Making Money in Digital Money

[Steve Schear]

At 06:19 PM 4/29/2003 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
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>At 12:52 PM -0700 4/29/03, Bill Frantz wrote:
> >This view of the Digital Silk Road is quite different from the one
> >described in the paper, "The Digital Silk Road" by Norman Hardy and
> >Eric Dean Tribble <http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html>.
> >However, Robert will enjoy the section, "No Junk Mail!".
>
>Fine. We'll call it the "original silk road". :-).
>
>It's Eric Hughes' sanctioned "piracy" distribution scheme, then.
>Sorry if I thought they were one and the same.

I attended Eric's July 1996 Defcon IV talk on what he called "Universal 
Piracy".  He anticipated many of the potential problems with "recursive 
auctions" and assumed that most successful content creators would get their 
money through guarantors, like those that provide movie production 
investors "completion bonds."  Creators would establish themselves by 
giving away content until they established a sufficient reputation that 
they could raise money prior to completion or even before commencement of a 
new work, product or product update.  These ideas are now widely credited 
to J. Kelsey and B. Schneier from their 1998, Third USENIX Workshop on 
Electronic Commerce Proceedings paper, "The Street Performer Protocol" 
http://www.counterpane.com/street_performer.html, and later more widely 
publicized in a First Monday review article 
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/rasch/.  Eric refined his ideas 
at a Cypherpunks meeting that fall (the first one I attended) in his 
Berkeley house.  Its too bad he never published his ideas and got the 
widespread credit he deserved.

steve