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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:03
Jamie Lawrence (jal@acm.org)
Fri, 15 Jan 1999 00:29:41 -0800
Oh man, am I really up to dealing with an argument with
Hettinga?...
At 01:23 AM 1/15/99 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:
[...]
>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.
Wrong. I hate to drop into dreamy terminology, but I do think that
the early experiences on the Cypher punks list bears this out:
community is as important to the current rush for the net as the
exchange of valued bits for valued items/information.
I've been on Cypherpunks as long as most (I won't dispute it if
I'm wrong, but I think I predate you, Bob), and until about a
year and a half ago, it was all about a core interest attracting
people who had (or at least thought they had) something to say about
that interest. About cross pollenization, critique, and shared goals
(in baser terms, dick waving, castration, and glory: there's a reason
even for alpha male behaviour, from time to time). Cypherpunks went
to hell for reasons we all know, but the fact remains that the reason
it gained momentum (no laughing from those who worked at Sybase) is
that it was a community.
Now, there's a lot to be said for defining community as a group of
entities with somewhat compatible economic goals (was Marx the first
to publish on that one explicitly? No, probably Machiavelli), but
that isn't nessessary nor sufficient for a sustainable community.
The net as we have known it wouldn't exist (in either the decades-old
form many of us miss, nor in the current 'rich-media' flavor) without
the novel communication vectors it encourages.
I suppose I'm simply arguing that commerce (be it in the form of
geodesic WYSIWYG Zaibatsu encrypted DropLets or double entry True
Name transactions) wouldn't exist without a base of many thousands
of shared interest groups, and that that same base exists externally
and orthogonally to the commerce element.
Whew.
>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
>understood, because, of course, that's what they wanted it to do in the first
>place. [...]
I hope that future readers will go to the archives to verify such an
affirmation of agreement on "the Cypherpunks" part with Hettinga's
assertion.
[Go, go, gadget crypto!]
>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.
You know, Bob, you sound a lot like Tim did a few years ago here, aside
from the fact that Tim is a better writer and (most of the time) quite
a bit more realistic. Just thought I'd point that out.
-j
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:03