Voice crypto: the last crypto taboo

[David Honig]

At 10:18 PM 8/6/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>> the fax effect.  I imagine that the fax machine overcame the fax
>> effect when a company with, for example, an east coast and a west
>> coast office bought two of them and then could send documents coast to
>> coast in seconds.  They didn't care that no one else had one; it was
>> boosted productivity immediately.
>
>You clearly don't understand the usual meaning of "fax effect." Fax 
>machines have existed in the form you describe for close to a century. 
>This was not what writers in the early 90s were referring to when they 
>spoke of the "fax effect."

He's talking about how to *bootstrap into society* an artifact wit fax-effect
problems ---ie, which must be present at both ends to work -phones, faxes,
Navajo, 
protocols..

>The fax effect is the same as the phone effect. Your analysis would have 
>had the first two phone changing the world overnight. No. What changed 
>was when a significant fraction of one's suppliers, delivery agencies, 
>shipping companies, customers, etc. all could be reached via a 
>compatible, interoperable standard. The "phone effect."

Theodore Hogg has done work on phase changes in topological (network)
systems --like
percolation in rocks, and other network effects.  At some level of
porosity, a body of rock becomes much more permeable, because
the pores often interconnect.  I can't help but think this relevent.

In any case, its clear you need a perceived benefit, probably expressable
in dollars (but maybe reputation), for early-adopters to 'seed' the
population.

But you can't seed if you don't have something to deploy, slow and
expensive though it may be at first.