On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote:
>Cf. crypto anarchy.
>Cf. crypto anarchy.
Uh, Tim? I've seen what you mean by "crypto anarchy", and this
ain't it. I'm talking about a society with laws, order, and
*orders*. A society where individual people can go to jail or
go on trial or get drafted into a war against their will if the
laws requiring that get passed.
In nature, a crypto state is not necessarily any more "free" than
a republic, or a democracy (you use the term "sheepocracy" to
denote the tyranny of the majority problem), or even a centrally-
planned socialist state. It *has* a government and the government
has real power to do things to people that the people as
individuals don't want. Sometimes stupid laws will be passed,
and rigidly enforced.
The only real difference is that the functions of government are
distributed instead of being vested in particular people.
The revolutionary and anarchist rhetoric here has masked the
facts of the matter -- people have been talking about rebellion,
bomb-throwing, and other acts of defiance and rage, but that's
not where the path they're pointing at leads. In fact, acts
of rebellion and rage are the single worst possible thing that
could be done, and will actively prevent a crypto state from
arising.
Bell's "AP" paper may not have been where the seed came from
originally, but aside from pointers at some science-fiction
books with zero technical content and impossible economics
and cultures, there has been no trace whatsoever of any other
protocols for replacing government on this list. And even
Bell's protocol presented in AP is unimplementable on
technical grounds. I had formally analyze it and discover
this for myself, because nobody here acknowledged that
simple fact until I rubbed their damn noses in it. It's
also lacking in any kind of controls, checks or balances,
and provides disincentives to create infrastructure; A
crypto state implemented with AP as one of the protocols
would quickly devolve into a collection of armed camps
with no infrastructure.
I dug through archives for days looking for a glimmer of
anything actually useful for establishing a working and
useful government rather than simply tearing one down or
hiding one's activities from it, and believe it or not
Bell's paper came closest.
What I've been able to do since is find that there are ways
to solve a bunch of technical problems -- like paying for roads
and beatcops and basic research and ecological preservation if
desired, taking care of national defense, regulating bandwidth,
and getting accurate information to the people in the presence
of a bunch of spinmeisters trying to distort things.
The hell of it is, you (and most of the other list members)
have been absolutely no help. Whenever I've asked a question
about whatever I was stuck on at the moment, you've done nothing
more than sneer. The most helpful thread recently has been
"the well-read cypherpunk", and just a hint, Tim? the books
*you* recommended were no damn help. In fact, they were a
waste of time. The only new ideas there were unworkable
distractions at best, presented as though they might make
sense but with impossible requirements both technically
(missing information) and pragmatically (human nature goes a
different direction and the whole thing explodes). And of
the few ideas that don't suffer these problems, there's
either no hint of how to actually implement nor any proof
that an implementation is possible, or they're ideas I'd
already had.
Bear
