Making Money in Digital Money

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, at 04:20  AM, A.Melon wrote:

>> 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.
>
> weblogs?
>
> http://invisiblog.com/
>
>

Rebutting Mr. Anonymous, the dyspeptic original poster,  with specific, 
single examples of where he is wrong only helps make his argument seem 
plausible.

Every one of his examples where he claims "none of this exists, in the 
world of the cypherpunks" can be rebutted by many examples.

I make no claim that we invented all of these things, though in several 
of the instances we were the first to use them, the first to talk about 
them, and even the actual inventors of some of them.

* P2P -- BlackNet was operational in 1993. Remailers were used for file 
sharing even before then. One of the few books on P2P discusses several 
Cypherpunks and their effects. We may not have coined the term "P2P," 
but we sure were talking about peer-to-peer and "everyone a remailer" 
and "everyone a mint" long before P2P became the darling of venture 
capitalists for a few short dot com boom quarters!

In any case, Napster, Kazaa, Freenet, Morpheus, etc. have been talked 
about many times here. Sure, we don't run the list based on P2P (unless 
the distributed CP list is considered P2P, which it could be, in which 
case we've been doing it since before Napster existed), but we know 
non-hierarchical, flat, first class object systems like nobody's 
business.

* File sharing -- Covered above. And don't forget the release of RC4 on 
our list. And the Mykotronx docs. And so on. MojoNation was based on 
distributed file sharing, for backups, etc.

(Before Cypherpunks, I worked to help Dave Ross and Jim Bennett develop 
their ideas for a distributed, file sharing back up system. This was in 
1990.)

* Freenet -- Covered above. Many here know Ian Clarke. Many here, 
present or past, have themselves worked on systems superior to Freenet. 
(MojoNation, Vines/Tarzan, BitTorrent, etc.) And many Cypherpunks 
worked at present or in the past for companies working in this area 
(C2Net, now owned by Red Hat, The Anonymizer, Zero Knowledge, 
MojoNation, etc.). To argue that we are uninvolved with one particular 
system, Freenet, is misleading in the extreme.

* IIRC -- ?  Sure, I guess. Those who like them, use them. People set 
up CP relay chats some years ago. I checked in and found the usual 
babble. Those who like it, use it. By the way, Cypherpunks (mainly Hugh 
Daniel) set up a 3-way DES-encrypted virtual meeting between Mountain 
View, Cambridge (MA), and Northern Virginia. This was back in 1994. 
Impressive.

* Weblogs -- They're there for those who want them. Our mailing list is 
not a blog, for the obvious reasons that blogs are mostly just extended 
rants with hypertext pointers. Like newspaper columns. Boring 
technology, been around for years. (I've been reading John Baez's blog 
on mathematical physics for more than 10 years now: 
<http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html>. Of course, he didn't call it 
a blog when he started, nor does he call it a blog now. But it for sure 
is. Likewise, Dave Winer didn't call his early systems blogs, but I've 
been using his tools for well over a decade, including his hypertext 
outline processor, MORE.

* WiFi -- give me a fucking break! Wirelesss connections abound at CP 
meetings. And we were some of the earliest users of the Metricom 
wireless modems, circa 1995, with a special deal offered by some 
Metricom founders. Seeing laptops Metricomed to search engines for 
instant answers from the crowd was impressive, circa 1996-7. It still 
is. It is true that wireless connections are not being used for 
remailers, a topic I wrote about extensively in 1992-3, and is covered 
in my Cyphernomicon, and is even mentioned in my 1988 Manifesto. The 
reasons are manyfold why wireless connections are not common for such 
uses (mostly, lack of density where the wireless benefits would appear).

* Open Source -- Mr. Anonymous is either ignorant or is being 
deliberately deceptive. PGP was distributed around the world via the 
efforts of several Cypherpunks, including Lucky Green, using open 
source models, with source code distributed at "open meetings, open to 
all." Ditto for several other systems, including remailer code, mint 
code, etc.

* Open Spectrum -- This is even more laughable. I guess Mr. Anonymous 
doesn't follow the work of Eric and Steve on GNU Radio, the open 
source, open spectrum effort. Actual demos, including to a stunned FCC 
(from what I hear). Funded by Cypherpunks, designed by Cypherpunks, 
built by Cypherpunks, used by Cypherpunks. And at the September meeting 
at my house we also heard from the Aetherwire ultrawideband folks.

His laundry list of things we are unaware of or uninvolved with is 
laughable.


--Tim May