Making Money in Digital Money

[Jim Choate]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Nomen Nescio wrote:

> 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.

> 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.

Well, some of them perhaps...

> 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.

Information wants to be free. Hell, really everything wants to be free.

Government and Economics are technologies that mankind developed to
sustain their psychologicaly driven societies. Fortunately our societies
are becoming technology (ie applied information) driven and this will
eventually spell the end of both 'government' and 'economics' as anything
resembling what we know today.

> 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.

Don't waste your time doing either, spend that energy on working on the
issues that you mentioned that you feel or most important to you.

Good luck!


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