Making Money in Digital Money

[Nomen Nescio]

All this talk about digital payments is a real blast from the past.

Not just because it's all been said before; but because of how it
demonstrates that cypherpunks are still stuck in the early 1990s as far
as their world view.

Every one of these discussions might have been made five or even ten years
ago (with the possible exception of the details of Brands technology,
which isn't fundamental).  Yet the internet world has changed enormously
since then.

Most of these changes have passed the cypherpunks by.  All the P2P work,
file sharing, Freenet, IIRC, weblogs, WiFi, open source, open spectrum;
for the most part it's as if none of this exists, in the world of the
cypherpunks.

The problem with these discussions of digital payments is so fundamental
that it's amazing that no one mentions it: anonymous payments are useless.
The world hasn't evolved the way cypherpunks thought it might, ten
years ago.  Yet the reality doesn't sink in.

Anonymous payments for physical goods are pointless because you can't
deliver them anonymously.  Everyone has recognized that from the beginning.
So they always envisioned them being used for information goods.

Well, here's a clue, folks: information goods are free today.  You can't
build a digital money system on paying for information goods, in a world
where people expect to get their information goods for free.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read someone like James
Donald claiming that MP3s are a micropayment market.  Wake up, gramps!
My God, nothing could make you sound more like a clueless refugee from
the 90s than a statement like that.  It's a perfect illustration of how
irrelevant the cypherpunks have become.

At one time, cypherpunks, with their libertarian and anarchocapitalist
views, assumed that the online world was turning into Galt's Gulch, a
world where people would constantly pay for exchanges of information.
What they didn't foresee is that it turned instead into a communist
utopia, where each supplies according to his abilities, and each takes
according to his needs.  And it works online, unlike in the physical
world, because no matter how much each person takes, there's still plenty
for everyone else.  Information doesn't get used up.

Unless cypherpunks open their eyes to the reality around them, instead
of seeing what they want to see, they are going to continue to be part
of the past rather than part of the future.

Ironically, Tim May's racist prediction  for "the colored race" has
become the truth for the cypherpunks: they are "headed for the trash
heap of history, courtesy of their own choices."

And with views like those, cypherpunks are the ones truly deserving of
his final comment:

"Fuck 'em."