Making the Agora Vanish into Cyberspace

[Tim May]

I want to apply what I just wrote to the projects of some friends of 
ours: MojoNation and Zero Knowledge Systems. I say "friends" because 
long-term list members are either working for them, or founded them, 
or whatever. You all know what I mean.

Caveat: I have not talked to principals at either company for a long 
time. I don't know what they're doing, or even if their companies 
still exist in the same form (same basic mission) as when I last 
talked to their principals. Consider these comments to be applicable 
to companies _like_ these companies.


At 11:14 AM -0700 4/12/01, Tim May wrote:
>
>This makes Yahoo, Amazon, EBay the easy targets for lawsuits by 
>foreign governments, lawsuits by PC groups in America, boycotts 
>(which are OK, of course), and even direct actions against corporate 
>officers. How long will it be before corporate offices at EBay are 
>bombed because birth control stuff is sold on EBay? How long before 
>the President of Amazon is assassinated one night for "allowing" 
>books like "The Satanic Verses" be sold on his system?
>
>These three companies are representative of the trend toward a 
>corporation, readily traceable to a physical location, acting as the 
>"marketplace" location. Even more abstractly, Napster only 
>distributed an _indexing_ application and then provided a forum for 
>indices to be published. And yet what has happened with Napster is 
>and was predictable.
>
>(If you set up a music pirating system, as seen by others, and paint 
>your name and address on your back, you _will_ be sued. A bunch of 
>us pointed this out at a CP physical meeting in early 2000, when 
>Napster was just starting to become known.)
>
>There's a better solution to this "big targets problem": 
>peer-to-peer, a la Gnutella, Mojo, etc. No identifiable nexus of 
>corporate control. Online clearing. Reputation intermediaries. 
>Digital cash (not strictly needed, if N (number of sellers and 
>buyers) is large enough and there is no central clearinghouse which 
>can be sued.)
>
>Making the agora disappear into cyberspace, whether by sheer numbers 
>of sellers and buyers (peer-to-peer) or by robust encryption (a la 
>BlackNet) is an important goal.
>
>"The Theory of the Corporation" needs revisiting.

This is what is missing from the plans of so many of these 
"Cypherpunks-interesting" companies: they start developing some ideas 
of how to implement true untraceability, and doing commerce in 
uncoercible (transactions cannot be physically coerced) ways, then 
they BLOW IT:

The blow it by incorporating in above-board ways, readily-traceable 
by any constable or narc or Fed who wants to find their corporate 
offices in Quebec or Mountain View or whatever village constitutes 
the capital of Anguilla.

Which means none of these entities can exploit the truly rich markets 
out there. Markets for online porn of various kinds, markets for 
"specialty" interests, a free and open and unfettered market in Nazi 
memorabilia and other such newly-verboten items, and, the gold mine, 
markets in medical information, credit information, and other such 
data bases which governments seek to hold monopolies on. (Governments 
ain't stupid. Being the official Mafia, they know the value of 
regulating and controlling data bases.)

For those of you who don't fully appreciate what I am getting at, 
being newcomers, let me move away from such banalities as "kiddie 
porn" market--though this is a real market which any truly 
untraceable tools will facillitate, obviously--and focus instead on 
the "credit rating market."

Alice defaulted on a loan to Bob some years ago. Do-gooders in the 
United States decided that Alice's "credit records" should be forced 
to "forget" this item after some period set by legislative decree. 
Charles, who was told by Bob by that Alice defaulted on a loan, is 
ordered by the government that he may not reveal this information to 
Darva, who is considering making a loan to Alice and is willing to 
pay Charles a fee for supplying her with what he knows of Alice's 
past habits regarding loans.

This is, in a nutshell, the essence of the "Fair Credit Reporting 
Act." This is what laymen, who usually think it a good idea, mean 
when they say "Your credit records only go back 5 years."

Cypherpunks know that the technologies exist to support bypasses of 
such contra-freedom  laws. Usually called "data havens," though Bruce 
Sterling got it wrong (no insult meant to him) when he predicted in 
"Islands in the Net" that such data havens would be on Caribbean 
islands or in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Physical security is 
only the equivalent of a few dozen bits' worth of cryptographic 
security. (At the time "Islands in the Net" appeared, in 1988, I had 
already presented the "BlackNet" crypto scheme to my Silicon Valley 
friends Phil Salin, Marc Stiegler, Randy Farmer, Chip Morningstar, 
and a bunch of the Xanadu/AMiX folks. It did in cyberspace, a la 
Vinge's "True Names," what Sterling was simultaneously setting out in 
"Islands.")

(As to the morality of such bypasses, why is the business of 
government or anyone else to tell Bob or Charles that it is illegal 
and punishable by fines and imprisonment to tell Darva that Alice 
cheated Bob at some time in the past? It isn't.

OK, so the crypto tools really do exist to enable "free markets in 
cyberspace." So it this what Mojo and ZKS will do? Is this what Vince 
Cate in Anguilla is able to do?

Why is Mojo not becoming the pirate music capital of cyberspace? Why 
is ZKS not advertising its software to those interested in nude 
photos of youngsters? Why is Anguilla not the credit rating capital 
of the world/


Because each is readily locatable and targettable. These are at least 
part of the reasons. (I admit that other reasons may be "Because Jim 
is not interested in being the pirate music capital, because the 
shareholders of ZKS choose not be child pornographers, because Vince 
doesn't want to be the credit rating center of the world.")

The important point is that even if any of these ventures _wanted_ to 
use their technologies as described above, THEY ARE TOO VISIBLE.

Jim McCoy understands this quite well...and yet he located his 
operation in a visible way, which surprises me. Austin and Hammie 
were told by both Lucky Green and myself, and maybe others , that ZKS 
was painting a giant "Sue Me!" and/or "Raid Me!" target on their 
backs by incorporating and locating in a major Canadian city.

(Lest anyone think Canada is "more tolerant" than the U.S., as some 
folks periodically claim, look at the Homulka/Teale censorship, look 
at the success of Andrea Dworkin and her feminazi cohorts in getting 
a bookstore shut down, look at the lack of anything comparable to the 
Bill of Rights in strength of precedent, and look at the recent 
crypto laws being proposed or which have been actually passed. The 
notion that ZKS will be able to say "Fuck off" to Mounties who arrive 
to investigate an extortion threat agains the Canadian PM or who have 
learned that FreedomNet is being used to trade child porn, is 
laughable.)

As for Vince and Anguilla, I wish him well. But a country which bans 
the importation of something so innocuous as copies of "Playboy" 
magazine, and which is said to be de facto ruled the "the seven 
families," is hardly a data haven by any definition.

(We don't hear much out of Anguilla anyway, so maybe it's days as a 
"Cypherpunks capital" are gone, not that it was ever really that.)

So, what's the solution?

The solution is that the technology clearly exists to allow entities 
to reside in cyberspace. What is lacking, as always, is the means to 
collect untraceable digital cash. (Chaum has sometimes argued that 
only _buyer-untraceable_ DC is needed...clearly a bidirectionally 
untraceable system, "true" digital cash, is needed. Both Doug Barnes 
and Ian Goldberg explained several years ago how such a TDC system 
could be built. Ian demonstrated a version of such a TDC system at a 
CP physical meeting, circa 1997.)

Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or 
cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever 
having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in 
untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink 
the theory of the corporation.

Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of 
shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) 
and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations 
for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. 
And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of 
Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German 
citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace.

The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, 
given the state of today's tools, but the long term trend.


--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