I'm not in the habit of kicking puppies or otherwise brutalizing the defenseless, but friends have alerted me of a recent, inaccurate portrayal of my Stanford talk. In Robert Hettinga's recent talk announcement, he writes: >Eric Hughes, the canonical cypherpunk, did, by all accounts, a gloomy talk >on internet payments at Stanford recently. The announcement was full of the >usual imprecations against long and deep "bathtub curves", excessive >Non-Recoverable Engineering costs, and the continually-immanent danger of >instant catastrophic system failure. Well, apparently Robert is speaking a message I sent to cypherpunks in advance of the talk, not the talk itself. My talk itself was neither about financing payment system companies, nor NRE's, nor catastrophic failure. It was on Design for Commercial Reliance. I used payment systems in the talk as an example of systems that could benefit from the approach that was the subject of the talk, but internet payments were not themselves the subject. The cypherpunks message was an introduction to the concerns of the talk, not a summary of it. What's astounding to me about this characterization of my talk is that streaming video of it is available from Stanford (it works with Windows Media Player; YMMV). It's been there for more than two weeks now. I'm wondering how many people reported the "accounts" that were in Robert's "all accounts". They must have all had the same laziness against research. The class: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ My abstract: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/010516.html Video: http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/010516-ee380-100.asx I encourage people to go and see for themselves what I said. Further, I take umbrage for having been said to have given a "gloomy" talk. Now true enough, I do say that "mutual expectation of behavior is a commons" and that "hucksterism is the tragedy of this commons." I must merely suppose that the characterization of hucksterism as a Bad and Destructive Thing must have called all of Robert's sources a fair amount of gloom. Eric
