"Let me re-emphasize that I have neither the knowledge nor the will to implement this system. I certainly don’t like the State, but I would rather concentrate my energies on constructive rather than destructive solutions. That said, I still think governments everywhere are going to be staring down the barrel of an encrypted gun in the near future, and this article attempts to explain why, in response to numerous objections received since my last article."
"**The following article is an opinion piece written in 2002 by the libertarian author Robert Vroman. Vroman is well known for his editorial work writing for anti-state.com. ‘The Jim Bell System Revisited’ first published on anti-state.com on August 15, 2002, in response to “The Jim Bell System” debate. This is the second installment of the series written by Vroman. Check out Bob Murphy’s and Adam Young’s response to Vroman’s editorial. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any opinions, content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article.**" [end partial quote]
Jim Bell's Comment below:
These are the kinds of analyses that the Cypherpunks email list never accomplished, although as I discovered last year, the 1995 Cypherpunks archive has been tampered with to avoid nearly every appearance of a discussion about my AP essay. That failure to deal with the AP idea was entirely irresponsible: The ostensible goal of Cypherpunks was always the anti-tyrannical analysis of and resistance to the usage of technology against the public, and conversely the active use of technology to free the public.
I should state, now, that I don't believe that whoever deleted those 1995 Cypherpunks comments did it for benevolent and justifiable reasons. It has been suggested that these messages were deleted as some sort of protective reaction to legal events involving me during 1997 through 2000.
One reason I reject that idea is that nobody could realistically believe that the government didn't already have full copies of the CP archive: To obtain that, all they would have needed to do was to subscribe to the CP list during the year of 1995, and all such emails would have been quickly copied to them. Those emails would never have been erased, once in government hands. Why would they, some agents of the Federal government, not have done obtained and kept those CP emails? And everybody on CP knew, or at least reasonably suspected, that the entire archive had been copied and thus couldn't be erased so the government would always have access to it. Nobody would have tampered with the CP archive if their goal had been to keep its contents away from the Federal government. They WOULD have had a motive to tamper with the CP archive if they wanted to conceal its discussions from Cypherpunks, as a whole.
So, if anybody was considering lying about the existence of those messages as a consequence of being asked in any sort of legal proceeding, that person would have been risking perjury charges even if the Cypherpunks archive had been 'successfuly' manipulated. That is, if they considered themselves on the side opposite to the government. If, instead, they considered themselves on the side of government, THEN they might have decided they had nothing to fear by deleting that material. So, what were the loyalties of the people who were maintaining the CP archive during 1995 and later?
Now, far more than at any other time, the AP idea needs to be considered. Nobody can say that the world doesn't need a solution. Go ahead and try to disprove it, if you can, but as these two articles show above, by Robert Vroman and R. Sukumaran, that will not be easy.
Jim Bell