Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)

[Ray Dillinger]

On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote:

>At 11:30 AM -0700 4/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>>
>>As presented, I think she's probably right.  Nobody in conventional
>>business is going to want to do a deal with someone when they can't
>>create a legally enforceable contract.
>
>Widespread black markets, for drugs, betting, etc., suggest otherwise.
>
>There are many markets out there which do not rely on the official 
>court system to enforce contracts for.

This is true, but look at the mechanisms for enforcing contracts 
that they *do* use.  Most of them are not compatible with anonymity, 
and only a few are compatible with pseudonymity. 

Mafia Bosses don't buy information from someone when they don't know 
where that someone lives.  It's the exact same enforceability of 
contracts problem that other parts of society uses lawyers to deal 
with.  Legbreakers or cops, basically they have the same job with 
regard to contract enforcement.  There has to be a hook where someone 
who does a ripoff can be punished, or else there is no deal.

When you talk about a one-time transaction, it pretty much has to 
involve something whose value can be ascertained ON THE SPOT.  
otherwise, there is either a continuing relationship that can't 
be unilaterally broken (ie, they know where you live) or there is 
no deal.  The value of information (other than entertainment 
value) is not generally ascertainable on the spot, because if 
you don't have at least some of the information, you can't check 
something that claims to be the information. Also, you often 
have to do a couple days work figuring out information formats 
and problems before you can even do your checking against it, 
particularly with financial data. 

>Besides Mafia markets, there are international trade systems which 
>typically don't invoke the laws of Fiji or Botswana or even the U.S. 
>to make them work.

But which are generally not done anonymously.  In these cases, 
there is no test of a protocol's ability to protect pseudonymity 
from a determined opponent, nor of the willingness to do business 
anonymously or pseudonymously.  Moreover, the determined opponent 
is often watching, even if no enforcement is attempted.


>In fact, most of our ordinary decisions and dealings are done 
>"anarchically," from deciding which restaurants to visit to the 
>buying of books and whatnot. 

So far I have seen no example of a non-contracted business 
agreement between people who are unable to identify each other, 
which extends beyond a single transaction.  Basically one goes 
one way with his merchandise and the other goes the other way 
with her money, and it's over.  There's no business relationship 
that's ongoing; if they ever meet again, it's just a coincidence. 

If the transaction is illegal, then any business relationship 
that may be formed is a liability to all participants; they 
never know when the lions are going to grab someone and when 
that happens, the lions usually find out everything that someone 
knows. 

Real business involves lasting relationships.  You don't want 
to be owed money, or merchandise either, by someone who can 
just shed the pseudonym and disappear. 

>>And "reputation capital"
>>that would counteract that point to some extent depends on maintaining
>>a consistent traceable pseudonym as someone who does something illegal,
>>for decades, without getting linked to it.
>
>As with Aimee, you haven't thought outside the box.
>
>You being a lawyer larvae, and Aimee being an official lawyer, is 
>this something that _comes_ from being a lawyer, or is this something 
>that causes a person to give up doing something real, like 
>programming or designing chips, to _become_ a lawyer?


Tim, I don't know why you're calling me "Lawyer larvae".  I'm 
not in Law school, nor have I ever been. 

What Aimee and I both seem to be pointing out here is that while 
it is *possible* for people to do business anonymously/pseudonymously, 
a whole new economy would have to grow up that way in order for it 
to become routine.  You are really and truly talking about building 
from scratch with effectively no interface to the way business is 
currently done.  I can respect that, but keep in mind that all the 
peripheral mechanisms of the way business is currently done will 
be trying to stomp the "aberration" out.  

In order to grow an anonymous economy, you'd need literally decades 
of time during which there were few conflicts with any part of the 
established infrastructure, and so that the emerging system could 
grow its own traditions and customs and routines.  Within that 
separate space, you could do business as you describe.  But during 
the whole building time, and until the new economy's traditions and 
routines are reflected in a robust system with enforcement capabilities, 
almost any contact with the existing economy would be destructive.  

It would be like building in the outlands, beyond civilization 
entirely.  It will happen, and it should; the laws governing it 
are the laws of mathematics and computability, and humankind will 
build the structures that those laws can support just as surely as 
humankind given the opportunity will occupy a new frontier. But I 
don't believe that it's going to have much to do with established 
business or extant business models.  Its basic required infrastructure 
and traditions are fundamentally incompatible with all current legal 
codes and methods of doing business, and will be attacked by all 
current enforcement capabilities whenever and wherever detected.

The "cipherspace outlands" will have to be built pretty much separate 
from current business and the laws that apply to it.  Otherwise it'll 
take centuries instead of decades. 

				Bear