Re: The Continued Attack on Cash (Was: "The Right ofAnonymity"...)
At 10:51 PM -0800 2/1/98, Black Unicorn wrote:
Mr. May said:
Suffice it to say that I find nearly all cases where someone is "demanding" personal information to be cases where the government has required them to, for various unseemly purposes, or in cases where credit is being arranged.
Of late I tried to pay off a rather large American Express bill.
Suddenly, AMEX won't take cash in excess of $1,000 in any single billing period (30 days). The large sign on the wall indicated the substance of ....
It's worth noting (again) that a very simple technological/social solution to the "credit card companies have records on people" problem, the one often cited by "privacy law advocates" as the reason for a Data Privacy Act, is easily found. Namely, remove any impediments to the issuance of credit or debit cards unlinkable to the True Name of a user. A card issuer could feature this as a Privacy Card, either backed by transfers of backing capital to accounts, or using Chaum-style methods. This is fully feasible using Chaumian credential-revealing mechanisms. (Cf. Chaum's seminal "Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete," in Communications of the ACM, November 1985. Updated a few times and available in reprints or other places. Try search engines for latest locations.) However, the trends are in just the opposite direction, as both Black Unicorn and Bill Stewart have noted in this thread. Between the War on Drugs, the laws about money laundering, the fears of tax evasion, and the general burrowcrat desire to record the movements and actions of citizen-units, such a Privacy Card would be frowned-upon. Various roadblocks, ranging from "know your customer" restrictions on banks to anti-money-laundering laws, would be thrown up to stop any such Privacy Card. The real solution is easy. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
Tim May wrote:
The real solution is easy.
Easier said than done. Designing digital cash software is easy. (Several prototypes exist.) Getting people to accept it as having value is not. But let's suppose that we build a complete fault-tolerant digital cash system with multiply-redunant servers all over the world, and you can sit at your computer and trade crypto-credits with whoever you want. You've got a small fortune worth of e$. What are you going to buy with it? Seriously. Are you going to buy groceries at the local supermarket with cypherbucks? I doubt it. Surely you can't use the system to pay for your house or car, or other government-traceable assets. And certainly not airline tickets. Perhaps you could buy a new computer. That would work, if you could arrange delivery anonymously (which I doubt). Or maybe you could pick it up in person, but you don't need e-cash for that. About the only practical thing you could buy would be a pre-paid phone card. Anything else, you'd need to arrange delivery for, and if you can have contraband mailed to you, then you can have other things that you don't want sent to you. The problem is not digital cash. The problem is delivering the goods bought with it. Solve the delivery problem and digital cash will follow.
At 10:31 pm -0500 on 2/2/98, Tim May wrote:
At 6:42 PM -0800 2/2/98, Anonymous wrote:
Tim May wrote:
The real solution is easy.
Easier said than done.
<snip>
When I say the real solution is easy, I mean it. Get rid of the laws
Nope. Making or repealing laws won't mean too much for the privacy of transactions, except to reallocate who gets screwed in some kind of political zero-sum game. Anyway, laws are there because there's an economic incentive for them to be there. Reality is not optional. Physics creates economics which creates laws. Not the other way around. Even morality and ethics come from culture, which itself is a physical phenomenon, the collective response of humans to the resources on hand, which is an economic process if there ever was one. So, only when digital bearer certificate technology like blind signatures is proven to be *cheaper* than the current privacy-invasive book entry transaction regime will there be any demand for digital bearer settlement of assets, debt, and cash transactions. Personally, I believe that that time is coming sooner than most people realize. That's because when someone figures out how to save everyone a bunch of money with digital bearer certificates, they're going to make a bunch of money doing it, and the race to the bottom-line will begin. As I've said here several times before, the paradox will prove to be that digital bearer settlement will be cheaper to use *because* they're physically anonymous. You don't *care* what the biometric identity of someone is, as long as you're protected from bad economic actors, and can do reputation damage to people who you can prove have damaged you financially. Which, as we all know here, is simply a matter of financial cryptography. The cost of anything is the foregone alternative. People will only demand more privacy when it's cheaper than not having it. I believe that that time is coming, rather quickly. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- on or about 980203:1053, in <v04003a0eb0fce6005c81@[139.167.130.248]>, Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> was purported to have expostulated to perpetuate an opinion:
The cost of anything is the foregone alternative. People will only demand more privacy when it's cheaper than not having it. I believe that that time is coming, rather quickly.
that, and "Americans do not buy for quality, they buy for price" as John Ruskin said: 1. those who buy for price alone are this man's lawful prey. 2. the price of oats is significantly cheaper when it has been processed by the horse. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQBVAwUBNNjj0LR8UA6T6u61AQF/VgH+I8k5TPa9u0mjBOZbhB+zl+C6Eo0yH4gY 9fgqICC+hmhzIQe1l1a9Y/3n0rWu5K6cWsTSzSF8KC4XyyLwH8fGQQ== =tQT9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
At 4:56 pm -0500 on 2/4/98, Attila T. Hun wrote:
"Americans do not buy for quality, they buy for price"
Which must explain our gross national product, then. Cheaper, as always, *is* better.
as John Ruskin said:
1. those who buy for price alone are this man's lawful prey.
Those who *don't* buy for price alone are usually somebody's lunch sooner or later.
2. the price of oats is significantly cheaper when it has been processed by the horse.
It ain't oats, then. It's horseshit. Aparently aristocratic horseshit, if I remember Mr. Ruskin's bio right... ;-). Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>
At 6:42 PM -0800 2/2/98, Anonymous wrote:
Tim May wrote:
The real solution is easy.
Easier said than done.
Designing digital cash software is easy. (Several prototypes exist.) Getting people to accept it as having value is not.
The thrust of my arguments, in my several posts in this thread, has been simply removing the laws which require True Names to be attached to transactions, bank account, credit cards, etc. No digital cash is needed. The rest of Mr. Anonymous' argument is a straw man, based on the difficulty of implementing digital cash. When I say the real solution is easy, I mean it. Get rid of the laws telling people how often and in what amounts they may take money out of their bank account, get rid of laws telling banks they must narc out customers who remove "too much" money, and get rid of any laws restricting the use of names customers and their financial partners may use. (BTW, until these actions happen, no widespread use of digital cash is likely to be accepted as legal. This has a lot to do, I think, with why d.c. projects are moving so slowly.) --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
participants (4)
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Attila T. Hun -
nobody＠REPLAY.COM -
Robert Hettinga -
Tim May