Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys
Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer wrote: I used a VISA debit card to buy a $25,000 Ford Explorer. You mentioned this for the fourth time this month. It would be refreshing if you could name some other merchandise next time, maybe some non-redneck items ? Not redneck. A redneck would buy a pickup truck, a gun rack, and about six extra rims, for lawn decoration. Half of my relatives are rednecks, so I know these things. An Explorer is more a soccer mom purchase. If you want to bust on Tim, try to aim a little more accurately. -- Steve FurlongComputer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel Vote Idiotarian --- it's easier than thinking
Re: Eyes on the Prize...not the Millicent Ghetto
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- At 9:30 PM -0700 on 5/13/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Seems to me that most of our economy is arguably illegal. Fine. Document that, please. Show me statistics. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, right? $4 trillion worth of foreign exchange alone happened today. Much of it illegal. Fine. How much. Say it with numbers, please. For example some large proportion of the capital formed in Ireland sneaks out, and then re-enters in the guise of foreign capital. No problem. How much, exactly? Even a reasonable estimate will do nicely, if you can point to actual data. The biggest number I've heard for money laundering worldwide for instance, over the last 6 years ago since Black Unicorn threw it around at DCSB in 1996, is a mostly made up number in the several hundred billion-dollar annual range. Compared, again, to, regulated, monitored, bank-to-bank foreign exchange of several *trillion* dollars a *day*, it's chicken feed. Illegal drugs are probably a few tens of billions of dollars a year. Timmy Leary quoted $50 billion in the early 80's at the height of the Columbian cocaine boom. I'll take triple that, now, just for fun. Chicken feed compared to the global commercial drug market. Money laundering and drugs are probably the largest illegal businesses. The rest is, again, chicken-feed in comparison to even that. Frankly, the amount of formerly illegal business now declared legal, in a gross sense, has gone up dramatically in the last 10-15 years, think most of Eurasia, for instance, and the number of de-regulated businesses increases that amount exponentially every year. Wait until various moslem dictatorships are freed, and you'll see even more. We're legislating crime out of statistical significance, just by making most of it legal, and in spite of the increase of financial crime legislation in the G-7, even before 9/11. Legitimate Internet commerce, boom, bust, or no, is going to be so huge that it will completely swamp the ability of governments to control business at all, much less their own economies and currencies, and, frankly, it can't happen soon enough for me. The pointy end of the stick isn't illegal business. It's anyone who wants to sell anything over the internet, particularly if it's anything that is *transported* over the internet, which, in a geodesic economy, will be the only stuff that matters. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 7.5 iQEVAwUBPOCkdMUCGwxmWcHhAQGbvwgApTqp1zOtoVX8/WRrirtJeOVvW7mO37U4 pkqXBmS3UuBv3JDySwcNv5rlqBhigO+DNmMtDWbosTg9tbmftKtVCK4ikmTbXMu7 JOS9T1QrbckwvT7e7NhjOUO8kv/P6tDo8fdlRNuRgLlrfvTKOJSmHiZEM/U3qhoo I0ao8qlsTpq8vVX5UdioZmw/EP/e251BAo4ngvYEfNgocMUNz7ni4fDdeJEVZy2a WawiGsmoPeQ8H8lCAHYPDWcA6PBimbyyiz2IG5F8njCz+WkH0fAm6FCp7QYrfObt 4jCdnl4iVIKkcaM6M9uTLQQqUJg1cEhq4hSQ1LmtiXQKlvUbkq9Rig== =5lP9 -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'
Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys
Nope, Usually credit card transactions are free for the payer Bullshit, they charge interest on the loans and such. You should read your credit card bills closer. Not sure if the rules are different over there then - after all, you add on extra charges to the ticket price when you reach the paypoint :) in the UK, almost all credit cards charge *no* interest at all on payments made with it provided you clear your balance when the bill comes in, and most charge no annual fee for usage either. A handling charge is applied if you use a cashpoint to withdraw money, but that is sensible as there there isn't a vendor to gouge :) The CC contract insists on no surcharge (to the customers) for CC payments ??? I guess the vendor who pays the fees to use credit cards just pulls the money out of thin air...not hardly. *shrug* I am not responsible for for your problems there. In my experience (limited to the uk, admittedly) card usage is free, and vendors are under a contractual obligation (and I know this because I have signed such a contract) to the CC swipe box supplier (the merchant account provider) not to add a surcharge for use of the card to pay; this leads to some strange situations, where companies will accept CCs to purchase goods, but will *not* accept them to pay bills. Mind you, if you wave a bundle of cash and mutter discount for cash payment? to a lot of companies, you can get a discount. but then, this is true *anyhow* particularly for payments over 100ukp to anything but the biggest of the high street names - and even then, usually a store manager has the discretionary power to apply discounts (usually booked as shop soiled (ie ex-display model) or manager's special promotion)
Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys
Ken Brown wrote: Er, I hit send prematurely, and I meant to go on to say that I have often used 1 or 200 UKP in folding money - it is easy to do with universal availability of ATMs. If anything I use more cash than I did 15 years ago because it is so simple to get hold of. And saves the bother of waiting while they go online to validate the credit card if the latest series of Buffy on video exceeds the floor limit at the shop. Yes, that is because Bob's comments were originally biased to the American market. There, in the US (I don't know about Canada), compared to Europe and most other countries, the usage of the credit card is much higher, and ATMs are less used. The reason for this is the structure of the banking industry. In most countries, there are 3-4 huge national banks that dominate. Consequently, they drive banking, and they have powerful ATM networks that are national in scope. Also, they drive card usage more, and thus they don't advance the cause of the credit card any more than it suits them. In contrast, the US is one of the few countries with little national banking. There are something like 10,000 banks there, and there no national banks. Consequently, the glue that holds the system together is the credit card majors (amongst other things like the fed), and they drive much of the utilisation patterns. The US therefore has weaker ATM networks (compared with other countries). Whilst a lot of that ground has been caught up, it is the case that the CC majors own the two big networks (as Bob says). I use a debit card, one that draws against my bank current account the way a cheque does (probably check to you). It's the same card that is used as a cheque card. Lots of purchases over $100. I've bought a miniature video camera with it, maybe 1500 dollars US. Debit cards I think are relatively new development in the US, as they bypass the CC companies' interests. They have been strong in the rest of the world for a longer time. For that reason, there is a whole host of charges as they go through the different institutions, including the CC networks, which you won't find so strong elsewhere. Still involves merchant charges of course. As far as they are concerned it is no different from a credit card. The cashier at the till probably doesn't even know the difference (after all it says Visa on it). (PS: I could be wrong about the details above, I haven't checked any of them, but I think I have the big picture down.) -- iang
Re: Eyes on the Prize...not the Millicent Ghetto
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- At 10:34 PM -0700 on 5/13/02, Richard Fiero wrote: Um, that $4 trillion didn't move around in trucks speeding on highways. It's just a bunch of marks on hard drives and very little money actually changed owners. Already electronic. Already secure. Extremely mobile. Correct. And it can only be transferred, in very big chunks, from one bank to another, taking at least 24 hours to clear and settle because of still mostly batch-processed bookeeping applications. The stuff we're talking about is much more mobile, it clears instantly, and considerably less expensive, so that ordinary people with an internet connection, and eventually ordinary machines, can pay each other increasingly smaller and smaller amounts as technology evolves. As the article excerpted below states, in 2001 there was about $620 billion dollars in US currency out there somewhere and 65% was in $100 dollar bills. Sure. I've read Rogoff, and Doyle, who he cites, before. Rogoff says nothing new there that everyone in the money business doesn't say already -- and the Bank for International Settlement has much better data, by the way. http://www.bis.org/cpss/cpsspubl.htm is a good place to start. The Kansas City Fed also has a good database, called FRED :-), containing all the various monetary aggregate figures in it going back at least to the turn of the 20th century. *My* point is that there hasn't been implementation of a working bearer-settled internet transaction system yet. I would probably claim that that when it's up and running, and proven to be cheap enough, that the amount of cash in circulation of various national currencies will easily double in 5 years, and go up from there. I also expect that, if it's cheap enough, internet bearer transactions will almost completely replace book-entry settled payment and finance within 25 years. Or at least to the same ratio that book-entry transactions dominate physical delivery of paper bearer instruments today, which, as inadvertently noted above, is pocket lint. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 7.5 iQEVAwUBPOEfaMUCGwxmWcHhAQF/4wgAtejiMUjA/QnTBqQKDUOxFDT0RsrjVjHb o79rKABKXuW49BL25LSTVpmQFzWUOKdG1Xte/DXDP2IREdPlDphmVvXl/7FnXhoj 4/tWaYSYteqsbA0O3oef5d4vmYDfR6HDzas/nHM3k5S7Nxb2w41bSmaUbkcmFO9W b0muJF1hxdf2Rd5/u7hDccbJJl+OUvjcR6mxW5qlbYlllFDAVAWwpZvIh8/qSpO6 IiCwPdeibbBHI6ixVy28Mo5sMet0XtkHen1FE2Li8jCW+PA+3cu7nxKYjWwXuc/U 9ZJs/x1ugdrmSlwt23s2PLknOcoxEEvRcQF2yoSOtvOwxJg/5J7SUg== =ScL3 -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'
Re: trillions a day?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 13 May 2002 at 18:27, R. A. Hettinga wrote: Right, though I'm sure you're wishing it wasn't. Again, crime, illegal markets if you will are piddly bits of pocket fluff in the global economy. $4 trillion worth of foreign exchange alone happened today. How could this possibly be true? :ast I checked, GDP for the US was about 10 trillion bucks a year, the combined GDP of every nation on earth per year can't be more than 100 trillion, most of which doesn't involve anything crosiing a border, so how can there possibly be trillions of dollars worth of foreign exchange a day? George The $4 trillion doesn't actually go anywhere. It's mostly put up as risk-management and exchange tweaking. Like pork bellies, dig? You buy the options but no truck actually comes and unloads a mound of pork on your front lawn. Keep in mind that US currency is US Government debt. The more stashed under mattresses, the less debt has to ever be repaid. As the article mentions, if non-interest bearing currency becomes less popular, then the debt will have to be financed at higher cost through interest-bearing bonds.
Spoliation
Yeah, I know, this is long gone... But... I still thought there would be interest. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: Rae Cogar [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 7:26 AM Subject: website case Here is a recently reported case from California that found a company guilty of spoliation of evidence by changing information on their website during litigation. One point made by the court in this case is there were no policies or procedures for the updating or deleting of material from the website. You can find this opinion at: http://www.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/tentrule.nsf/4f9d4c4a03b0cf70882567980073b 2e4/cf68f686007991fa88256af1006a9e16?OpenDocument (you will need to cut and paste url) Spoliation Sanctions for Deletion of Web Page The defendant corporation moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, denying minimum contacts with the state of California. The plaintiff offered as evidence a page from the defendant's web site that listed a California office address. While the motion was pending, the California address disappeared from the defendant's web site. Though one employee of the defendant testified that he had deleted the page in routine maintenance, there was no corporate maintenance policy that would explain the deletion. The court granted the plaintiff's motion to enjoin further spoliation and ordered that the defendant pay plaintiff's attorney's fees as a sanction. Pennar Software Corp. v. Fortune 500 Sys., 51 Fed. R. Serv. 279 (N.D. Cal. 2001). Another case for good records management! Rae Cogar, Esq. RCS Consulting Hamburg, NY 716-646-6192 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Eyes on the Prize...not the Millicent Ghetto
-- On 13 May 2002 at 22:34, Richard Fiero wrote: As the article excerpted below states, in 2001 there was about $620 billion dollars in US currency out there somewhere and 65% was in $100 dollar bills. Presumably most of those $100 bills are changing hands in suitcases and brown paper bags, exposing the owners to considerable personal risk in each transaction. However, in many countries, most for example Argentina, the government routinely engages in bank robbery, making the banking system pretty much unusable. Many of those holders of bags of $100 bills would find a quiet electronic version very handy. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG k5Q0ixYnXPGv/XDu2hDgLJoUHo/6YsmFCmLRq9VM 4Ziv9lrQKn6qjtcEQFPjaJcif82ptDYKZhIVWcPVM
burbclave tech
TCM Wrote: The second is my favorite, by far. Robinson captures the essence of OC's crowds, the surfers, the burbclaves (years before Stephenson's Snow Crash, _also_ set in California!). Hmm. My OC burbclave just installed a laser-barcode scanner to admit cars. (The barcodes are discrete black on black in the visible and work in the IR; in my night vision device the barcode is quite visible.) I haven't seen pizza-carrying teens use dupes of the barcodes to skate inside, but its possible...
Re: Eyes on the Prize...not the Millicent Ghetto
-- James A. Donald: Seems to me that most of our economy is arguably illegal. R. A. Hettinga Fine. Document that, pease. Show me statistics. Obviously that is a claim that cannot be directly documented, since most people decline to register their business with the department of census and statistics as engaged primarily in illegal activity However every business that I have been involved in, where I have been in a position to know, has been extensively violating some laws in some fashion -- personal anecdotes, where I cannot give details. There are also many sweeping decrees where it is not clear what is intended, or what will be enforced, and one can make a plausible argument that current practice is arguably legal -- but not a very good argument. For example AOL, Verant, Yahoo, and perhaps Microsoft are arguably in violation of COPA. Almost everyone necessarily operates in gray areas, often fairly openly, and wherever I have been in a position to know, most people were in some respects operating in black areas, not at all openly. There are so many laws, that it is impossible to operate a business entirely legally. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, right? What is extraordinary about this claim: If most individuals can rack up multiple felony offenses while scarcely realizing it, think what a pickle the average business must be in. When the federal register is requires a fleet of trucks, when I have committed several hundred years worth of felonies without doing anything that the ordinary middle respectable middle class male would regard as very disreputable, I do not see what is so extraordinary about that claim. Illegal drugs are probably a few tens of billions of dollars a year. Timmy Leary quoted $50 billion in the early 80's at the height of the Columbian cocaine boom. I'll take triple that Add AOL, Yahoo, Verant, and Microsoft to the crips and the bloods. My usenet server has a sign up web page that emphasizes privacy, anonymity, lack of logs, absence of censorship, and completeness of newsgroups -- I get the impression that a large part of their customer base is people downloading child pornography. Frankly, the amount of formerly illegal business now declared legal, in a gross sense, has gone up dramatically in the last 10-15 years In Russia what we saw is not so much legalization, as collapse of enforcement -- the long existing illegal market that kept Stalin's economy going has now wholly displaced the socialist economy, a process that in restrospect was visible under Khruschev, and was visible to me at the time under Brezhnev. A similar collapse seems to be under way in America. Here in America we are in a situation equivalent to the early Brezhnev years. We're legislating crime out of statistical significance, just by making most of it legal, Most legislation makes more things illegal, not more things legal. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Nfak7kEQszUPr9gvDxWe7RF8jWE3evQwcUJgv8mR 4QWiykow35eQRRBIC3Q3w/0KHpuUKp1Aed3l+CSIK
Re: trillions a day?
On Tuesday, May 14, 2002, at 08:10 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 13 May 2002 at 18:27, R. A. Hettinga wrote: Right, though I'm sure you're wishing it wasn't. Again, crime, illegal markets if you will are piddly bits of pocket fluff in the global economy. $4 trillion worth of foreign exchange alone happened today. How could this possibly be true? :ast I checked, GDP for the US was about 10 trillion bucks a year, the combined GDP of every nation on earth per year can't be more than 100 trillion, most of which doesn't involve anything crosiing a border, so how can there possibly be trillions of dollars worth of foreign exchange a day? Because GDP is a measure (flawed, of course) of _production_, not of money being shipped around. (I'm assuming Hettinga was talking about overall money flows, not just payment for goods purchased, a narrower definition of foreign exchange.) To see this simply, imagine your own annual income of, say, $50,000. (No insinuations intended as to your wealth or lack of it.) You could wire $20K to a bank, wire it again to another bank, wire it againeasy to have a total amount transferred that is many times your annual income. Economists talk about velocity of money and all, but this illustrates the point. The same money is being moved many times. Transactions are not just You grow corn. I pay you for corn. Here is money. I have no idea whether the $4 trillion figure for a day is correct, but it's plausible. Checking with Google, I find this: SWIFT is the industry-owned cooperative supplying secure messaging services and interface software to 7,000 financial institutions in 196 countries. SWIFT carried over 1.5 billion messages in 2001. The average daily value of payment messages on SWIFT is estimated to be above USD 6 trillion. http://www.globalcrossing.com/xml/news/2002/april/02.xml So, this is how the daily money flow can be so large compared to the daily GDP. --Tim May Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound
Re: trillions a day?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How could this possibly be true? :ast I checked, GDP for the US was about 10 trillion bucks a year, the combined GDP of every nation on earth per year can't be more than 100 trillion, most of which doesn't involve anything crosiing a border, so how can there possibly be trillions of dollars worth of foreign exchange a day? Because the money goes round more than once. Because most foreign exchange ends up right back where it started before the end of the day, with tiny bits shaved off for interest. Because vast proportions of the apparent US money traded are, and have been for years, in the euro-dollar market in London and never touches down in America at all. (the relative importance of that has declined but other non-US markets are growing to replace it) Because banks lend money they don't have, and the people they lend it to lend it to others, who can include banks, who can lend the same money to more than one person - and as long as no-one is *really* stupid (remember Nick Leeson?) most of the money comes back home at settlement time. Because lots of money doesn't really represent spending power at all. Say that A owes B a billion dollars. B owes C a billion dollars worth of euros. C owes A a billion dollars worth of yen. Minor fluctuations in exchange rates, combined with traders efforts to pull a fast one, mean that smaller amounts of money - say a few hundred thousand a day - permanently changes hands, and can be spent. But, absent the meltdown of one or another market, the whole pot never gets spent. It can't, because it is mostly always promised to someone else. Because people don't just trade money, whatever that is. They trade various kinds of rights and duties to money and other property. A has a billion dollars. How much is it worth to B to buy the right to borrow that billion for 1 day sometime next week, if they choose to? That has a value. A sells that right to B, and C and D. What happens if B C both want to cash in? Well, A has to borrow the second billion from E in a hurry... and so on. Because as Bruce Sterling told us many years ago, cyberspace is real, it is where the banks keep the money. Most of the money in the world is entries in databases in London banks and market traders that no-one will ever spend. Most of the rest is in banks in Singapore, Tokyo, and New York. No-where else has any at all, statistically speaking :-) Ken
Re: Eyes on the Prize...not the Millicent Ghetto
R. A. Hettinga e-said: Compared, again, to, regulated, monitored, bank-to-bank foreign exchange of several *trillion* dollars a *day*, it's chicken feed. On Bob's list, yesterday: About $1.2 trillion in currencies is traded daily, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Regards, Dave Birch. -- == My own opinion (I think!) given solely in my capacity as an == interested member of the general public == mail(at)davebirches.org, http://www.davebirch.org/
Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys
--- begin forwarded text Status: U User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.0.0.1331 Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 10:21:01 +0200 Subject: Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys From: David G.W. Birch [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Bob Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED], Digital Bearer Settlement List [EMAIL PROTECTED] R. A. Hettinga e-said: What the hell does *live* mean? There are quite a few folks on this planet who 'sell' nothing. They grow their own food, they build their own house. Any many of them live well into their thirties. Regards, Dave Birch. -- == My own opinion (I think!) given solely in my capacity as an == interested member of the general public == mail(at)davebirches.org, http://www.davebirch.org/ --- 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'
Re: trillions a day?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 14 May 2002 at 13:47, R. A. Hettinga wrote: At 8:10 AM -0700 on 5/14/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How could this possibly be true? :ast I checked, GDP for the US was about 10 trillion bucks a year, the combined GDP of every nation on earth per year can't be more than 100 trillion, most of which doesn't involve anything crosiing a border, so how can there possibly be trillions of dollars worth of foreign exchange a day? You're confusing assets with transactions. Cheers, RAH I'm really not, I'm just wondering what the hell all these transactions are. I understand that in principle I could convert 100 dollars into Euros and back again 100 times to generate 10,000 dollars worth of transactions, but why would I? If I'm under the delusion that the dollar is overvalued, presumably somebody else must be of the opposite opinion for a trade to take place, right? So if I change my mind half an hour later, presumably it's because the dollar went down, right? So the people who thought the dollar was undervalued should be even more confident in their opinion, I would think. Yeah, I know, if the world worked that way stock price graphs would look like smooth slowly varying curves instead of spikey hairy monsters. But still, trillions a day? it just seems incredible to me that there should be that many transactions. Think arbitrage. Allegedly only 2% of foreign exchange transactions are actually related to anything real. The other 98% are just banks playing gambling games on the money markets. Scary, if you ask me. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff
