My answer to same, when someone noted it on the dbs list...
Cheers,
RAH
(who's been reminded, several times now, that it's Simson, not "Simpson". Doh.)
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 04:38:25 -0400
To: Digital Bearer Settlements <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Twilight of the crypto-geeks
Sender: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
List-Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
At 10:14 PM -0700 on 4/12/00, Stephen Lawton wrote:
> http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/04/13/libertarians/index.html
More socialist happy horseshit from salon.com?
;-).
I'm not sure I saw a bearer transaction reference in there, :-), but you
have to remember that Zimmerman started out as a no-nukes leftist, Diffie
is was, as noted, a "red-diaper" baby, Berners-Lee has always been more
like Phill Hallam-Baker than Tim May, and, well, Stephenson is a *writer*,
for god's sake... :-). Finally, of course, like Simpson Garfinkel, another
person who thinks commerce more evil than "policy", David Chaum himself
strikes me more as a liberal with a privacy fetish, than a libertarian,
much less cypherpunk.
Seriously, with its title firmly tucked in cheek, CFP has always been about
politics, which means government, which doesn't mean code, so you can't
really consider what happens there to be even libertarian, much less
anarcho-capitalist, which is where most people who started the cypherpunks
list, Gilmore included, ended up once they understood the implications of
cryptography and a ubiquitous internetwork.
Of course, the fact that there's no bearer settlement yet probably has a
lot to do with people's resorting to "social" structures to solve what
should be, at root, an economic, a financial, problem: the requirement of
identity, and physical, and thus, ultimately, violent, access to a person
to settle transactions. "And then you go to jail" as the error handler, and
all that.
This current grasping at regulatory and "social" straws is just like all
those "qualitative" risk models [finance --rah] had before Black and
Scholes figured
out their option model.
Cheers,
RAH
--
-----------------
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'
--- end forwarded text
--
-----------------
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'
