Message from a Parallel Universe

[Tim May]

At 1:25 PM -0400 4/16/01, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:
>
>Tim, you recommended we search out for your prior articles...I've done that
>and found a couple of things (the '97 conference paper on this topic was
>most relevant) but I couldn't find a whole lot...please provide an url if
>you have one...

I've written too many thousands of small-to-medium-sized articles on 
these sorts of topics. I haven't written many "full-length" summary 
papers. So, asking for URLs would be like asking me to do the 
searches and report on which sites have the Cypherpunks list (and 
Extropians list, as I wrote articles on that list, 1992-94) articles. 
Can't do that.



>after reading what I did find, I've come to the conclusion
>that "reputation" is not necessarily an issue for certain kinds of
>transactions...I believe it's useful to define when/where reputation means a
>lot:
>
>- If i'm hiring a painter or plumber, referrals mean a lot.  anyone can push
>a pain roller.  few of us know how to do it well.

A perfect example of the "sparseness" of most reputational PBNs. For 
example, in my home newsgroup, scruz.general, people ask for 
recommendations on veterinarians, painters, yard workers, etc. It 
turns out that almost all replies of the form "Well, I hired Joe 
Blow, and he's done a very good job for me."

Besides the trend of people to give positive endorsements more than 
negative endorsements (fear of lawsuits is also an issue), it's 
apparent that most people are simply reporting on whom they have 
dealt with. Hence the "sparseness" point.

Word of mouth tends to work very locally. Nothing new here.

Nor is it cause for alarm. It's true that most of the people of 
"solid reputation" on the CP list/meeting are people I have met or 
worked closely with. Why should it be different?
>
>Where reputation of a transactive party doesn't realy mean a lot (or means
>little):
>
>- napster.  I don't care who has the song I'm looking for...i'd download
>from anyone (given the right bit rate, ping distance, connection type, etc.)
>The product quality is judged by itself and my only potential 'downside' is
>having spent a little time downloading a poorly encoded file...in which case
>i delete the bad file and find someone else who has what i'm looking for.

This is _still_ reputation! It seems less apparent because the 
infrastructure hides the need to make personal decisions. But the 
reputation lies partly in the infrastructure: you assume that if the 
song has the right title, about the right number of minutes, etc., 
that it is very probably the song you are looking for. (This is 
starting to change, in my experience, as more "jokesters" put 
deliberately deceiving stuff up. As with the erotic binaries 
newsgroups, where Christian fundies started putting up pictures of 
religious figures and messages under hot-sounding names. Still, a 
minor issue.)

For example, you might say "I don't need to think about the 
reputation of Safeway when I go out to buy groceries, because they 
have what I need and the stores are clean.:

The reputation issue is hidden from you precisely because it is do 
tightly built-into the infrastructure of grocery stores, Safeway in 
particular, etc.

Or, like the cleanliness of drinking water. We in the U.S. treat it 
as a fact of life that drinking water anywhere in the U.S. is 
basically clean. The same is not true in many parts of the world.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that because you don't need to 
consciously think about reputation that reputation is not an issue.

No time now to address your later examples. Similar logic applies.

>
>finally, i think Tim's logic is right: don't try to come up with a complete
>overhaul to the existing monetary system, just focus on the incremental
>pieces.  in my opinion, infomarkets are the first best step...they're
>digital, portable, somewhat protectable, and have value.

This is why MojoNation's "Napster with the profit incentive" sounded 
so good. Whether it succeeds or fails, someone will likely enter this 
kind of market.

(Though doing it with an identifiable corporation, from a known 
location, with traceable employees, is a recipe for disaster. Which 
is where "making the agora vanish" came from.)


--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