Someone else forwarded me this. For some reason, I feel like passing it along... :-). I confess to correcting a grammatical error in the original. See you in Baltimore. Cheers, RAH --- begin forwarded text Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 07:16:42 -0400 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Peter Wayner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: "Virgins in the Bathtub"-- Baltimore Digital Commerce Society, June 12th Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailing-List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Unsubscription-Info: http://einstein.ssz.com/cdr X-Loop: ssz.com X-Acceptable-Languages: English, Russian, German, French, Spanish Robert Hettinga, the CEO at the Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation (IBUC), will be coming to Baltimore on June 12th to give the inaugural lecture for the Baltimore branch of the Digital Commerce Society. Bob is well-known for his pursuit of the cheapest possible way to swap cash, stock, bonds, or any other security over the Internet. Today, many businesses pay 2% or more of a transaction for the convenience of using the credit card system. If IBUC succeeds, costs could drop well into the smallest fractions of a cent. The talk will be held at the Engineering Society, a downtown club with a rich tradition of supporting Baltimore technology. A reasonably priced lunch is included. Contact me ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) for more information and reservations. This is an ideal chance to hear one of the most innovative financial minds explore the next generation of payment mechanisms. In the future, the Baltimore branch of the Digital Commerce Society will sponsor similar lectures from industry leaders. Please let me know if you are interested in helping organize the group. For directions: http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?BFCat=&Pyt=Tmap&newFL=Use+Address+Below&addr=11+Mount+Vernon+Place&csz=Baltimore%2C+MD+21201&country=us&Get%07Map=Get+Map Time: 12:30 on June 12th Menu and cost: to follow Here's his abstract: Virgins in the Bathtub -- Political Cryptography, Cypherpunks, and Internet Bearer Transaction Settlement Robert Hettinga Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation Eric Hughes, the canonical cypherpunk, did, by all accounts, a gloomy talk on internet payments at Stanford recently. The announcement was full of the usual imprecations against long and deep "bathtub curves", excessive Non-Recoverable Engineering costs, and the continually-immanent danger of instant catastrophic system failure. Paradoxically, the very thing that got Hughes and cypherpunks interested in finance in the first place, blind signatures and other internet bearer transaction protocols -- a set of frankly political cryptographic protocols designed prevent the exponential collapse of financial privacy and smash the nation-state (or corporations, depending on who you talked to) in the process -- are exactly the technologies which overcome the criteria that Hughes himself has laid out as show stoppers to the adoption of any new internet payment technology: the inability to do low-margin, low risk transactions at high volume in any reasonable development time-frame, and the need to use massive marketing efforts to cause their adoption. His abandonment of them over the last 6 years is, then, somewhat curious. It might be that the politics of internet bearer transactions, and the requirement to pay the mortgage, are now much less glamorous than than they used to be. Certainly internet bearer transaction protocols can be functionally anonymous, giving fits, in cryptoanarchist terms, to "rent-seeking confiscators of honestly earned wealth" everywhere. Nonetheless, internet bearer protocols can instantaneously execute, clear and settle transactions from millidollars to gigadollars at several orders of magnitude lower transaction cost than server-farmed (and clerk-excepted) book-entry transactions. Furthermore, they can be underwritten onto the net without much recourse to branding or any other accoutrement of modern marketing. The finance of pre-funded notes (like cash and bonds) has been historically a business of graded fungible commodities bought and sold in microeconomic "perfect competition" by relatively unknown entities. Finally, the aforementioned "bathtub" full of non-recoverable engineering costs is just about full now, and without much help from internet payment companies themselves. Efforts by the financial clearing and settlement networks to use the much cheaper technology of the internet, coupled by demand for much lower transaction costs by bubble-shocked internet goods and services firms -- including those in the capital markets -- have pretty much paved the way for internet bearer transactions, from financial back-office and trading intranets, to securities depository internet APIs, to client authentication and even "walletware" itself. In light of these developments, political-cum-financial cryptographers, and other financial virgins, might soon emerge, finally, from their respective bathtubs into profitability, if not respectability itself. Here's hoping someone hands them a towel when they do. Robert Hettinga is a reformed spreadsheet mechanic and almost-lapsed cypherpunk who found himself, two years ago, starting the Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation because no one would do things *his* way. IBUC is currently working on internet bearer finance projects -- with paying customers -- from one end of the payment bell-curve (Rabin-signature millidollar streaming cash backed up by custodial cash-reserve account balances) to the other (Unsponsored Network Depository Receipts backed up by CREST-linked custodial securities-account balances), and at several places in between, including, apparently, retail cash settlement for internet goods and services in transactions above one dollar. Before IBUC, Hettinga wrote rants on the net which ended up in print in various places, including a series for the Financial Times Virtual Finance Report demonstrating that any financial instrument could be issued onto the internet using a variety of peer-reviewed financial cryptography protocols. In addition, he started or helped start (in reverse order) the Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering Conference, the Philodox Symposium on Internet Bearer Transaction Settlement, the Digital Bearer Settlement List, the International Financial Cryptography Association, the International Conference on Financial Cryptography, the Mac-Crypto conference, the mac-crypto list, the e$/e$pam lists, the DCSB list, and the Digital Commerce Society of Boston. --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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' --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
