<Wherein Hettinga jumps up and down, rather heavily, on what skimpy "1A"
punditry credentials he has. Here's hoping this source-protection stuff
holds up.>
At 3:53 PM -0400 on 5/5/99, Not Chaum wrote:
> www.ruloffcapital.com
Cool!
But, wait, boys and girls, there's more:
At 7:47 PM -0400 on 5/5/99, Somebody wrote:
> <snip> PLEASE DO NOT REPOST
<Bwahahahaha! Silly *you*... "Telegraph, Telephone, Tell Hettinga",
remember? :-). Don't worry. This won't hurt a bit...>
> The name of the buyer is Ruloff Capital. The owner is Walter Ruloff
> out of Vancouver who made ~$100k though the sale of his last company.
<^ I take this to be an "m">
> I don't know exactly which company he sold, but I assume it to be one
> of the following: http://www.itls.com and/or http://www.i2.com
>
> The front person and contact seems to be a John Filby
> <snip>@ruloffcapital.com. He used to be (is?)
> General Counsel for one or both of the above named companies.
>
> Office: <Oh, my!...snippage...>
> Cell: <'nother snip>
>
> Other people involved are:
> David Farrago (sp?). No idea what he does.
> Dennis Faust. Described as the "technical guy".
The ganglia twitch. When it rains, it pours. Or, in these guys' case, "poors"?
That's because, folks, it's beginning to look to me like we have everyone's
nightmare on tap here: someone we never heard of, with lots of money, who
wants to be in the digital bearer software business, and they want sole
control of the DigiCash IP portfolio to do it. Meaning that it's possible
that we've just exchanged a rather old and toothless dog in the manger for
another, younger one, a veritable mastiff, with lots of pep, vim, and vigor
to unprofitably guard the the manger's hay from the, um, cows, for the
remaining lifetime of the blind signature patent.
The only thing worse would be if it had been scarfed up by some Vancouver
Stock Exchange penny-stock projector, which was what I was initially
worried about. Fortunately, it doesn't look like that's what is happening
right now.
God help me, but for some reason I'm thinking about sailing, here.
Sailors joke that while a spinnaker, a giant balloon-shaped foresail,
enables you to go *much* faster downwind than you could normally, it's
pretty much a sail that eats things: lines, spars, crew. Money.
Evidently, Mssrs Ruloff et al. think that controlling the DigiCash IP at
the core of a software company, a retreaded DigiCash or a brand new
venture, will give them the spinnaker of the payment software business.
Of course, such an enterprise *will* eat plenty of lines, spars and crew.
Demonstrably. Down to the very last deck-ape, as DigiCash, BV, Inc., Etc.,
versions 1 through 5 or so, have all shown us. They're going to have to
rewrite all that legacy code from the ground up, for starters, and I bet
they're not accounting for that at all.
But, worse, exclusive control of things like the blind signature patent
will actually *slow* any new software company made from them -- not to
mention the whole internet payment market -- for at least another 7 years.
Much more like setting a large parachute sea-anchor than any spinnaker.
If the above rank speculations (and crufty metaphors) are all true, we have
impending disaster in my opinion.
However, maybe they know something about this that about 1000 or so of us
in and around financial crypto haven't figured out in the last 5 years or
so. One doesn't earn $100 million without above average competence,
certainly. Let's just hope they don't spend it all in one place.
It's probably wishful thinking, but I can almost imagine a deputation of
financial crypto and internet greybeards going up to BC to straighten these
guys out and pulling the fat out of the current fire.
Does anyone *else* out there think this is a good idea? Anyone out there of
sufficient net.reputation up for a little road trip to Vancouver to see
what happens?
If I thought it would help, I'd go myself, but I've probably just
prejudiced the discussion a bit :-), and I couldn't afford to do it,
anyway. It's that old "No bucks, no Buck Rogers" thing.
One final note. It turns out that the bidding is now high enough that all
of DigiCash's current debtholders will be made whole, plus a little bit.
And, evidently, several other people now tell me that the ZKS syndicate was
prepared to go higher, but weren't really given the chance to do so by
DigiCash, who accepted Ruloff's bid without coming back for a rebid. Which,
of course, is their perogative.
Nonetheless, and I don't know who overplayed what hand, but all of this
could turn into an awful big shame if it can't be fixed somehow, and fairly
soon. The judge's gavel goes down on all of this quite shortly.
Cheers,
RAH
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'
