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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:03
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Thu, 14 Jan 1999 17:56:29 -0500
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At 2:02 PM -0500 on 1/14/99, Robert Hettinga wrote:
> I'm a reporter at Wired News, and I'm looking for information on a porn
> movie being filmed about the cypherpunks. I hear it's written and produced
> by a cypherpunk and that a co-founder has a cameo.
Bingo...
> Is it true? I'd love to
> talk to anyone who knows about it...Feel free to forward this email...
I just had an idea about this. Since *one* co-founder of cypherpunks is holed
up in the mountains around Santa Cruz somewhere, waiting for the millenium,
the only *other* co-founder left is Eric Hughes, I suppose, which now all
makes sense.
- From the article's, um, intimations that the cypherpunk-producer worked for
C2NET once, I now think, for some reason, that the producer-writer might be
Sandy Sandfort. Mostly because all the rest of the people from C2NET, past and
present, and no offense to them, of course, :-), are probably not likely to be
the porn-movie-producing type. (Well, maybe Lucky Green, a snappy dresser who
has that suave, debone^haire look about him, but, naaaahhh, not even Lucky.
:-)).
The main circumstance that links all this together for me now is that both
Eric and Sandy either work for, or have worked for, Bob Hilby's Simple Access
outfit, and they seemed to me to be fairly close friends.
<http://www.sac.net/> is the URL for Simple Access, I think. I haven't heard
of any product announcements from them lately, if at all, though they were
busy cranking out a payment system idea every other minute when I met them all
for the first time, a little more than three years ago, when I first went to
the Bay Area to give a speech at Apple on OpenDoc as geodesic software (my,
how time flies) and, of course, cryptomoney.
Hilby, back then, was moving himself and his family to San Francisco from
Atlanta, drove around in this big old black Town Car, and described himself as
the owner of the largest independent reseller of 900-number lines in the
country. According to Hilby, his two principal kinds of customers were
televangelists and dial-a-porn operators. Hilby bragged at the time that he'd
had to use the bills from the one of latter's directors and officers to
protect the business of one of the former on at least one occasion.
So, with that all in mind, I'd bet that some, um, connections, were made on
the porn side of Hilby's business network to get this movie produced and
distributed, though probably without Hilby's actual help. On the other hand,
it's possible that Sandy did all that stuff by himself. If he's the producer
at all.
Oh, well. So goes the revolution. Cypherpunks go to Hollywood, and all that.
Or at least to sleazy motels in the North Bay somewhere. :-/.
Which reinforces the idea, to me at least, that it is *economics*, and not
privacy, which will sell cryptography, same as anything else, and why the only
people who are doing actual crypto these days are doing it for money. Which
is, of course, as it should be.
Every one of the "revolutionary" cypherpunks I know of from those days has
gotten bored and has gone off to do something more interesting, as the two
very founders of cypherpunks have now both seem to have done: Eric Hughes did
it in fact, by unsubscribing more than three years ago, and Tim May did it de
facto, if you will, by not contributing much crypto related stuff, when he
contributes anything at all, to the "mosh-pit" that cypherpunks has become, to
use Time reporter Declan McCullough's splendid description.
As I've said many times before, if privacy, much less financial privacy, were
so desparately valuable, an end in itself, we wouldn't have book-entry
transaction settlement, or the NSA, or the IRS, or even laws *mandating*
privacy, like the European Union is trying to do. On the contrary, we would
have an inelastic *market* for privacy, in the same way that we have inelastic
markets for clean water, or food, or, these days, electricity -- or money
itself.
And, the word "money" is the genuine paradox, here.
That's because the discussions that Eric Hughes, and Tim May, and Perry
Metzger, and Hal Finney, Duncan Frissell, and Sandy Sandfort were all having
about the technology and financial consequences of David Chaum's digital cash
protocols were the very reason I joined the cypherpunks list myself, back in
1994, about 1 1/2 years after the revolution started with the first Bay Area
meetings, starting this list, and Jude Molhoun, of Wired, christening the
group the "cypherpunks".
When I got here, what I saw was something which changed the whole way I looked
at the world: David Chaum's protocols created, effectively, the first form of
digital bearer certificate, which, I believe now, will be as important to the
emerging geodesic economy as the techniques of book-entry settlement (bank
accounts, bank wires, clearinghouses, checks, credit cards) were to the late
industrial economy.
Oddly enough, I heard about the cypherpunks list after I searched on the words
"internet" and "money" on Nexis (this was back in the pre-Netscape days of
hockey-stick earning estimates, and exterrestrial stock prices, of course),
and came up with an article on Eric, and Tim, and Phil Zimmermann, and David
Chaum, et. al., written in the Whole Earth Review by none other than one of
Wired's founders, Kevin Kelly.
Now, of all those people who participated in the above discussions of digital
cash, and digital bearer transactions, Duncan Frissell is the only one who is
still actually subscribed to the list, still contributing the occasional
libertarian bon mot.
Tim May is actually subscribed to cypherpunks, but he seems to spend most of
his time these days writing on other lists and on usenet -- and quite
apocalyptically -- about Y2K. And the need to blow up Washington, DC, of
course. :-). Periodically, Tim will lob a grenade, mostly on those two
topics, into the cypherpunk discussion, but even that is happening less often
than it used to. In fact, Tim has gotten so contrary to what I subscribe to
cypherpunks for that he currently lives in my killfile.
Anyway, the paradox, the "money" paradox from above that has kept me
subscribed to cypherpunks all these years, is that cryptography, specifically
financial cryptography on the internet, creates at least functionally
anonymous digital bearer transactions, with protocols like Chaum's
blind-signature "notes", or Ron Rivest's hash-collision "coins".
I, and a few other folks in the financial cryptography community, believe that
this technology will so reduce transaction costs that we'll have to use
digital bearer certificates instead of account-based book-entry transaction
methods, and, more to the point, that we won't care that our transactions will
be utterly anonymous. Just as we don't care, with credit cards and checks,
that our transactions are completely traceable right now. Our transactions
will be anonymous just because they're cheaper to do that way.
And, finally, with this huge reduction in transaction cost, we'll end up
*buying* the "revolution" anyway, and with it a lot of what the early
"revolutionary" cypherpunks predicted, Tim's crypto-anarchy. Or, more likely,
something like David Friedman's anarchocapitalism. Whether we want it or not.
Reality, particularly economic reality, is never optional.
Which is fine. 4 1/2 years on the cypherpunks list have convinced me
personally that the crypto-anarchy that Tim and Eric talked so effusively
about in the early years, the thing which got their masked faces, and John
Gilmore's, according to Tim, on the cover of Wired back in Wired year 0, won't
be very scary at all, and, in fact, that world will be a better, freer, place
to live in than the world we're in now. Lions, Tigers, Bears, and all.
So, the world turns. Time marches on. And, to paraphrase another cliche, money
talks, and "revolution" walks.
Or at least it goes into the movie business.
Cheers,
Robert Hettinga
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:03