Making the Agora Vanish into Cyberspace

[mean-green at hushmail.com]

At 12:12 PM 4/12/01 -0700, you wrote:
>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? 

1. Because most music down-loaders (and many others with content to share) 
are lazy and Mojo requires them to take positive action to publish.  2. 
Because Mojo is sensitive to networks effects (when there are less than 
a hundred or so users on-line the reliability data retrieval quickly diminishes) 
and because of factor 1 there is less interesting data being shared.

The members of this list with always-on connections could easily put Mojo 
right by running a client configured to offer most or all of Mojo's services 
(block server, content tracker, publishing tracker and relay server).  This 
one small thing could provide the needed infrastructure to bootstrap.  Come 
on guys, it can't be that painful to participate, can it?

Look, I'm not loaded but if I can get a few dozen list members running the 
client (BTW, its small and easy to run, doesn't patch the OS, etc.) and 
stabilize the system, I'm willing to start converting Mojo currency out 
of my own pocket and pay those offering services.

>>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.")

True, but he was/is interested in seeing the technology and the public Mojo 
service become generally useful.


>>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. 

Cost, priorities and a bit of laziness.  But all is not lost.  The public 
code includes almost all of the system and the parts which are missing I 
have on good assurance aren't that hard to reverse engineer.

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