Making the Agora Vanish into Cyberspace
mean-green at hushmail.com
mean-green at hushmail.com
Mon Apr 16 19:19:44 PDT 2001
At 12:12 PM 4/12/01 -0700, you wrote:
>I want to apply what I just wrote to the projects of some friends of ours:
MojoNation and Zero Knowledge Systems. I say "friends" because long-term
list members are either working for them, or founded them, or whatever.
You all know what I mean.
>
>Caveat: I have not talked to principals at either company for a long time.
I don't know what they're doing, or even if their companies still exist
in the same form (same basic mission) as when I last talked to their principals.
Consider these comments to be applicable to companies _like_ these companies.
At 11:14 AM -0700 4/12/01, Tim May wrote:
>>This makes Yahoo, Amazon, EBay the easy targets for lawsuits by foreign
governments, lawsuits by PC groups in America, boycotts (which are OK, of
course), and even direct actions against corporate officers. How long will
it be before corporate offices at EBay are bombed because birth control
stuff is sold on EBay? How long before the President of Amazon is assassinated
one night for "allowing" books like "The Satanic Verses" be sold on his
system?
>>
>>These three companies are representative of the trend toward a corporation,
readily traceable to a physical location, acting as the "marketplace" location.
Even more abstractly, Napster only distributed an _indexing_ application
and then provided a forum for indices to be published. And yet what has
happened with Napster is and was predictable.
>>
>>(If you set up a music pirating system, as seen by others, and paint your
name and address on your back, you _will_ be sued. A bunch of us pointed
this out at a CP physical meeting in early 2000, when Napster was just starting
to become known.)
>>
>>There's a better solution to this "big targets problem": peer-to-peer,
a la Gnutella, Mojo, etc. No identifiable nexus of corporate control. Online
clearing. Reputation intermediaries. Digital cash (not strictly needed,
if N (number of sellers and buyers) is large enough and there is no central
clearinghouse which can be sued.)
>>
>>Making the agora disappear into cyberspace, whether by sheer numbers of
sellers and buyers (peer-to-peer) or by robust encryption (a la BlackNet)
is an important goal.
>>
>>"The Theory of the Corporation" needs revisiting.
>>
>>This is what is missing from the plans of so many of these "Cypherpunks-
interesting" companies: they start developing some ideas of how to implement
true untraceability, and doing commerce in uncoercible (transactions cannot
be physically coerced) ways, then they BLOW IT:
>>
>>The blow it by incorporating in above-board ways, readily-traceable by
any constable or narc or Fed who wants to find their corporate offices in
Quebec or Mountain View or whatever village constitutes the capital of Anguilla.
>>
>>Which means none of these entities can exploit the truly rich markets
out there. Markets for online porn of various kinds, markets for "specialty"
interests, a free and open and unfettered market in Nazi memorabilia and
other such newly-verboten items, and, the gold mine, markets in medical
information, credit information, and other such data bases which governments
seek to hold monopolies on. (Governments ain't stupid. Being the official
Mafia, they know the value of regulating and controlling data bases.)
>>
>>For those of you who don't fully appreciate what I am getting at, being
newcomers, let me move away from such banalities as "kiddie porn" market-
-though this is a real market which any truly untraceable tools will facillitate,
obviously--and focus instead on the "credit rating market."
>>
>>Alice defaulted on a loan to Bob some years ago. Do-gooders in the United
States decided that Alice's "credit records" should be forced to "forget"
this item after some period set by legislative decree. Charles, who was
told by Bob by that Alice defaulted on a loan, is ordered by the government
that he may not reveal this information to Darva, who is considering making
a loan to Alice and is willing to pay Charles a fee for supplying her with
what he knows of Alice's past habits regarding loans.
>>
>>This is, in a nutshell, the essence of the "Fair Credit Reporting Act."
This is what laymen, who usually think it a good idea, mean when they say
"Your credit records only go back 5 years."
>>
>>Cypherpunks know that the technologies exist to support bypasses of such
contra-freedom laws. Usually called "data havens," though Bruce Sterling
got it wrong (no insult meant to him) when he predicted in "Islands in the
Net" that such data havens would be on Caribbean islands or in the jungles
of Southeast Asia. Physical security is only the equivalent of a few dozen
bits' worth of cryptographic security. (At the time "Islands in the Net"
appeared, in 1988, I had already presented the "BlackNet" crypto scheme
to my Silicon Valley friends Phil Salin, Marc Stiegler, Randy Farmer, Chip
Morningstar, and a bunch of the Xanadu/AMiX folks. It did in cyberspace,
a la Vinge's "True Names," what Sterling was simultaneously setting out
in "Islands.")
>>
>>(As to the morality of such bypasses, why is the business of government
or anyone else to tell Bob or Charles that it is illegal and punishable
by fines and imprisonment to tell Darva that Alice cheated Bob at some time
in the past? It isn't.
>>
>>OK, so the crypto tools really do exist to enable "free markets in cyberspace."
So it this what Mojo and ZKS will do? Is this what Vince Cate in Anguilla
is able to do?
>>
>>Why is Mojo not becoming the pirate music capital of cyberspace?
1. Because most music down-loaders (and many others with content to share)
are lazy and Mojo requires them to take positive action to publish. 2.
Because Mojo is sensitive to networks effects (when there are less than
a hundred or so users on-line the reliability data retrieval quickly diminishes)
and because of factor 1 there is less interesting data being shared.
The members of this list with always-on connections could easily put Mojo
right by running a client configured to offer most or all of Mojo's services
(block server, content tracker, publishing tracker and relay server). This
one small thing could provide the needed infrastructure to bootstrap. Come
on guys, it can't be that painful to participate, can it?
Look, I'm not loaded but if I can get a few dozen list members running the
client (BTW, its small and easy to run, doesn't patch the OS, etc.) and
stabilize the system, I'm willing to start converting Mojo currency out
of my own pocket and pay those offering services.
>>Why is ZKS not advertising its software to those interested in nude photos
of youngsters? Why is Anguilla not the credit rating capital of the world/
>>
>>
>>Because each is readily locatable and targettable. These are at least
part of the reasons. (I admit that other reasons may be "Because Jim is
not interested in being the pirate music capital, because the shareholders
of ZKS choose not be child pornographers, because Vince doesn't want to
be the credit rating center of the world.")
True, but he was/is interested in seeing the technology and the public Mojo
service become generally useful.
>>The important point is that even if any of these ventures _wanted_ to
use their technologies as described above, THEY ARE TOO VISIBLE.
>>
>>Jim McCoy understands this quite well...and yet he located his operation
in a visible way, which surprises me.
Cost, priorities and a bit of laziness. But all is not lost. The public
code includes almost all of the system and the parts which are missing I
have on good assurance aren't that hard to reverse engineer.
Free, encrypted, secure Web-based email at www.hushmail.com
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list