-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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. Everything illegal everywhere all the time. A legislative singularity akin to early modern discoveries in physics (the end of the geocentric universe) and engineering (peasant-fired projectile weapons making noble armor obsolete) once and forever violating the "laws" of god. The 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. If that works, sooner or later we'll have the technical equivalent of the thirty years' war, which only the ubiquitous and instantaneous application or threat of private, local, force will solve. The result will be a software/protocol "Treaty of Westphalia", giving us actual markets for force instead of confiscatory monopolies for same. In the end, if necessary we'll know, absolutely, where *every*body is, and what they're doing, all the time, because we'll all be watching our *own* stuff, supervising our *own* property with our *own* equipment, like, um, god, meant us to do :-). But, paradoxically, because it'll be cheaper and more secure to do instantaneously-settled functionally anonymous transactions, we won't know, we won't *care* where anybody gets, spends, or invests their money, and we won't give damn about it because it works better than the Friedmanian mummenschantz(1) we currently call "law and order". Markets will create better order than laws ever could. Cheers, RAH (1) See David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" where he describes the finance of the modern nation state as this ceremonial game in which 50 people sit in a circle with a hundred pennies stacked in front of each person. The politician comes along, and with great pomp and circumstance (and two guys with guns on either side of him), takes everyone's pennies and dumps them into a fancy bowl. Then, at random, he stands in front of someone, and slowly, with great fanfare, counts off 50 pennies and gives them to the lucky recipient. After repeating this 49 more times without repeating anyone, the politician and his associates go off to the local pub and buy themselves a beer. The victims are left marvelling at all the free money they just got. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPfldFsPxH8jf3ohaEQIdqwCg3KMwGcxZP+JiAFcq3/+GgPVMGbAAoJvX rMD2BLN0WvuZC8i7ZhBVu5Sc =YJy7 -----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 "Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods." -- H.L. Mencken
