Deconstructing Timothy.

[mattd]

 >>I'd rather see a company starting on a shoestring, with surplus desks 
from Repo Depot, with crowded offices, and with no money wasted on 
frivolities. Especially if I'm an investor!<<

And you'd probably be wasting your money cos good code needs quiet private 
reasonably pleasant surroundings.Not digbert cubicles run by simon legree.

 >>(I faced a similar choice in 1974: some of the places I was considering 
were known for their lavish expense accounts, their nice offices. Other 
places were more spartan (that's a good word to think about). I chose one 
of the spartan places, Intel. A lot of those other companies I could have 
gone to went nowhere.)<<

Yes we all know how much you prefer Sparta to Athens.Arbeit macht frei.

 >>This applies to marketdroids as well. Startup companies get larded-up 
with marketing departments when there is little to market. The huges staffs 
of some of the companies we all know about is an example. (Just as bad: the 
hiring of ex-government officials, regulators, etc. But I digress.) <<

 >YAWN<

 >>I agree and disagree. I agree that the core crypto is sort of 
established. However, how many examples of it do we see? Few. How many of 
the programmers here on this list (there must be a few dozen who call 
themselves programmers, professionally) have ever implemented anything 
remotely similar to digital cash? (I don't call myself a programmer, but I 
fool around. The closest I have come to the above is when about 10 years 
ago I wrote a simple RSA implementation in Mathematica, just to make sure I 
had all the "Euler totient function" kind of crapola down straight.) <<

More drivel,Tim getting senile? The ronnie raygun of the cypherpunk pantheon?

 >>PayPal took off pretty fast. So did VISA and MasterCard in their day. I 
think and hope someone will cut through all of the b.s. and do something 
that takes off. As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the reasons we wanted 
to have a session on "implementing digital money" was to brainstorm these 
issues. Maybe we should try again. By the way, if "lots of people can turn 
the algorithm into reliable code," where _are_ the implementations? I see 
bits and pieces. <<

I see dead people.Especially people like timmy.

 >>I don't think things happen because of "evangelists." Evangelists didn't 
give us the transistor, the IC, the microprocessor, the early personal 
computers, or even the Mac (where Apple was famous for hiring 
"evangelists," e.g., Guy Kawasaki). Discussing this would require a longer 
article here than I'm interested in writing. To be sure, advertising 
BankAmericard (VISA) and other credit cards was and is a big business. 
People have to know a technology exists and then want to use it. 
Evangelizing digital cash, when no real digital cash implementation exists, 
is getting things backwards. <<

Bollocks and stale to boot.Not the 1st time tims got things ass about 
though.(can provide examples on request.)

 >>Lucky can tell us what the real level of technology was. My impression 
is that it was a cleaned-up version of Chaum's earlier code (or the code of 
his early 90s programmers, that is) and did "uninteresting" things. And 
since it wasn't payee-untraceable, interesting uses for trading banned 
materials were not possible. (My recollection, though I could be wrong, was 
that Mark Twain Bank also had the usual ISP-like junk about acceptable uses 
and how accounts could be cancelled for "inappropriate uses.") A lot of 
these applications are just "toy uses." Not even the True Believers, most 
of us, <<

Ahem,True believers? The next steps,evangelists.Shurley some mishtake.

 >>would waste our time and money opening a Mark Twain Bank account so we 
could flash our account cards, or whatever, at local parties and meetings. 
I don't know of anyone, besides Lucky, who ever used the system. It is 
true, and we've talked about it many times, that most people don't care 
about anonymity and untraceability.<<

They are even taking the "let it all hang out' road with APster! and 
flashing more than account cards!

  >>They don't care that their "Fast Pass" turnpike passes can (and 
sometimes are) be used to track their movements, to find out when they were 
on the New Jersey Turnpike and which exit they got off at. 99.9984% of them 
figure no one will bother to check. So the market for Chaumian ecash for 
car passes never materialized. A big part of the problem is the lack of 
evolutionary learning. <<

Is that when you learn the meaning of the basic words you use,like 
'anarchy',ferinstance?

 >>This is a problem with our patent system, especially for software. A 
number of years ago I wrote an article about how patents for hardware work 
because the produced good "meters" the patent: no one cared what uses were 
made of the microprocessor because every sale was a sale, thus paying for 
all of the various R&D and patents and so for the chip companies. With 
software (*), there is much concern about what uses are made. Because of 
replicability of the product. (* I don't mean a software product like 
Microsoft Office. It is true that no one cares what use is made of a copy 
of Office, provided it was legitimately bought. I mean software like "RSA," 
where sale of a general license has to be very carefully planned.) Because 
Chaum wished to make money (not an ignoble goal), he limited access to the 
core of his system. (Whatever you want to call it, the algorithms, the 
implementations, the ability of others to build products, etc.) There were 
a series of "future by design" projects, but little evolutionary learning. 
(Contrast to the aircraft or chip businesses, where hundreds of companies 
failed, planes crashed, new designs were tried, patents were cross-licensed 
or bought, companies rose and fell, products proliferated...) It's not easy 
to build a company around an algorithm.<<

Or a reputation on blithering blather,Its like cypherpunk elevator muzak 
isnt it?

  RSA succeeded, but it faced years of shoestring operation troubles (I 
visited their crowded offices in Redwood Shores, circa 1990-1). And it had 
arguably the most important patent portfolio of all. (Levy's "Crypto" 
details the history, and the almost out of business experiences.) I see way 
too many Cypherpunks jabbering about "raising money." Most don't.<<

I dont see enough cypherpunks raising money to have this embarrassment put 
down,but its early days.

 >> It's time for a return to the older models. > <<

Like Operation soft drill,BUMs and K.I.S.S ferfucksake.

 > >Getting the real thing working requires real marketing skills <>See 
above. I doubt a marketing group makes a hill of beans' worth of difference. <<

Tims opinions are definitely worth a large hill o'beans.

 >>> and being in the right place at the right time; occasionally <True 
enough. <<

Look up at that full moon tim.

 >>> 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.) <

We saw a lot of appallingly-stupid Cypherpunks Business Plans, too. <<

And the appallingly stupid adoption of crypto-anarchy instead of 
cyber-liberty.Whoops.

 >>"And then at this point the world adopts the use of Bearer Bucks (TM) 
and we get 2% of every transaction!" >

Anarcho-capitalism would never encourage such lunacy,right timmy?

 >>> 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.
Yep. Premature commercialization, mythical man-month, burn rates, and all 
that. <<

Wisdom from on high,take notes,cypherpunks.Tim may not be with us 
forever.(It just seems like it sometimes)

 >>> But if you're not going to use the marketdroids, you have to find > 
some really solid alternative to get the stuff widely used. I'll say it 
again: the best commercialization is done for stolen products. <<

And words,see mattd's posts on how I stole the word "anarchy."I'm TM master 
Thief!

 >>(Or, to head off frivolous charges that I am libeling Sun or Cisco, 
below, products which were basically already developed and faced a ready 
market.) The Stanford University Network (SUN) machines were largely ready 
to go when the founders of Sun (gee, where'd they get that name?) sought 
permission (and investment) from Stanford to commercialize them. Ditto for 
Len and Sandy's work at Stanford on routers. This is how Sun and Cisco were 
able to "hit the ground running." They didn't squander precious startup 
dollars on roof-top jacuzzis and meeting rooms for researchers to sit 
around trying to develop a product. Investment money went into production 
facilities, wire-wrap guns, etc. Even RSA was basically just 
commercializing an already-extant thing. Intel was making and selling 
actual products within 6 months of its formation. (It did _not_ get funding 
and then sit around in opulent surroundings thinking about future 
directions. In a way, it also "stole" its technology, in that its founders 
had worked on silicon-gate MOS at Fairchild and knew how to get rolling 
quickly. I'm not accusing Intel of stealing in any prosecutable sense, but 
in the sense that this is the way evolutionary learning happens:<<

May I interject some Proudon at this point: "Property is Theft"

  >>the children of successes create more successes.) By contrast, I've 
watched dozens of companies (some of them started and staffed by my 
friends) raise some seed capital and _then_ begin their research and 
development! Bad move. For lots of reasons I could write about for hours. 
(Xanadu and AMIX were examples, several Cypherpunks startups are other 
examples.) (Nutshell: research proceeds unevenly. Breakthroughs. 
Evolutionary learning. Dead-ends. <<

Anarcho-capitalism,racism,fascism,ayn Rand,robert Heinlein,Gun nuts and 
militia wackos,sexism,Libertianism,etc.Yep.

Redirections. "Exploitation of rich veins of ore," punctuated equilibrium, 
time value of money. When a company gets investment money, it _must_ begin 
to use that money _immediately_. Ideally, for production facilities, for 
actual product advertising, for _immediate_ uses. The time value of money 
dictates this. It _cannot_ use its money to hire people to sit around and 
think about future research directions. If there is not a _real_ business 
plan (I don't mean a "spreadsheet business plan") with a real revenue 
stream beginning _soon_, why form a company?<<

Why indeed,become a true anarchist name.Corporations wont last 5 minutes 
without the state to back them up.

  >>A lot of naive people seem to think the capital markets exist to help 
them fund their dreams, their vague ideas about becoming the next Bill 
Gates. Maybe the recent dot com collapse has changed things.) There _is_ a 
place for "service businesses." ISPs, for example. (The founders of ZKS 
made their initial money by setting up a successful ISP in Canada and then 
selling it when the great wave of ISP consolidations was cresting. 
Interestingly, some of the early remailer operators in Holland did 
something very similar, selling their ISP business. Looks like this was the 
real way to make some money. No exotic cutting-edge technology, just paying 
customers.) There's a saying that "the best is the enemy of the good." This 
is part of the long debate in computer science between "doing the right 
thing" and "doing what works." The "Right Thing" is the elegant, the 
crystalline, the pure. "What Works" is the crufty, the cobbled-together. 
LISP versus Perl, perhaps. Richard Gabriel has some fun essays along the 
lines of "Worst is Best" (use Google to find them), discussing why the 
workstation and language market developed in the way it did. In our 
community (and related orbiting communities), "the cool is the enemy of the 
good." Hence we see multi-year efforts to the really cool implementation of 
hypertext developed, thus running out of money and missing the boat on the 
Web. (Xanadu.) Ditto for digital cash, as comparatively low-tech and uncool 
products like PayPal move in to take the low-hanging fruit. Paying people 
to sit around and dream about rilly, rilly cool products is the kiss of 
death. <<

Oh death! Where is thy sting? Why is this bore still breathing?Will no one 
rid me of this turgid capitalist priest?

 >>Lastly, the focus on commercialization has been very weird these past 
several years. Nearly everyone jabbers about how to make money off of 
remailers, or data havens, or digital money. But little in the way of new 
ideas are being discussed here. <<

Anarcho-capitalism had nothing to with this and neither did I,Im TM 
crypto-anarchist.

 >>Our last Cypherpunks meeting was refreshing in that we had a couple of 
good talks on real things and very little of the "lawyer" and "startup 
evangelizing" junk. And we ended with a heated discussion of remailers and 
such, which Len and Steve and others have been writing about. <<

Len and Steve may still have something new to say,Im sucking wind and have 
been for years.

 >>Even more lastly, you folks out there thinking about how to do a startup 
or make money should be thinking about what I said, and which I am certain 
is basically correct: start up companies are not the place to do basic R&D. 
That's the place for universities and for established companies (with the 
companies either spinning-off divisions or selling the products themselves 
or losing their staff who "steal" the work). The cost of money is just too 
high for anyone to fund blue sky dreamers. Except as charity. (I can't 
resist: Look at Interval Research. Paul Allen, who has almost as much money 
as Bill Gates, decided to try to replicate the success of Xerox PARC and 
funded Interval Research some years ago (around '92-'93, IIRC). He gave it 
a wad of money, they set up shop, they hired Brenda Laurel and Lee 
Felsenstein and all kinds of other bright thinkers and dreamers. What came 
out of it? Nothing. Nada. Nil.) --Tim May <<

You folks,you anarch-capitalists should listen to me.The cost of money is 
to high.Milton Friedmans probably to blame.

 >>"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone 
with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later 
convinces himself." -- David Friedman <<

Tim,(and david) don't even believe their own 
arguments.See.http://world.std.com/~mhuben/leftlib.html
And...http://world.std.com/~mhuben/ddfr.html

I guess Tim still loves capitalism to death,He just has to bash her sometimes.