Wired on e-gold

[georgemw at speakeasy.net]

On 19 Dec 2001, at 1:30, Nomen Nescio wrote:


> Of course the cypherpunk interest in e-gold revolves around its vaunted
> privacy protection.  The article provides a much-needed dose of reality to
> those who still harbor fantasies that e-gold is interested in protecting
> the privacy of its customers.  Those who participated in the fractious
> debates between e-gold founders and its customers in the early days
> will remember the company's sniff of dismissal at "elite ivovy-tower"
> arguments in favor of its privacy.  Alaskan attorney Daniel J. Boone in
> particular made a number of principled appeals to e-gold officials to
> hold to their early promises of privacy protection, to no avail.
> 

Which illustrates why "cypherpunks write code".  Promises to 
protect your privacy aren't worth much. particularly when the
people who have the authority to enforce contracts are the ones
trying to get your info in the first place.

The only way to have good confidence that someone 
won't give out your personal info is if they don't have
your info. 


> Jackson is lying about the unimportance of HYIPs.  Independent e-gold
> vendors estimate 30, 50 or as much as 90 percent of e-gold transactions
> go into pyramid scams, and the largest single holding in the system
> belongs to a shut-down Ponzi.  

I'd ask for a source, but I really don't care that much.  Although 
would like to say that I suspect using "transactions" as
a metric is itself probably misleading.  It's like the dot bombs that
would have a volume of twice the number of outstanding shares
every day, yet 90% of the stock was never publically
traded. You could say the average share traded twice a day,
but that would be highly misleading. I'm not a real gold bug,
really I'm not, but I could play one fairly convincingly if I wanted to.
Gold bugs don't do a whole lot of transactions, they hold
their gold. Commodities traders and gold bugs are very different
animals, but if they wanted to appeal to commodities traders,
they should've called it e-pork-bellies.  If the idea was to
appeal to suckers trying to get rich quick,
maybe e-Hillary-Clinton-Cattle-futures. 



> Criminals love privacy, they love anonymity.  

They love their own privacy, but hate other peoples'.
A thief would be very disappointed if he had no way of
knowing who was rich and who was poor.  How would he know
whom to profitably rob? A thief would love to know
who had guns and who didn't. Then he'd know whom
he could rob safely.  

>Remailer operators soon find
> that a substantial majority of the messages they send contain nothing
> but harrassment and threats.  

No they don't; remailer operators never get a clue what "a
substantial majority of the messages they send contain".
Rather, the only time they'll be made aware of what message they
carry contain is 1) if they're the last hop and 2) there's a complaint.
Only a tiny minority of messages will have both apply.


>Few customers use anonymity services
> for positive purposes, to protect their privacy while engaging in
> legitimate activities.  With most people, if they have nothing to hide,
> they don't hide it.  

Total and unmitigated bullshit. In fact, everyone who isn't
an exhibitionist is hiding stuff most of the time, and most
of them are performing a public service in doing so.

>Only paranoids and extremists will adopt anonymity
> technologies without nefarious purposes in mind.  Anyone proposing to
> offer new services for privacy and anonymity should be prepared to deal
> with the onslaught of criminals who will use the system for bad ends.
> 
> 
This is backwards.  The reason that nobody insists, for example,
that Blockbuster not sell lists of what moves they've checked out
is not that they wouldn't care if this was done, but rather that
it wouldn't occur to them that such a thing might happen in the
first place. It is not true that only somone with a "nefarious purpose"
in mind would want that list kept confidential; rather, only somone
with a nefarious purpose would try to obtain such a list
on someone else in the first place. 

George