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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)
Fri, 15 Jan 1999 01:23:36 -0500
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At 10:40 PM -0500 on 1/14/99, Sameer Parekh wrote:
> To set the records straight, the fact that Eric has a cameo in
> Sandy's movie has nothing to do with the fact that Eric was a founder
> of sac.net and Sandy used to work there, and Bob used to sell 900 #s
> to dial-a-porn services.
Nice to know that I guessed all the facts right, even if a hypothesis (or two
:-)), ended up with, well, its pants around its knees.
> Sandy invited most cypherpunks he thought would be interested
> to take part in this film, either as crew or as an extra. I was also
> invited to be an extra, but unfortunately I was already committed the
> day of the shoot.
Fine. Hope he makes a million. Looks like he's going to get lots of publicity
now.
"Cypherpunks make porn". Or something. :-/.
> To address your other points -- some of us who were on the
> cypherpunks list in days gone by have chosen to actually create the
> future everyone else on the list merely talked about.
Especially you, Sameer. You were the first, and I expect you'll still be the
best, when it's all said and done.
Of everyone who was on this list when I got to cypherpunks in the spring of
1994, you saw opportunity and acted on it better than anyone else did.
There are lots of other markets for financial cryptography out there, and
I'm sure we haven't seen the last of you.
> Being subscribed
> to the list and actively posting is not an indicator of
> 'cypherpunkness'.
Amen.
Cypherpunks do lots of things these days besides "write code", of course. But
figuring out how to dodge taxes in some microscopic principality, or on an
island somewhere, or "thinking like an illegal actor", or making dirty movies,
or holing up on a mountaintop waiting for the FBI to burn you out, or the
Infocalypse, or whatever, isn't exactly the way to do it either, I would
argue.
The supreme irony in all of this is, the world now understands that digital
commerce is the only use for the internet that really matters.
And it was the cypherpunks, before all others, who understood that the most
efficient way to do digital commerce on a geodesic public internet is with
instantaneous, bearer-settled, auction-priced sales of digital assets. They
also understood that this very technology erodes state control of the
internet, and, by extension, the economy and the rest of the world. They
understood, because, of course, that's what they wanted it to do in the first
place. The fact that it turns out to be the cheapest, most efficient way to
move money and transfer ownership is just a happy accident.
Digital commerce is financial cryptography. Financial cryptography is strong
cryptography. No strong cryptography, no digital commerce. Everybody knows
that, now. It's a "motherhood" of the emerging geodesic economy.
However, what most people except cypherpunks don't realize is, financial
cryptography is the *only* cryptography which matters. Sooner or later,
financial cryptography enables the complete control of digital assets -- or
anything else digital, for that matter, which, in a geodesic society, means
*all* assets -- without any use of law whatsoever, much less legislation. Just
software.
Think of it. Private property without law. Somewhere, Ronald Coase is grinning
that "I told you so" grin.
Some cypherpunks understood then, and most do now, that as you converge
internet transaction latency to zero, you converge freedom to infinity.
That truth was discovered first on the cypherpunks list. The first internet
transaction, a PGP-encrypted message with credit card information, was
announced on there, because it was executed by a cypherpunk. Cryptanalytic
attacks by cypherpunks on the cryptography in popular web browsers ended up on
the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and in the New York Times. A
cypherpunk reporter wrote cover stories for Time, just because he hung out on
the right email list. ;-).
You yourself, Sameer, have now been on the cover of Forbes. All of this
because the financial world now understands that truth.
Walter Wriston, the former chair of Citicorp, talks like a cypherpunk now.
David Friedman, the man who invented the very word "anarchocapitalism", sounds
like Tim May used to in the old days. David's father Milton, the owner of a
Nobel Prize in Economics with a theory predicated on state control of the
money supply, sounds almost the same as his son does.
In digital bearer settlement, even Alan Greenspan himself sees the possiblity
of a return to free banking, something Eric Hughes, and Perry Metzger, and
Duncan Frissell, taught us all about, here on cypherpunks.
Military cryptography just doesn't matter anymore. Except to break it up for
scrap, to mine it for algorithms useful to commerce. To discover just how far
back the NSA knew something that financial cryptography had to reinvent later
in the quest for securing internet transactions.
Dr. Morris, senior, of the NSA and now retired, one of the most respected
security experts in the history of computing, head of security for the NSA's
own systems, put it best at MIT a few years ago. Morris said about key escrow,
the final significant attempt of the security apparatus to control
cryptography: "It all depends on how much you trust your government. Do *you*
trust your government with your keys?". Everybody, even high-school kids,
knows the answer to that question: "No." And it was the cypherpunks who taught
them that answer.
So, the crypto-war is over, now, except for the shouting. The state is a
bugbear. It's a monster in the closet. It just doesn't matter anymore. You
can't legislate physics.
Unfortunately, too many once and future cypherpunks are still fighting that
last war. And, seeing that they haven't caused the downfall of an empire
overnight, or that it didn't happen they way they wanted, they seem to be
quitting the field, and not helping to build what comes next.
To me, those cypherpunks are still trapped in the political layer
silk-screened on their old black t-shirts. Not in the financial layer of the
net itself, the layer that matters most now. The fun part is, in solving the
problems of financial cryptography, not only do you dissolve the remaining
bonds of state tyranny, you get paid to make it happen. As you found out with
Stronghold, and as people like Adam Shostack, and Ian Goldberg, are now
finding out.
And that, Sameer, is the shame I see in all of this. This latest episode
represents a much larger, and very sad, waste of human capital. The very
people who know most about how we got here, and how the new world's going
to work, have lost their enthusiasm, just when the fun starts.
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