At 11:11 AM -0400 on 6/16/99, John Lowry wrote: > Of course, they're backed by: > 1: a friendly government and coordinated policy between > major powers and ISPs. > 2: a kiloton of gold. > > The book ends with only one "subscriber", the future father-in-law. > > :-) Yeah, I transcribed original quote from Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" just as I had finished reading it, and, you're right, the ending fizzled a bit on the original premise. I'm much more interested in creating economically trasparent digital bearer versions of existing currencies than I am with creating a currency itself. The e-gold guys are welcome to all that other fun stuff :-). However, the most important point for me, and the reason I quoted the book then, was to see a very popular science fiction author like Stephenson talk about something near and dear to cypherpunks, and ex-cypherpunks, everywhere. It was such a kick to see that happen, especially after watching people talk about it so much, in my case, for 5 years now. Of course, the cypherpunks have been talking about this ever since May and Hughes convened the first physical meeting in 1992 or so. Of course, it's not the first time that Stephenson has written about electronic money; his short story "The Great Samolean Caper" was written, for Time/Pathfinder, I think, 3 years ago, and his last novel "The Diamond Age" had a whole cash-settled anonymous-auction (dare I say geodesic? :-)) content/services market underlying the 'young ladies' primer' at the core of the story. I see the creation of any eventual internet currency itself as a second-, or, actually, third-, order effect, requiring, first, as I said, transparent exchangeability into existing currencies, the ability to actually *withdraw* book-entry cash onto the net in digital bearer 'bank-note' form, and, second, the establishment of permanent digital bearer asset classes, money market instruments, bonds, equity, derivatives, all based on the use of that cash, originally in existing meatspace currency, on the net. Tatsuo Tanaka did a talk to DCSB about this kind of thing, called "The Macroeconomic Consequences of Digital Cash", about 3 years ago or so, where he talked about how the issuance of digital bearer cash reserved by extraterritorially-held currency deposits makes things very interesting for any "controller" of national currency, but his endstate was, curiously, a central bank of cypherspace of some kind. I helped him get the paper into the web-journal First Monday, back then, as a member of its editorial board, but, personally, I would more likely see a currency board governing an internet currency instead of any central bank, and, in addition, I think we'll have many competing currencies, each one built from the bottom up, probably based on various, and now-unknown, internet economic behaviors or asset classes. Cheers, RAH ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Digital 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'
