[2221] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: A Geodesic Society?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Sun Mar 1 13:28:05 1998
In-Reply-To: <v03007807b11778f7ca83@[172.17.1.150]>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 11:23:35 -0400
To: Rick Smith <rsmith@securecomputing.com>, cryptography@c2.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
At 3:59 PM -0400 on 2/23/98, Rick Smith wrote:
> In order to earn favorable rates on your digital bearer bonds, you'll have
> to make information about your successfully redeemed bonds as public as
> possible. This produces the moral equivalent of book entries (ephemeral,
> possibly, but quite visible to the tax collectors). If you try to split
> your transactions among two or more different digital IDs, then you produce
> two or more shorter credit histories instead of a single longer (and more
> appealing) one. So from the very start there is a strong bias against
> privacy.
Possibly. I wrote a whole 41k rant here and elsewhere about this last
November (when I wasn't sending my friends with the black helicopters to
land on Tim's lawn :-)), called "Snakes of Medusa on Wall Street?".
Essentially, I make the point (after a while :-)) that Carl Ellison and
others have made all along: In because of the required or inadvertant
disclosure of text-concordance/transaction/traffic analysis, reputation --
pseudononymous or not -- makes a pretty good biometric. Or biometric
equivalent, I guess. Ellison actually actually calls it a biometric, if I
heard him right...
A few of us were talking in the FC98 dining room yesterday about the
underwriting of digital bearer certificates using my pet market model,
where the trustee is a plain old bank, and the underwriter(mint) is a
strictly net-based entity with an account at the trustee and a wire through
the trustee to the book-entry world of banks for exchangibility into
meatmoney. In that model, for the time being, the trustee is about as
regulated as you get, the underwriter is known by virtue of having an
account at the trustee, and you and I both are known to our banks when we
bring money onto and pull it off of the net. Render unto FINCEN, and all
that. However, on the net, the underwriter doesn't know us from Adam (Back
or Shostack :-)). The trustee only knows us as much as any bank doing a
"foriegn" ATM disbursement (and deposit, which is impossible now). So, once
you get to the net, *everything* is up for grabs, with total anonymity,
modulo the real or imagined regulatory influence of the patentholder ;-).
The trick then is to figure out new and better, i.e., interest-bearing and
equity increasing, ways to keep money on the net, which, of course, you do
with digital bearer debt/equity/derivative instruments. When that happens,
then the trustee can hold digital bearer assets in its reserve accounts,
and can be an entirely net-based entity, even pseudonymous, and, of course,
so can the underwriter. Even a pseudononymous inventor of a transaction
protocol can be paid by the trustee this way.
At that point the world will have more interesting things to think about
besides whether FINCEN can see our book-entry transaction trails, I figure.
Having a wonderful time in Anguilla, wish you were here ;-),
Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>
