Decentralized Markets

[Greg Broiles]

At 09:46 AM 3/1/2001 -0800, Tim May wrote:

>Is it all hopeless? Are we destined to see a world of a few corporations 
>like Yahoo and Ebay and Amazon being choke points for any tinhorn dictator 
>threatening to sue them and arrest their employees?
>
>The answer is, of course, decentralized networks, decentralized markets.
>
>Gnutella, Open Napster, Freenet, Mojo Nation, Cypherpunks-style remailers. 
>(Some of these still have elements of centralized control. But the 
>centralized control and corporate points of attack may someday be 
>discarded as unnecessary, pace the discussions we've had of "everyone a 
>mint" in digital money systems.)
>
>The Cypherpunks future lies with these decentralized systems. Obvious, but 
>true.

This is a reasonable description of my current project - I gave a 
presentation in it at the O'Reilly
P2P conference, slides are at 
<ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/conference/p2p2001/1178/broiles_1178.sdd>.

>Centralized control is a more general problem than just "men with guns" 
>controlling others. Centralized control is also a target for other 
>centralized controllers. Ebay and Yahoo are finding this out in a big way.
>
>Let a billion buyers and sellers bloom.

Exactly. Control freaks and lazy people hoping to exploit designed-in 
architectural weaknesses or choke points in commerce systems will find 
themselves hoisted on their own petards, like Napster and Ebay.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at netbox.com
"Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler