On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Vincent Penquerc'h wrote: > > You're assuming a static agent model. Iterative interactions of smart > > mutually identifyable agents would trend towards increasingly benign > > cooperation. > > That in turn assumes that the population is homogeneous. There is
Not at all. Of course you have subpopulations engaging in more cooperative interactions; this is how the world works already. The nice thing is that with cryptography you have facultative strong authentication, and globally accessible databases (like a searchable p2p document store) to keep track of your interaction history with others. A nym who's lying too much will have accrue negative mana very quickly. > overwhelming probability that a group will form around some people, > who have charisma, or who can give others something, whether it is > power, money (or ability to "get" stuff), or just about anything > people would want. Some of these groups will want power. I don't see how this is relevant to our conversation. > I'm not sure what you mean by "mutually identifyable" agents. If > you mean that people seeking power by reducing other's freedoms, No, mutually identifyable means exactly that: ability to tell that you've interacted with that agent before. In human agents this means ability to recall some other monkey's biometrics. > would be known, and others could react to that, then I'm not so > sure it would work. Trouble is, even a very small amount of power > grabbing people will fuck it all up. It's very nice to say that > those who are ready to relinquish freedom for safety deserve > neither, but a life of never ending combat against those who want > to grab power is not something I strive for. > If you mean, OTOH, that people would recognize "honest" people, > as in a kind of reputation system, then it might have some merit The reputation system needs infrastructure to work. Basically it's about trustable (by the user) smart card crypto, traffic remixing (at IP level, preferrably) and distributed anonymous p2p store with a distributed search. > to it, but would require these people to build a structure to be > able to react. This structure would be, as I see it, kind of a > distributed democracy. Is that what you had in mind ? > Or am I completely off :)
