making the agora vanish

[Tim May]

At 5:45 PM -0700 4/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>Okay, as some have pointed out, I've been a little too flip
>in assuming that people's nyms will "vanish" if they get into
>real trouble.
>
>It's true that nyms like "Pr0duct Cypher", which represent
>the authorship claim to years of code and writing, are not
>going to be abandoned over a $10 transaction, and if P. Cypher
>were to put that nym on the line for a deal, I wouldn't hesitate
>to accept it.
>
>The problem arises because the means of building reputation
>are so utterly ill-defined.  Having read P. Cypher's list
>contributions and software, and having a public key to
>check his/her/their signatures against, suffices in an
>individual case.

"Ill-defined," yes. Just as the form of corporations was ill-defined 
in the 1850s. Just as the form of derivatives markets was ill-defined 
as recently as 1980. Just as many things have been 
ill-defined...until the form emerges.

It's a failure of analysis to assume that because the form of a 
market, or a medium, or whatever cannot be imagined in advance that 
the market or medium or whatever will not  come into being.

This is the burden of central planners, to try to imagine how all the 
little bits and pieces will work, how money and labor will flow from 
one place to another. No wonder they usually opt for simple 
brute-force controls (which fail, of course).

The emergent behavior point of view, outline in Kevin Kelly's "Out of 
Control," is that we don't know the form of most structures yet to 
emerge.

Reputations are very common, in many walks of life. The movies we 
hear about and choose to see or not see are a composite coming 
together of many reputations of actors, directors, themes. Is the 
algorithm for this "ill-defined"? Sure. I doubt anyone knows even 
their own algorithms for deciding to see "Blow" instead of "Enemy at 
the Gates."

Does the fact that reputation systems for restaurants, books, 
employers, people, and politicians are so vague, so nebulous, so 
proteanly malleable mean that we don't make choices?

>
>But commerce - large, heavy, routine commerce between relative
>strangers, which is the fundamental strength of our markets,
>requires there to be some standard format or method of
>presenting reputation capital that can be checked.  The only
>thing I can think of is a set of endorsements verifying deals
>done already.  But that is exactly the information that most
>of you say you don't want disclosed.

You again are trying to solve the Whole Enchilada. You look for ways 
that the existing economy can be transformed into a crypto anarchy. 
No credible commenter here has ever said this is a realistic thing.

I look for interesting markets to become Blacknet kinds of markets. 
Then we'll see what structures evolve.


>
>Escrow agents and reputation agents definitely help -- they
>can overcome a lot of difficulties involving who gets paid
>what and when.  But now you've got a third party in your deal,
>charging vigorish when one of your main hopes was to get away
>from the tax man charging vigorish.

Again, you misstate what you think the intended use is.

In any case,  the clearing costs of many such transactions are not 
likely to be anywhere as high as taxes are.

In the case of the offshore/cyberspace credit ratings, for example, 
there is no reason to expect the transaction costs to be even as high 
as they are in the U.S. Probably lower, as legal fees will will be 
lower.

The motivation for this particular market is not avoiding taxes on 
the transaction.



--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