Bionomics" [1] about the public education problem. The point being made there is that injecting even a little real competition into a monopoly situation improves things tremendously. It is the counter argument to the objection that allowing students choice of schools will destroy the majority, as the "good" kids flee. What will happen instead is that most schools, seeing imminient flight, will take measures to avoid losing students (and taking their tuition with them). A few, that really can't adapt in time, fail and their students are forced to seek other schools. The result is that all schools, even "public" schools improve dramatically. It seems to me that the government as a whole may be subject to this same force. If cryptoanarchy can inject even a little real competition into the business of government (in the "providing services crucial to a civilized society" sense) it may succeed, even if few people actually use bona fide cryptoanarchical tools. If this is true, we can expect existing government organizations to try to improve to avoid extinction (some will doubtless try other things besides improvement). Perhaps the US Postal Service is a leading indicator of this process. This suggests that the transition to cryptoanarchy may be rather gradual and peaceful after all. Ted Anderson I'm still behind on cypherpunks, so apologies if this response is dated. [1] http://www.bionomics.org/text/resource/biobook.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMoihwwGojC9e/wyBAQHcJAQAoFO3a/kNxlp30A1CUTxKNoLgKPtATTp/ jYpqpeq29oh4195OvIIUVzx8DUyZgmdVJEtfPakatDuXsVPMwab18BriI7AJeq0u 1w43jimazlKCbbKFT9ZanzpJlohVxvsNlL132o7jq/4SHDnS0py3tIr/4HY0nUoL dKh0avqHGeo= =TIIL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
I tend to agre with Ted Anderson's point that a shift to cryptoanarchy will be a gradual process if it happens at all. this is in total contrast to TCM who has, as I recall, talked about "cryptoanarchy" as an example of a phase discontinuity, i.e. an abrupt transition. I personally would like to see a more specific description of "cryptoanarchy" because it seems its originator is always posting new messages about what it really is about, associating it with new developments, and distancing it from areas of stagnation or perceived criminality. a bit of "success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan" going on here.
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At 11:12 AM -0500 11/12/96, Ted Anderson wrote:
This concluding paragraph got me to thinking of something I read recently in "Bionomics" [1] about the public education problem. The point being made there is that injecting even a little real competition into a monopoly situation improves things tremendously. It is the counter argument to the objection that allowing students choice of schools will destroy the majority, as the "good" kids flee. What will happen instead is that most schools, seeing imminient flight, will take measures to avoid losing students (and taking their tuition with them). A few, that really can't adapt in time, fail and their students are forced to seek other schools. The result is that all schools, even "public" schools improve dramatically.
Many years ago, circa 1989 or so, I wrote a satirical essay which I called "Access to Food Must be Equal!" I can't seem to find it right now, so I may have moved it off my hard disks in one of my periodic housecleanings...I'll try to dig it up. The gist was that of an alternate reality in which supermarkets were not private, but were run the way the public schools were run. That is, each neighborhood was in some Food Distribution District, at which a household bought its food or even got it for free (I didn't flesh this point out, but the parallel with public schools is that the landowners would pay property taxes, but everyone would be able to get food for free, according to some ration or coupon system). (And if you think about it, food is pretty important, and supermarkets are roughly distributed the same way and in the same numbers as elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools, etc. So it's not completely far-fetched to imagine America having taken a different turn a century ago, and including food distribution centers in the same system.) I even included mention of the important role the PGA (Parent-Grocer Association) played in ensuring the nutritive requirements of young bodies are met. And the need for "nutritional standards" to keep junk food off the shelves, and only bran muffins and similar digestives be in every meal. My piece was written as a rant about the dangers of the proposed talk of "privatizing food distribution points," about how this would result in a system where only the rich could get access to nutritional food, and how the poor would be made to suffer. And how this "caloric anarchy" would result in vicious monopolies, price wars, and deviation from Recommended Governmental Caloric Intake Rules. Think about this kind of parallel when privatization of schools is talked about. P.S. The "bionomics" stuff is just reworked ideas from a bunch of other fields, given new names, and packaged with seminars, training classes, and other multi-level marketing nonsense. I'm not impressed. --Tim May "The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology." [NYT, 1996-10-02] We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
My piece was written as a rant about the dangers of the proposed talk of "privatizing food distribution points," about how this would result in a system where only the rich could get access to nutritional food, and how the poor would be made to suffer. And how this "caloric anarchy" would result in vicious monopolies, price wars, and deviation from Recommended Governmental Caloric Intake Rules.
Which it does... FWIW, I tend to agree with your general point, but I moved from downtown Manhattan to Harlem recently, and was surprised to see how many foodstuffs cost _more_ up here, as well as the obvious fact that many are harder to get... Junk food and cheap liquor are everywhere, though... Which doesn't say that a centralized food distribution system would be a win, but don't bet on privatization being a win either. Many of the local stores won't even hire in the neighborhood... Of course, with big supermarket chains finally breaking into this island, that is becoming less of an issue, so maybe things will balance. Looking around me, I'm not inclined to bet on it, tho. -- Jim Wise System Administrator GSAPP, Columbia University jim@santafe.arch.columbia.edu http://www.arch.columbia.edu/~jim * Finger for PGP public key *
Jim Wise <jw250@columbia.edu> writes:
On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
My piece was written as a rant about the dangers of the proposed talk of "privatizing food distribution points," about how this would result in a system where only the rich could get access to nutritional food, and how the poor would be made to suffer. And how this "caloric anarchy" would result in vicious monopolies, price wars, and deviation from Recommended Governmental Caloric Intake Rules.
Which it does... FWIW, I tend to agree with your general point, but I moved from downtown Manhattan to Harlem recently, and was surprised to see how many foodstuffs cost _more_ up here, as well as the obvious fact that many are harder to get... Junk food and cheap liquor are everywhere, though...
I spent a few years living in Columbia housing on 111th St and there are plenty of good, cheap groceries around. If you choose to save on the rent and to live, e.g., up by City College, then indeed there are fewer groceries and they cost more. The clerks who work there also get paid much more than the clerks midtown because they risk their lives. And you spend more time commuting to Columbia. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
On Wed, 13 Nov 1996, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
I spent a few years living in Columbia housing on 111th St and there are plenty of good, cheap groceries around. If you choose to save on the rent and to live, e.g., up by City College, then indeed there are fewer groceries and they cost more. The clerks who work there also get paid much more than the clerks midtown because they risk their lives. And you spend more time commuting to Columbia.
These days City College has a miniature version of CU's higher-rent bubble effect. At any rate within a few blocks of either school is rather a bit better off than the surrounding areas. 111th is much more within CU's sphere of influence, and prices at markets like Westside and UFM drop as they compete for the student crowd. That neighborhood has a pocket of slightly more variety as well, for the same reasons. As you walk north, the number of liquor stores rises even as the number of businesses drops... -- Jim Wise System Administrator GSAPP, Columbia University jim@santafe.arch.columbia.edu http://www.arch.columbia.edu/~jim * Finger for PGP public key *
At 10:56 PM -0500 11/12/96, Jim Wise wrote:
On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
My piece was written as a rant about the dangers of the proposed talk of "privatizing food distribution points," about how this would result in a system where only the rich could get access to nutritional food, and how the poor would be made to suffer. And how this "caloric anarchy" would result in vicious monopolies, price wars, and deviation from Recommended Governmental Caloric Intake Rules.
Which it does... FWIW, I tend to agree with your general point, but I moved from downtown Manhattan to Harlem recently, and was surprised to see how many foodstuffs cost _more_ up here, as well as the obvious fact that many are harder to get... Junk food and cheap liquor are everywhere, though...
But you're conflating a separate issue: the cost of doing business in high-crime ghettoes. Both rich and poor alike find prices high and selection poor in high-crime ghettoes. Likewise, both rich and poor alike find prices low and selection good in low-crime, suburban locales. --Tim May "The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology." [NYT, 1996-10-02] We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
On Wed, 13 Nov 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
At 10:56 PM -0500 11/12/96, Jim Wise wrote:
Which it does... FWIW, I tend to agree with your general point, but I moved from downtown Manhattan to Harlem recently, and was surprised to see how many foodstuffs cost _more_ up here, as well as the obvious fact that many are harder to get... Junk food and cheap liquor are everywhere, though...
But you're conflating a separate issue: the cost of doing business in high-crime ghettoes. Both rich and poor alike find prices high and selection poor in high-crime ghettoes. Likewise, both rich and poor alike find prices low and selection good in low-crime, suburban locales.
I would hardly classify alphabet city as a `low-crime suburban locale'. Much more of an issue is that the locals downtown are much closer to being within walking distance of the higher-rent higher-income areas, so the local bodegas must keep prices low to compete. Up here, it's a lot farther to an alternative, and a lot fewer people have cars, so you have a lot fewer choices. The result is that what choices there are can pretty much stock what they please and charge what they please... The issue here is much more one of the insularity of the ghetto than it's crime rate... -- Jim Wise System Administrator GSAPP, Columbia University jim@santafe.arch.columbia.edu http://www.arch.columbia.edu/~jim * Finger for PGP public key *
participants (9)
-
Adam Back -
dlv＠bwalk.dm.com -
Jim Wise -
Mark M. -
Mike Ingle -
Open Net Postmaster -
Ted Anderson -
Timothy C. May -
Vladimir Z. Nuri