Pay per use remailers and remailer reliability tracking.

[Bill Stewart]

At 02:19 PM 12/22/2001 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>Yes. The best work has always been done by one or two people at a time.
>This applies to software as well.  (Not so much to chips anymore,
>at least not for the past 20 years. Another topic.)

>A person with the dedication and skill of a Stallman could
>probably implement digital cash without having the Herman Miller chairs,
>the hot tub up on the roof of the office building, the staff of 
>marketdroids, and the espresso machines.
>
>There's some hope.

Espresso is important, basic machines are cheap, and the real decision
is whether walking down to Starbucks to avoid making it yourself
is more an interruption to your concentration or an opportunity
to spend time in the real world and to check out the Mondex smartcard machine
that Starbucks gave up on using :-)

But the easy part of doing digital cash is the software,
and it doesn't take years of Stallman-level or Chaum-level or
Ian-or-Ben-or-Lucky-level wizardry to produce it, though it's
really helpful to have their insights into what didn't work
and what pieces were useful for consumer-quality realizability.

Lots of people can turn the algorithms into reliable code;
lots of people can build user interfaces, though you if you want
it to run on the latest Microsoft GUI API environments and
all Mac environments from 6.5 through 10.1.2Coca you'll need a few
extra helpers to add the ugly details.  (*I* could even do the programming,
though you'd get a basic web forms interface and a text interface
that looks suspiciously like "throw stone knife at dwarf", "404 Knife Not 
Found",
with none of that modern Javascruft or "ncurses" aesthetics in it :-)

The hard part is getting people to take the stuff.
30 years of Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson, 20 years of Stallman and 
Gilmore,
15 years of X and Gosling, and 10 years of PGP & Linux has gotten us 
partway to
World Domination in technical areas, often by getting the good parts stolen 
badly
by the bigger commercial interests, but money's harder to change;
Black & Scholes and Fair & Isaac and Milken and Visa/MC/AX and Schwab and
later E-Trade and just possibly PayPal have changed things,
but Mondex didn't happen, and Micropayments didn't happen,
and in spite of all of Hettinga's enthusiam and Chaum's business acumen,
anonymous digital bearer cash hasn't successfully rocked the world.
It not only takes technical skills to ship working stuff,
it takes business skills to find a market where it works and
promote it enough that enough people are using it that
some level of anonymity can actually happen.

Lucky and the Mark Twain Bank had the technology, and had the
service working in the abstract, aside from the minor problem that
there was nothing to buy except pictures of Cypherella
before they stopped allowing that, though perhaps if they'd
been a bit later to market and jumped into E-Bay when PayPal did
they could have pulled it off (or perhaps not - that's a market
where reputations have a really high value, and you'd have to
structure an escrow market around your digicash that would
undo most of the anonymity even if the digicash provided it.)

Doug and the Austin Cypherpunks Credit Union folks had the technical skills,
and the interesting hook that in the US, Credit Unions have
much less regulation than Real Banks, but figuring out how to make money
from such an activity was tough, and unlike MTB, they decided not
to launch a business they didn't know how to make money with :-)

Getting the real thing working requires real marketing skills
and being in the right place at the right time; occasionally
you can hit it off, like the kid who wrote WinAmp and was pressured
by his parents into making it Shareware and not just freeware,
or the Hotmail folks causing the free-web-based-email wave
(and catalyzing many of the appallingly stupid Dot-Com Business Plans.)

Perhaps one advantage of the dot-com crash is that people starting
businesses today are much more likely to do the solid business planning
and the initial technical decisions before they get enough
funding to leave the garage and hire the 200 programmers that
it takes to prevent any real work from being done while you're
having meetings to coordinate development of the hot-tub-scheduling website.

But if you're not going to use the marketdroids, you have to find
some really solid alternative to get the stuff widely used.
Maybe it's as simple as finding the next Ochoa brothers and
showing them how selling bearer cash cards can help their business,
now that the tough part is moving the green paper and not the white powder,
but the nearest recent equivalent was The Napster Brothers,
and they didn't successfully capitalize their need for a payment system.
Mojo Nation may have been a bit closer, as a small dedicated group
of enthusiasts working on a payment system combined with a transport mechanism
for the goodz, but they didn't pull it off either.