Cypherpunk failures

[Declan McCullagh]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2001 at 02:00:15AM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Speaking of laws by Christmas, anyone want to give odds on the accuracy
> of Tim May's prediction on September 13:
> 
>    Dark times are coming. I'll bet a complete ban on strong, unescrowed 
>    crypto is passed in all European countries, Russia, China, Japan, and 
>    the U.S. by, say, December 15th.

Yes, this will turn out to be an incorrect prediction. Not one country
has taken serious steps to ban or limit crypto; in the U.S., even Gregg
never introduced his bill.

> The larger question is, what is it about the cypherpunk worldview which
> is so wrong?  Why do cypherpunks constantly predict events which don't
> come true?  And is this faulty vision responsible for the failure of
> the cypherpunks to maintain their cultural and technological influence,
> and to make progress towards their goals?

Tim does not equal cypherpunks, and not all of his predictions turn
out to be so off. It's difficult to predict the future accurately --
what would be more interesting is to compare relvant predictions made
by cypherpunks against predictions made by, say, groups of
politicians, academics, think tank types, and so on. Go for it.

> Meanwhile the most interesting technological changes are passing the
> cypherpunks by.  The open source movement, peer to peer exchange, the
> music and copyright wars, all have had little impact in the cypherpunk
> world.  Peer to peer technology alone has tremendous potential as a

This is actually partly true -- even Freenet, perhaps the most
promising cypherpunkly project with live code right now, barely gets a
mention on the list.

-Declan