At 6:11 PM -0800 on 12/12/02, Lucky Green wrote: > Agreed. A few years ago, some would advocate that on the Internet, > no national laws apply. This was, of course, nonsense. Instead, > every single national, regional, and local law in effect today > anywhere in the world applies to anything you do to the extent that > said law can be enforced.
Yup. At least until the internet boycott against Australia succeeds, we're closer to Tim May's signatures about ~~this posting void where prohibited by law, may offend local sensibilities, etc~~ than to "just speedbumps on the information superhighway". Or at best, they're the kind of speedbumps designed to generate extra business for the local car-repair shops...
At 11:10 PM 12/12/2002 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
It was nice to believe this for a while. Is there any evidenceThe next trick will be to drive a stake into the heart of modern society's present mystification of identity and is-a-person credentials by moving money and financial assets, significantly cheaper than we do now, using systems that don't require identity at all to clear and settle transactions. Systems which are, paradoxically, cheaper *because* they're anonymous, or at least, identity "agnostic", just like physics is religiously agnostic.
that it's actually becoming practical or even possible to have
identity-less systems that are less expensive than current processes?
Moore's Law is making it easier to afford fast crypto,
but it and the similar effects in networking costs are making
identity-based settlement systems progressively cheaper,
to the extent that it may not be worth switching.
Or is that just because the companies that have the critical patents
keep going nowhere while they keep the technology locked down?
I'm reminded somewhat of the IP telephony situation -
it's east to get ham-radio-quality VOIP to talk to your friends,
and building a whole new infrastructure based on VOIP
would be radically cheaper than building it with old technology,
and replacing the whole antique structure at once would be
impossible, but would also be much cheaper than doing it piecemeal,
because the interconnections between the old and new sides are ugly.
It's easy to get incremental 0.1 cent minutes, instead of 2-cent minutes,
but there's enough fixed startup cost that it's not worth it for
most business applications (though it would be worth it to replace 29-cent minutes.)
