Digital cash and campaign finance reform

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 11:47  AM, Steve Schear wrote:

> At 09:28 AM 9/9/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>> Why are you not addressing the more direct attack, the one I 
>> described yesterday?
>>
>> "The contributions you receive for $87.93 came from our members."
>>
>> Unless the amounts are consolidated by a third party or dithered (so 
>> much for digital money being what it claims to be), this covert 
>> channel bypasses the nominal name-stripping.
>
> Sorry, I replied to this but apparently forgot to cc cypherpunks....

On this topic, I very strongly suggest to people that they not carry on 
conversations on both open lists and moderated lists.

Also, I thought Perrypunks was a "no politics, crypto only" list? 
Debating how to do campaign finance reform is heavily political, and 
very light on cryptography, math, etc.
>
> Limiting each individual contribution to fixed amounts (say $1, $5, 
> $10, $20 and $100) should close that loophole.
>



There are too many loopholes to close.


You also don't address the other point I raised, that if an 
"untraceable campaign contribution system" is in fact unlinkable to the 
donor, then Warren Buffett is able to donate $10 million, all in 
"unlinkable" contributions.

(Nothing wrong with this, of course, but it sure does contradict the 
"only small contributions" intent of the various statist rules about 
campaigns.)

So, why work on a system which is guaranteed to fail, by its nature?

And guaranteed to fail for social reasons, when it is pointed out that 
inner city negroes rarely have access to PCs or digital money systems 
and that the system thus skews toward techies and those with computers?

--Tim May



--Tim May
"Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid.  But 
stupidity is the only universal crime;  the sentence is death, there is 
no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without 
pity." --Robert A. Heinlein