-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 1:31 AM -0700 on 5/12/02, Morlock Elloi wrote:
>> People don't actually have to understand it as long as they get >> paid, of course. People who are getting paid want to get paid as >> cheaply as possible, ceterus parabus, and so any payment >> mechanism's > > At which point do you fail to understand that people who *need* > anon, untraceable transactions and use paper cash these days (not > checks, not money orders, not wire transfers) would not touch a > networked computer-like thingie with a 10' pole ? Their loss, I suppose. I frankly don't give a tinker's damn about what a bunch of erst-feudal atavists want. Sooner or later, if it's cheap enough to use, *everyone* will use a given technology, or go live in a cave by choice -- until their kids want a better life. You might want to be a "natural" man, but I sure don't, and, frankly, neither do most people who are born "natural". > The value-bearing vehicle has to be 100% comprenhensible and > verifiable by the end user in these cases, not by some faraway > programer and a web of hype, I mean trust. Or the end user does not > need cash in the first place. I think we've just agreed here and you don't know it. That's a shame, really. I said that if people get what they want, cheap transactions, they don't care how it works. I bet, for instance, you have no idea how to use intaglio printing (and fractional reserve finance, for that matter) to make a banknote, and could care less. You have no idea how to mine gold, if you want to go farther back than that. You just care that people want to get paid in gold, so you convert whatever you have too much of into gold and use the gold to buy things. > This is the prime reason why digital cash didn't happen - users > don't really care to replace *one* middlemen (government with a > printing press and shitloads of armed men protecting the reputation > of cash) with another *few*. Actually, we're talking about a micro-intermediated market with *lots* of intermediaries, just a single intermediary in every transaction. We're talking about Moore's Law and strong cryptography driving profit and loss down to the device level, right? When you talk like you've been doing, you really do sound about as neo-scholastic as some PoMo french philosopher, you know. Think about what you're saying, here, instead of trying to storm the Bastille in some frothing fit of almost luddite egalitarianism. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPN6ovsPxH8jf3ohaEQKK6gCg3PKVlgkSdHF5U/GGZHphn0qlVOEAnAxN SHtGjj2BUJAlmY+mZagn4kDi =Avrp -----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'
