-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Traffic Analysis is A Bitch, boys and girls. At 10:10 PM +0200 on 7/1/02, The Single-Remailer-Hop Anonymous Austrian Innumerate returns, writing:
> They do fine for ordinary, private > goods. A signed, much less encrypted, copy of a piece of digital information, or even a digital service, for that matter, (teleoperated machine commands, or a live video feed answering a question, and, of course, computation and bandwidth) is, in fact, an "ordinary, private" good. Go find an economics dictionary, look up "perfect competition", and come back when you have a clue, please. You don't need governments to have a market. People have been trading things with each other since they could make things and carry them from place to place. Frankly, if you have enough financial cryptography, and bearer settled transactions using that cryptography, you don't even need governments to have an *economy*. All you have to do is apply the mathematical economics of cash-settled, fungible, graded commodity markets to information and digital services and you get the answer. Look ma, no lawyers: The first copy to hit the network is worth a lot. The last copy is worth so little that it should be deleted from a hard drive. In the middle of the cloud, between the two, who ever owns a copy can sell another one, and they will, if there's any profit at all in it. That leaves transaction cost, and, frankly, I can do transactions down to a tenth of a penny, in bearer form cash, with a couple hundred thou in development costs. Add Moore's Law, and stir, um, liberally. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPSDjuMPxH8jf3ohaEQKWVQCgraOTGRf9o9zETFK6zMVhXym5eeEAnRQF XEr7Spid7BIM4TmJPoFyKIZ2 =Gjwr -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- 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'
