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>>Depends on what dimension you're measuring. For fun, I pick time.
>>
>>I leave a definition of fractal time to the more mathematically
>>creative out there.
>
> You're the one using it, so why would you ask us to try to guess what
> you mean?
Actually, since I'm not the one trying to use "fractal time", or fractal
anything else, for that matter, in any coherent sentence, I abdicate any
responsibility for its use, which I probably wasn't clear enough in
saying, I guess.
As to my wild-ass guess of picking of time as a dimension, it seems to me
that the latency, load, whatever of the network can be measured in
dropped packets, or time or something, and the network certainly *looks*
like a geodesic one, with multiple nodes plugged into lots of lines
routing packets in arbitrary directions instead of up and down a
hierarchy. That and having read Huber's idea (or at least Huber is where
I saw it first) that decreasing switch prices creates geodesic networks.
But, of course, I don't know nearly enough about how packets move across
the network, even after reading some pretty good stuff on network/ISP
settlement, like, say,
<http://www.isoc.org/inet99/proceedings/1e/1e_1.htm>, to make any
actually informed claims about it.
> Unless you are saying you were just hand-waving, which would make
> Choate's point, much as I am loathe to admit.
Of course I just wave my hands a lot. And, if there's anyplace where
handwaving is an art, cypherpunks is it, right? Note that I've never
published a paper on any of this, though I've had my rants published as
opinion pieces in various places, and I do know *where* to publish these
hand-wavings, if I had enough of a clue, or discipline, to do so, having
helped start a conference or two on financial cryptography, but only on
the business, and certainly not the content, side.
So, like I said before, everything I know, I stole from someone else.
These days, I make no claims to *any* original ideas, ever.
That's because every time I think I've thought of something new, it turns
out someone else has thought of it already. For instance, I've always
thought it was me who realized, on my own, that Chaum's blind signatures
got you internet bearer financial instruments. It turns out that Nick
Szabo figured it out, quite explicitly, long before I did, and that I
probably got my own "discovery" of same from watching his stuff fly by on
either cypherpunks or www-buyinfo in 1994 or so. His corpus of work in
that regard is what informs a lot of the capability based work being done
by Mark Miller and the language E, or Tyler Close with his Ferex
securities underwriting system, for instance.
About the only things I like to claim as my own these days are merely
hypotheses. One, that in order for internet bearer transactions to
replace book-entry ones, they need to be three orders of magnitude
cheaper, and, two, that our social structures map directly to our
communication architectures in a quite mechanical and, yes, Virginia,
determinist fashion. Frankly, I expect that if those ideas are provable
at all, someone's probably already proven/disproven those in the
literature somewhere, long before we get actual data to that effect in
the respective instances of bearer transactions and the internet.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
