None of those things came from the space program. With the exception of specific space technology, rockets, for instance, practically nothing was developed for the space program that wasn't in commercial use, or in the commercial use development pipeline at the time.
Intel was developing microprocessors independently of the space program, for instance, and would have made its stuff recursively smaller no matter whether we went to the moon or not. Same for everything on the list you mentioned. Satellites were launched before we even thought about putting a man on the moon. Clarke figured out geosynchronicity in the proceedings of the British Interplanetary Society in the late 1940's, for instance. Even Telstar was planned long before Kennedy's speech, and it's a safe bet the Comsat, one of the only companies to be chartered by the U.S. Congress, would have gotten off the ground without that particular bit of window dressing.
Just Going Out There is a good thing. It's just that with the exception of hurting people and breaking things, (they don't call them force monopolies for nothin') government "programs" are an *effect* not a *cause* of progress.
I would even bet that science itself would be farther along if most of it wasn't paid for by governments, but that's just a WAG...
I don't understand why a cryptographic protocol using a blind signature can't be used to make an auditable voting system.
It's real simple.
The paradox of internet voting is that you can't vote on the net without being able to sell your vote.
That's because blind signatures -- certainly the most secure, and probably the cheapest way to do things, especially since the patent expires in a year -- create bearer financial instruments.
Can you say, "equity", boys and girls? I knew you could...:-)
In other words, blind signatures, right out of the box, create a secure anonymous vote, but it is, by definition, a vote you can buy or sell. In bearer form. For the most part, anonymously. For cash, in bearer form. That is, anonymous cash.:-).
In fact, without a mondo-draconian is-a-person, gimmie-a-sperm-sample biometric identity scheme (say, voting in meatspace like we do now), you can't vote on the net. The paradox again.
For us anarcho-capitalists, buying and selling votes is a feature, not a bug. It's even a god-given right. But for you *statists*, on the other hand, that's a problem, yes?;-).
Seriously. At the 2001 Financial Cryptography conference in (where else?:-)) Grand Cayman, there was this panel session where various famous, and mostly liberal, academic cryptographers were beside themselves, in front of an audience of people mostly of the same mind -- pissed off and liberal, not famous -- about how to do a cryptographic voting protocol in light of Bush "stealing" the election in Florida.
They started this panel at 10-ish, and one "yeah, what he said" lead to another, and they fulminated all the way through lunch before they finally took questions from the floor.
I was first in line.:-). I noted that not once in the entire three hours had they talked about financial voting (equity, remember?) at the world's only financial cryptography conference. If, say, the conference was your idea, or something, it might even make you want to terminate the academic discount, or something...:-).
One of the reasons that this got up my nose is, as you might have guessed by my.sig, below, I define cryptography into two kinds. (There are two kinds of people, those who think in dichotomies, and -- well, you get the idea...) The first kind of cryptography is political cryptography. That is, these days, at least, cryptography used for and against nation states, since empires mostly don't exist, feudal ones, anyway. Political cryptography is the stuff involved in, say, your "rights" (see, "rights" below), online.
All the rest, for lack of a better term, is financial cryptography. I mean, sooner or later it all boils down to money, right? I'd even shoehorn Schneier's "your kid sister" in here too, just to be ornery, except that sibling rivalry is politics, if there ever was any.
And, I would say, even after USElection2K -- and 9/11, especially after 9/11, where the stock market was almost taken out, if they'd waited an hour or two for a few hundred million shares in un-cleared and un-settled trades to build up, because *that* would have caused more pure hell and hardship than even 3000 deaths could cause-- financial cryptography is *still* the only cryptography that matters.
Finally, that paradox, that the only secure vote on the net is voting a share of mostly anonymous digital bearer equity in exchange for mostly anonymous cash is probably proof of my political/financial crypto dichotomy if there ever was one. Why? Because it points, some day, to efficient, competitive markets for force and the collapse of force monopoly, which is the very foundation of what the average statist would call "government". All cops and soldiers become rent-a-cops, in other words, reporting to their shareholders and customers like everyone else in the economy.
Secure voting, indeed. Efficient markets are the most secure, anonymous votes there are.
"When the hares made speeches in the assembly and demanded that all should have equality, the lions replied, "Where are your claws and teeth?" -- attributed to Antisthenes in Aristotle, 'Politics', 3.7.2
For a somewhat cheaper -- and much more geeker -- watch, Suunto, a Finnish company, makes a whole range of watches for various sports that does all of what this one does, without the touchscreen.
Mine has a yacht-race timer in it, for instance.
I wouldn't be surprised they're using lots of the same OEM stuff inside. The Suunto watches are kind of large. Though, in the old "Right Stuff" test-pilot days, big watches meant -- oh, never mind...
(Scratches wizened scruffy beard...) 'long about 1990 or so, I was sitting in a cube farm at Fidelity, and some young whippersnapper with too much hair was plinking away at an IBM PPC AIX machine while I was in earshot.
A crony sidles up, and says, "What's the name of this machine?"
Whippersnapper says, "Pittsburgh. That one over there's Gary. The one downstairs is Kawasaki."
"Kawasaki?"
"Steel towns. Heavy Iron. The IBM guys are pissed."
:-). (Probably not the actual city names, but you get the idea.)
I've fixed this by setting all my lists "reply to sender" instead of "reply to list". Most list managers I know of have the ability to configure this.
I've gotten yelled at by a few list-protocol nazis out there, well, one in particular, but their reasoning never made sense to me, so I just ignored them. If you make replying to the list a deliberate act by an actual human being, then there' no infinite ping-pong, as far as I've ever been able to see.
The British version of road pricing was thought up by libertarian conservatives at the dawn of the Lady Maggy era. Like a lot sensible ideas from that time, however, it has now been hijacked, "triangulated" if you will, by erst-totalitarian socialists in a political era when nobody admits to have ever been a Tory.
I expect, nonetheless, that if the British government attempts to do top-down road-pricing by political committee, with centralized book-entry transactions, GPS transponders, and, probably, politically odious "is-a-person" identity schemes to clear and settle such transactions, such a system would choke on its own data-effluvia.
One need only look at the original proposal to have central automated control of the San Francisco Bay Area's Bay Area Rapid Transit system for reference. That kind of centralized traffic control still falls down, even 30 years after BART tried to do it.
If such a top-down, positive control system did manage to be built, however, it would probably still "morph", with the addition of financial cryptography on a ubiquitous internet, into a completely private system in the long run anyway. The dramatically reduced transaction cost of a streaming internet bearer cash toll system would be so much cheaper to operate than the proposed virtual highwayman's panopticon that it would eventually behoove the government to literally sell the roads to the abutters someday -- resulting the the fulfillment of that long-standing cause of libertarian nocturnal emission, selling the roads.
So, from a libertarian perspective, would-be totalitarian market controllers and transportation bluenoses and busybodies everywhere should be very careful of what they wish for.
For an example of that, remember what happened to telephony. In the US, the industry demanded from the state a Morganized monopoly to "prevent ruinous competition". In exchange for same, the various local political machines controlling the nation-state required universal service to keep the mob from voting them out of office, and to create a larger pool of deposits in the political favor-bank.
It took a quite a while, but the creation of a so-called "natural" monopoly eventually backfired on both of the industry and the state. The achievement of universal service required automated switching to prevent the telephone monopoly from hiring a significant percentage of the population (half of all females was the apocryphal statistic) from becoming telephone operators. As a result, electromechanical switching (rotary dial) begat electronic switching (touch-tone; Shockley invented the transistor for the phone company, remember), which, in turn, begat microprocessor switching and Moore's Law.
The resulting exponential drop in the price of switching completely inverted the economies of scale of network operation, changing its very structure from an increasingly larger, more unified hierarchy with exactly one fixed-price circuit-switched route from any two network nodes, to a massively geodesic network with a combinatorical number of routes between any two nodes, each route with its own possible auction price depending on latency, noise, and lots of other factors.
The result was a dramatic reduction in transaction cost, price discovery, market entry, and of course, firm size. That gave us a dramatic increase in the number of phone companies, even vertically integrated ones, and we haven't even started cash-settlement of network bandwidth yet. The paradox, of course, is that every "information worker" who sits in front of a microcomputer to work these days, sizeably more than half the female population -- even a MacDonald's cashier -- is doing exactly what a turn-of-the-20th-century telephone operator does, reprocessing and routing information from one part of the network to another.
Someday, the same thing will happen to roads, and to electricity, and to natural gas, and to any system requiring the movement of one ostensible commodity from one place to another, including physical goods in the commercial distribution chain, with internet bearer bills of lading and warehouse receipts being traded against instantaneous internet bearer cash settlement -- just like cars paying internet bearer cash to a road's intersection "nodes" as they travel down it.
In order to be in business at all these days, companies have keep a huge database of stuff. Not just the normal things, like what you sold, when, and for how much. Remember, we use book-entry settlement to buy and sell things: checks, credit cards, direct-debit/deposit, even ostensible credit-card transaction gateways like PayPal. Book-entry transaction settlement means that a company has to know who the they did business with as well -- down to their customers address, and, sooner or later, their biometrics as well.
The reason for this is that we have to send someone to jail if they lie about a book-entry transaction, or, frankly, those transactions won't clear, much less settle, and we're back to the days of personal store credit and bales of paper bearer certificates, all of which cost much more to use than just calling the cops.
So. You're in a finance department, say at Amazon. You've got a huge database with all this stuff in it, names, addresses, phone numbers, who bought what and for how much. You pay an enormous amount of money keeping it around, massaging it, storing it, reporting on it. It's gotten so necessary to have, in fact, that because it's all there, the government now wants to see it all, once a quarter, so they can tax and regulate you with it. A fine kettle of fish, indeed.
So, what are you going to do to make money with all that information, to cover some of its enormous cost? You call the Marketing guys, of course, and get them to sell it...
I expect, by the way, that the cheapest way to do transactions, particularly on the net, will be digital bearer transactions, with cryptographic protocols like blind signatures, or X-Cash, or MicroMint, or Mojo, or something like that, but I'm supposed to say that, because it's my job.
In the meantime, don't be surprised if anyone with a database full of book-entry transaction history sells that information, for whatever they can get for it, and that they will even create legislation allowing them to do that, probably with the word "Privacy" in the title somewhere.
This especially holds true for the book-entry transaction companies themselves, like VISA/Mastercard, or, unfortunately, even PayPal itself. Because, even if by law a company can't directly sell that that information, they can, at the very least, always merge, right?
There's a nice Catch-22 to business process patents, as we were told by some friends at Testa Hurwitz at a Digital Commerce Society of Boston talk a year or two ago.
If you reduce a business process to software, you're absolutely reducing it to practice: you're literally making a machine out of an idea, which, by just about every definition of "patentable" you can come up with, is, in fact, patentable.
In fact, if you don't allow business process patents, you have to unwind almost every concept in patent law.
Isn't that *cool*?
(Hmmmm.... Let's see if I pull on *this* thread *here*....)
Cheers,
RAH
Hettinga's Lemma to Coase's Theorem: If it's encrypted, and I own the key, it's *my* intellectual "property".
I suppose that was Huberman's point, but it bears repeating here.
Ultimately, if and when there's an actual bearer-cash-settled auction market for internet content, information and resources out there, with fungible coins completely exchangeable into any actual *currency* -- fiat, "resource", numismatic, whatever -- all of this "free-riding" will come to an end. Especially if the coins can be made in small enough denominations to actually *pay* for the rediculously small distribution, processing and storage costs that the net exhibits today.
I expect that when everything is actually *paid* for, someday, it'll probaby cost considerably less than such things "cost" now, using transfer-pricing methods like advertising, flat-fee billing, intellectual "property" royalties, and so on.
And, yes, Virginia, you probably *will* pay a smidgeon above your cost of raw bandwidth for "free" music someday, but not much above that.
In addition, given the economics of so-called geodesic recursive auction markets, the people who invent new stuff will make the most money. Pretty much like they do now, only more so, which is certainly more efficient, if not "fair"...
Obviously, however, cash is *not* a trivial problem.:-). If we lived there, we'd be home now, and all that...
Yet another digital cash lemming marching over the economic cliff,
RAH
>This fella is one of the Financial Cryptography folks in Anguilla, >along with Vince Cate. Some of the folks who sponsor the FC > symposia include Zero Knowledge, E-Gold, and Hushmail.
Yes, well...
As the, um, actual founder of same, I should note Ryan actually "interned" at FC98 [the one with the solar eclipse over the volcano's ashcloud:-)], and that happened mostly because he did something especially cool on cypherpunks, (can't remember what, maybe it was fully-indexed cypherpunks list archives?) and I comped him a conference badge and a room in Willies' Inn, (such as it was) for his trouble.
Also, I should note that Ryan also did the "protocols" presentation at my Philodox Symposium on Internet Bearer Transaction Settlement the following year, and, as a result of that, got himself a job slinging code for Ian Grigg and the e-gold folks for most of the following year in Anguilla.
Unfortunately, his job for e-gold was to do an implementation of Wagner Blinding, which, sad to say, he didn't actually do, and which he followed by getting himself deliberately kicked off Anguilla as persona non grata so that he didn't have to come back and finish.:-).
[BTW, Ben Laurie, of Apache SSL fame, actually *did* just finish Wagner blinding for Lucre, and, it appears, he's going to talk about it at the Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering Conference (run code or go home, and all that), which will be held in, um, Edinburgh, on June 23rd and 24th.:-)]
Now, I like Ryan a lot, both personally, and in a prodigal, "infant terrible", kind of way, and, unlike a lot of people who probably have reason to say such things, I think he's going to make something happen this time with Havenco. I was, frankly, floored when I heard about it, and I laughed for hours afterward at the sheer audicity of the idea, so it's definitely a good one, on that score alone.
I also like Sameer, who has a proven track record in starting crypto- and privacy- companies, c2.net, for instance, and certainly has the credentials worthy of the above quoted praise.
Nonetheless, I do think that the idea of "privacy-" or "data-havens", per se, and "regulatory arbitrage", in particular, is, mostly, a waste of time. Okay. To be charitable, a stopgap measure at best.
Just like they did in Switzerland, and, even, Anguilla, FinCEN et. al. will legislate "privacy" away, and just because they *can*, to use the ribald expression, leaving us nothing but *cryptography* on the internet, preferrably financial cryptography:-), which, some people note, is the way it should be, anyway.
Still, Ryan and Sameer are out there, hanging it out, while lots of people just talk about it, and, Sameer, of course, is famous for *doing* things other people just talk about.
And, I should note, finally, that we have all *kinds* of money being raised spent on things of what some people consider to be technology of dubious efficacy. So-called "certification authorities", for instance, which, like all hierarchical schemes on a geodesic internetwork, "trust management" or otherwise, are simply a waste of time. Hell, we even have watermarking companies getting funded when the only thing you can tell from such a thing is who you "stole" the item *from* -- not who "stole" it. I even hear tell of so-called "bearer transaction" companies getting money these days;-).
So, in it's own spirit of "because they can", go forth, Havenco, and, heh, replicate.
I still chuckle when I think about Ryan & Co, out there in a horizontal-rain force-blabla Beaufort-scale North Sea gale, making the world safe for the four horsemen of the infocalypse...
Cheers, Robert Hettinga Founder, DCSB, The International Conference on Financial Cryptography (FCXX), IFCA (*I* say so), Philodox, IBUC, EFCE (kind of), yadda, yadda, yadda...
Slashdot Mirror
... a dude named Lebowski laughs...
Electric Generators Direct: http://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/
'Nuff Said.
None of those things came from the space program. With the exception of specific space technology, rockets, for instance, practically nothing was developed for the space program that wasn't in commercial use, or in the commercial use development pipeline at the time.
Intel was developing microprocessors independently of the space program, for instance, and would have made its stuff recursively smaller no matter whether we went to the moon or not. Same for everything on the list you mentioned. Satellites were launched before we even thought about putting a man on the moon. Clarke figured out geosynchronicity in the proceedings of the British Interplanetary Society in the late 1940's, for instance. Even Telstar was planned long before Kennedy's speech, and it's a safe bet the Comsat, one of the only companies to be chartered by the U.S. Congress, would have gotten off the ground without that particular bit of window dressing.
Just Going Out There is a good thing. It's just that with the exception of hurting people and breaking things, (they don't call them force monopolies for nothin') government "programs" are an *effect* not a *cause* of progress.
I would even bet that science itself would be farther along if most of it wasn't paid for by governments, but that's just a WAG...
I don't understand why a cryptographic protocol using a blind signature can't be used to make an auditable voting system.
:-)
:-).
;-).
:-)) Grand Cayman, there was this panel session where various famous, and mostly liberal, academic cryptographers were beside themselves, in front of an audience of people mostly of the same mind -- pissed off and liberal, not famous -- about how to do a cryptographic voting protocol in light of Bush "stealing" the election in Florida.
:-). I noted that not once in the entire three hours had they talked about financial voting (equity, remember?) at the world's only financial cryptography conference. If, say, the conference was your idea, or something, it might even make you want to terminate the academic discount, or something... :-).
.sig, below, I define cryptography into two kinds. (There are two kinds of people, those who think in dichotomies, and -- well, you get the idea...) The first kind of cryptography is political cryptography. That is, these days, at least, cryptography used for and against nation states, since empires mostly don't exist, feudal ones, anyway. Political cryptography is the stuff involved in, say, your "rights" (see, "rights" below), online.
It's real simple.
The paradox of internet voting is that you can't vote on the net without being able to sell your vote.
That's because blind signatures -- certainly the most secure, and probably the cheapest way to do things, especially since the patent expires in a year -- create bearer financial instruments.
Can you say, "equity", boys and girls? I knew you could...
In other words, blind signatures, right out of the box, create a secure anonymous vote, but it is, by definition, a vote you can buy or sell. In bearer form. For the most part, anonymously. For cash, in bearer form. That is, anonymous cash.
In fact, without a mondo-draconian is-a-person, gimmie-a-sperm-sample biometric identity scheme (say, voting in meatspace like we do now), you can't vote on the net. The paradox again.
For us anarcho-capitalists, buying and selling votes is a feature, not a bug. It's even a god-given right. But for you *statists*, on the other hand, that's a problem, yes?
Seriously. At the 2001 Financial Cryptography conference in (where else?
They started this panel at 10-ish, and one "yeah, what he said" lead to another, and they fulminated all the way through lunch before they finally took questions from the floor.
I was first in line.
One of the reasons that this got up my nose is, as you might have guessed by my
All the rest, for lack of a better term, is financial cryptography. I mean, sooner or later it all boils down to money, right? I'd even shoehorn Schneier's "your kid sister" in here too, just to be ornery, except that sibling rivalry is politics, if there ever was any.
And, I would say, even after USElection2K -- and 9/11, especially after 9/11, where the stock market was almost taken out, if they'd waited an hour or two for a few hundred million shares in un-cleared and un-settled trades to build up, because *that* would have caused more pure hell and hardship than even 3000 deaths could cause-- financial cryptography is *still* the only cryptography that matters.
Finally, that paradox, that the only secure vote on the net is voting a share of mostly anonymous digital bearer equity in exchange for mostly anonymous cash is probably proof of my political/financial crypto dichotomy if there ever was one. Why? Because it points, some day, to efficient, competitive markets for force and the collapse of force monopoly, which is the very foundation of what the average statist would call "government". All cops and soldiers become rent-a-cops, in other words, reporting to their shareholders and customers like everyone else in the economy.
Secure voting, indeed. Efficient markets are the most secure, anonymous votes there are.
"When the hares made speeches in the assembly and demanded that all should have equality, the lions replied, "Where are your claws and teeth?" -- attributed to Antisthenes in Aristotle, 'Politics', 3.7.2
I had no idea that was what I was doing. All I did was look it up and post the URL. Honest. Accidental empire, that's me. :-).
Doh! It's translucent, of course. Proofread once, post once, as they always say. I tried to retract for a rewrite, but, well, you know how it is...
I wouldn't be surprised they're using lots of the same OEM stuff inside. The Suunto watches are kind of large. Though, in the old "Right Stuff" test-pilot days, big watches meant -- oh, never mind...
(Scratches wizened scruffy beard...) 'long about 1990 or so, I was sitting in a cube farm at Fidelity, and some young whippersnapper with too much hair was plinking away at an IBM PPC AIX machine while I was in earshot.
A crony sidles up, and says, "What's the name of this machine?"
Whippersnapper says, "Pittsburgh. That one over there's Gary. The one downstairs is Kawasaki."
"Kawasaki?"
"Steel towns. Heavy Iron. The IBM guys are pissed."
:-). (Probably not the actual city names, but you get the idea.)
I've fixed this by setting all my lists "reply to sender" instead of "reply to list". Most list managers I know of have the ability to configure this.
I've gotten yelled at by a few list-protocol nazis out there, well, one in particular, but their reasoning never made sense to me, so I just ignored them. If you make replying to the list a deliberate act by an actual human being, then there' no infinite ping-pong, as far as I've ever been able to see.
The British version of road pricing was thought up by libertarian conservatives at the dawn of the Lady Maggy era. Like a lot sensible ideas from that time, however, it has now been hijacked, "triangulated" if you will, by erst-totalitarian socialists in a political era when nobody admits to have ever been a Tory.
I expect, nonetheless, that if the British government attempts to do top-down road-pricing by political committee, with centralized book-entry transactions, GPS transponders, and, probably, politically odious "is-a-person" identity schemes to clear and settle such transactions, such a system would choke on its own data-effluvia.
One need only look at the original proposal to have central automated control of the San Francisco Bay Area's Bay Area Rapid Transit system for reference. That kind of centralized traffic control still falls down, even 30 years after BART tried to do it.
If such a top-down, positive control system did manage to be built, however, it would probably still "morph", with the addition of financial cryptography on a ubiquitous internet, into a completely private system in the long run anyway. The dramatically reduced transaction cost of a streaming internet bearer cash toll system would be so much cheaper to operate than the proposed virtual highwayman's panopticon that it would eventually behoove the government to literally sell the roads to the abutters someday -- resulting the the fulfillment of that long-standing cause of libertarian nocturnal emission, selling the roads.
So, from a libertarian perspective, would-be totalitarian market controllers and transportation bluenoses and busybodies everywhere should be very careful of what they wish for.
For an example of that, remember what happened to telephony. In the US, the industry demanded from the state a Morganized monopoly to "prevent ruinous competition". In exchange for same, the various local political machines controlling the nation-state required universal service to keep the mob from voting them out of office, and to create a larger pool of deposits in the political favor-bank.
It took a quite a while, but the creation of a so-called "natural" monopoly eventually backfired on both of the industry and the state. The achievement of universal service required automated switching to prevent the telephone monopoly from hiring a significant percentage of the population (half of all females was the apocryphal statistic) from becoming telephone operators. As a result, electromechanical switching (rotary dial) begat electronic switching (touch-tone; Shockley invented the transistor for the phone company, remember), which, in turn, begat microprocessor switching and Moore's Law.
The resulting exponential drop in the price of switching completely inverted the economies of scale of network operation, changing its very structure from an increasingly larger, more unified hierarchy with exactly one fixed-price circuit-switched route from any two network nodes, to a massively geodesic network with a combinatorical number of routes between any two nodes, each route with its own possible auction price depending on latency, noise, and lots of other factors.
The result was a dramatic reduction in transaction cost, price discovery, market entry, and of course, firm size. That gave us a dramatic increase in the number of phone companies, even vertically integrated ones, and we haven't even started cash-settlement of network bandwidth yet. The paradox, of course, is that every "information worker" who sits in front of a microcomputer to work these days, sizeably more than half the female population -- even a MacDonald's cashier -- is doing exactly what a turn-of-the-20th-century telephone operator does, reprocessing and routing information from one part of the network to another.
Someday, the same thing will happen to roads, and to electricity, and to natural gas, and to any system requiring the movement of one ostensible commodity from one place to another, including physical goods in the commercial distribution chain, with internet bearer bills of lading and warehouse receipts being traded against instantaneous internet bearer cash settlement -- just like cars paying internet bearer cash to a road's intersection "nodes" as they travel down it.
Close, but still no cigar. It was *Western* Electric, as in Ma Bell, and, though I might be wrong, it was *Hawthorne*, IL, not Cicero?
If you're in Boston and want to hear the replay... 90.9 FM, WBUR
In order to be in business at all these days, companies have keep a huge database of stuff. Not just the normal things, like what you sold, when, and for how much. Remember, we use book-entry settlement to buy and sell things: checks, credit cards, direct-debit/deposit, even ostensible credit-card transaction gateways like PayPal. Book-entry transaction settlement means that a company has to know who the they did business with as well -- down to their customers address, and, sooner or later, their biometrics as well.
The reason for this is that we have to send someone to jail if they lie about a book-entry transaction, or, frankly, those transactions won't clear, much less settle, and we're back to the days of personal store credit and bales of paper bearer certificates, all of which cost much more to use than just calling the cops.
So. You're in a finance department, say at Amazon. You've got a huge database with all this stuff in it, names, addresses, phone numbers, who bought what and for how much. You pay an enormous amount of money keeping it around, massaging it, storing it, reporting on it. It's gotten so necessary to have, in fact, that because it's all there, the government now wants to see it all, once a quarter, so they can tax and regulate you with it. A fine kettle of fish, indeed.
So, what are you going to do to make money with all that information, to cover some of its enormous cost? You call the Marketing guys, of course, and get them to sell it...
I expect, by the way, that the cheapest way to do transactions, particularly on the net, will be digital bearer transactions, with cryptographic protocols like blind signatures, or X-Cash, or MicroMint, or Mojo, or something like that, but I'm supposed to say that, because it's my job.
In the meantime, don't be surprised if anyone with a database full of book-entry transaction history sells that information, for whatever they can get for it, and that they will even create legislation allowing them to do that, probably with the word "Privacy" in the title somewhere.
This especially holds true for the book-entry transaction companies themselves, like VISA/Mastercard, or, unfortunately, even PayPal itself. Because, even if by law a company can't directly sell that that information, they can, at the very least, always merge, right?
_________
There's a nice Catch-22 to business process patents, as we were told by some friends at Testa Hurwitz at a Digital Commerce Society of Boston talk a year or two ago.
If you reduce a business process to software, you're absolutely reducing it to practice: you're literally making a machine out of an idea, which, by just about every definition of "patentable" you can come up with, is, in fact, patentable.
In fact, if you don't allow business process patents, you have to unwind almost every concept in patent law.
Isn't that *cool*?
(Hmmmm.... Let's see if I pull on *this* thread *here*....)
Cheers,
RAH
Hettinga's Lemma to Coase's Theorem: If it's encrypted, and I own the key, it's *my* intellectual "property".
...is that nobody *owns* the commons.
:-). If we lived there, we'd be home now, and all that...
I suppose that was Huberman's point, but it bears repeating here.
Ultimately, if and when there's an actual bearer-cash-settled auction market for internet content, information and resources out there, with fungible coins completely exchangeable into any actual *currency* -- fiat, "resource", numismatic, whatever -- all of this "free-riding" will come to an end. Especially if the coins can be made in small enough denominations to actually *pay* for the rediculously small distribution, processing and storage costs that the net exhibits today.
I expect that when everything is actually *paid* for, someday, it'll probaby cost considerably less than such things "cost" now, using transfer-pricing methods like advertising, flat-fee billing, intellectual "property" royalties, and so on.
And, yes, Virginia, you probably *will* pay a smidgeon above your cost of raw bandwidth for "free" music someday, but not much above that.
In addition, given the economics of so-called geodesic recursive auction markets, the people who invent new stuff will make the most money. Pretty much like they do now, only more so, which is certainly more efficient, if not "fair"...
Obviously, however, cash is *not* a trivial problem.
Yet another digital cash lemming marching over the economic cliff,
RAH
>This fella is one of the Financial Cryptography folks in Anguilla,
:-)], and that happened mostly because he did something especially cool on cypherpunks, (can't remember what, maybe it was fully-indexed cypherpunks list archives?) and I comped him a conference badge and a room in Willies' Inn, (such as it was) for his trouble.
:-).
:-)]
:-), which, some people note, is the way it should be, anyway.
;-).
>along with Vince Cate. Some of the folks who sponsor the FC
> symposia include Zero Knowledge, E-Gold, and Hushmail.
Yes, well...
As the, um, actual founder of same, I should note Ryan actually "interned" at FC98 [the one with the solar eclipse over the volcano's ashcloud
Also, I should note that Ryan also did the "protocols" presentation at my Philodox Symposium on Internet Bearer Transaction Settlement the following year, and, as a result of that, got himself a job slinging code for Ian Grigg and the e-gold folks for most of the following year in Anguilla.
Unfortunately, his job for e-gold was to do an implementation of Wagner Blinding, which, sad to say, he didn't actually do, and which he followed by getting himself deliberately kicked off Anguilla as persona non grata so that he didn't have to come back and finish.
[BTW, Ben Laurie, of Apache SSL fame, actually *did* just finish Wagner blinding for Lucre, and, it appears, he's going to talk about it at the Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering Conference (run code or go home, and all that), which will be held in, um, Edinburgh, on June 23rd and 24th.
Now, I like Ryan a lot, both personally, and in a prodigal, "infant terrible", kind of way, and, unlike a lot of people who probably have reason to say such things, I think he's going to make something happen this time with Havenco. I was, frankly, floored when I heard about it, and I laughed for hours afterward at the sheer audicity of the idea, so it's definitely a good one, on that score alone.
I also like Sameer, who has a proven track record in starting crypto- and privacy- companies, c2.net, for instance, and certainly has the credentials worthy of the above quoted praise.
Nonetheless, I do think that the idea of "privacy-" or "data-havens", per se, and "regulatory arbitrage", in particular, is, mostly, a waste of time. Okay. To be charitable, a stopgap measure at best.
Just like they did in Switzerland, and, even, Anguilla, FinCEN et. al. will legislate "privacy" away, and just because they *can*, to use the ribald expression, leaving us nothing but *cryptography* on the internet, preferrably financial cryptography
Still, Ryan and Sameer are out there, hanging it out, while lots of people just talk about it, and, Sameer, of course, is famous for *doing* things other people just talk about.
And, I should note, finally, that we have all *kinds* of money being raised spent on things of what some people consider to be technology of dubious efficacy. So-called "certification authorities", for instance, which, like all hierarchical schemes on a geodesic internetwork, "trust management" or otherwise, are simply a waste of time. Hell, we even have watermarking companies getting funded when the only thing you can tell from such a thing is who you "stole" the item *from* -- not who "stole" it. I even hear tell of so-called "bearer transaction" companies getting money these days
So, in it's own spirit of "because they can", go forth, Havenco, and, heh, replicate.
I still chuckle when I think about Ryan & Co, out there in a horizontal-rain force-blabla Beaufort-scale North Sea gale, making the world safe for the four horsemen of the infocalypse...
Cheers,
Robert Hettinga
Founder,
DCSB, The International Conference on Financial Cryptography (FCXX), IFCA (*I* say so), Philodox, IBUC, EFCE (kind of), yadda, yadda, yadda...