Seth Finkelstein, reluctant cypherpunk?

[Tim May]

At 8:03 PM -0700 4/3/01, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
>Declan and Jim both seemed to have missed the point about Cypherpunks.  I've
>attended physical meetings, off and on, since meeting #2 or #3 in the Bay
>Area.
>
>I'm not uncomfortable being called--or calling myself--a libertarian, but
>one of the first things that the meetings revealed was that we had attendees
>from all corners of the political arena.  And as a result, we soon saw that
>nothing would ever get discussed--much less done--if we focused on our
>political DIFFERENCES instead of our community of interest.

Indeed, and this was apparent at the earliest meeting.

I make no effort to hide my political views, especially in my 
writings, but at physical meetings there is very little political 
debate.

(Sometimes it cannot be resisted, as when a well-meaning-but-confused 
liberal lefty called for a Cypherpunks-endorsed "master root key" (or 
whatever the top-down key hierarchies are pushing). I just _had_ to 
leap up and explain why we don't need no steenking heirarchical key 
bindings and why the distributed, anarchic, peer-to-peer model is so 
much more compelling.)


Because people are freer to make their politics obvious in writings, 
as opposed to a limited amount of time forum like a physical meeting, 
the _list_ is in many ways more political than the physical meetings 
are.
>
>
>What is that community of interest?  It is the fight for privacy, against
>those who would deny it to us, primarily through technological (as opposed
>to political) means.  As long as we all kept our eyes on that prize, we had
>no problem getting along.  When we got diverted into other areas of
>politics/philosophy we ended up accomplishing nothing.
>
>So, do the participants of this list wish to actually get something done
>with regard to securing privacy, or shall we just spin our wheels in
>internecine warfare?

I don't see this internecine warfare. I see a few mild comments. I 
see a newcomer, Seth Finkelstein, harshly criticizing Declan and 
others. Easy to ignore someone who was even't here the day before 
yesterday.

In fact, much got accomplished over the past nine years. Many on the 
list moved into positions at various crypto, software, and digital 
signature companies.

This is the curse of success, or the curse of being on a cresting 
wave: many are called away.

The most obvious lacking bit is a workable 2-way-untraceable digital 
cash system. Magic Money was a start. Ian Goldberg and Doug Barnes 
had good ideas on implementing a kind of Pretty Good Digital Cash, 
but both were heavily tied-up over the past several years in 
commercial ventures, of course.

The list is not what it once was, for various reasons. So be it. Part 
of the natural cycle of things.

We can hope that the key ideas have already been well-publicized.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns