RE: Making the Agora Vanish
At 11:30 AM 4/15/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: Nobody in conventional business is going to want to do a deal with someone when they can't create a legally enforceable contract. This is a common refrain - especially among people who are pushing, for cultural or economic reasons, the adoption of a PKI system - but I think it suffers considerably from being overgeneralized. Specifically, it's common to overemphasize the importance of the government-based legal system as a dispute resolution system, or as a righter of wrongs, especially private civil contract-based litigation where force multipliers like attorneys' fees awards, punitive damages, or widespread public scorn or embarrassment. Even in a case where nothing goes wrong - e.g., both parties are subject to personal jurisdiction in the same place, they agree on the laws to be applied and the court which should apply them, and they have a clear pre-existing agreement covering their relationship - litigation is slow and expensive. On TV, it looks like a dramatic clash between two lone samurai attorneys fighting for the honor of their principals. In the real world, it looks more like WW I trench warfare, with expensive, slow, vicious, impersonal fighting over feet and yards of muddy, uninteresting terrain that's not good for much once the fighting stops. One of the problems people have when they learn defensive shooting is that they expect criminal assailants to just fall down and die if they're shot once, because that's how it works in the movies. In real life, actual criminals have often been shot before - frequently several times - and lived without serious consequences, partly because they received prompt, skilled medical care, and partly because the people who shot them didn't select an effective combination of ammunition and firearm. Because of their experience with gunshot wounds, criminals no longer necessarily have a great fear of being shot, nor are they likely to respond to it as a life-threatening event. Consequently, a person defending themselves against people like that will need to use force sufficient to render them physically and medically incapable of attack - injuries which might otherwise have resulted in moral or emotional incapacitation are likely to be inadequate to end an attack. Turns out the same thing happens with people and companies who use lawsuits instead of guns - they learn that it's not the end of the world if you get sued, and that suing someone (especially if they're an experienced defendant) isn't necessarily going to make them play nicely immediately. We talk about people making decisions based on the abstract notion of "the law" or "the courts" - but it's more useful to break that down further into decisions based upon "the carrot" and "the stick", or "greed" and "fear" .. the labels aren't important, so much as is thinking about those two flavors of human motivation. The "legally enforceable contract" notion is meant to invoke fear of a powerful and unavoidable stick - ideally striking fear (and good behavior) into the heart of a potential bad actor. As things turn out, sophisticated actors - be they businesspersons, criminals, diplomats, or whomever - come to understand that the law's force as a stick is not so powerful and unlimited as it's frequently portrayed. Does the failure of "the stick" doom us to lives of fear and hunger? No. Not at all - in fact, many of the people who enjoy themselves the most seem to be people who have learned to act on "carrot" motives, and to structure their negotiations and contracts with others so that they are operating not based upon fear, but upon mutual advancement and cooperation? And "reputation capital" that would counteract that point to some extent depends on maintaining a consistent traceable pseudonym as someone who does something illegal, for decades, without getting linked to it. No - it depends on maintaining a consistent identity, whose trades with its counterparties are considered by those counterparties to be both predictable and beneficial. As Tim May writes in a message which arrived while I was composing this one, there are plenty of examples of reputations as the basis for business deals now - and business deals which occur despite the lack of reputation systems. Cross-jurisdictional trade is one - really, it's just an example of the general class of disputes where the cost of resolving the dispute exceeds the value in dispute. There's a vast amount of commerce which goes on - certainly the majority in terms of number of transactions, likely the majority in terms of transaction dollar value, as well - where the cost to the participants to adjudicate a dispute regarding the transaction is greater than the value of the underlying goods, but is perceived as smaller than the cost to either party of ending their relationship. Easy examples of transactions without legal enforcement or reputation
RE: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
Bear wrote: (Bear, read the entire before you reply...) I said: That is an over-simplification, but yes. Intelligence is not headlines. To a large extent, "what's happening" is not analyzed correctly, because the intelligence community lacks sufficient expert analysis to cope with the dataload. This capability is in the private sector. These information flows, between the government sector and the private sector, are unmapped. I want to paddle back to the kiddie pool, but I'll try to address you Bear, you are way over my little headand so is this subject matter. This is not true any more. The automated analysis of trawled data has advanced considerably beyond keyword searching at this point; there are programs out there now specifically looking for much more subtle and complicated things, which were formerly the domain of intelligence analysts, and they are actually pretty damn good. The simple keyword searchers and keyphrase searchers you hear about with echelon are only the front line; they pass their data back to much more sophisticated AI programs that analyze content, and synthesize information gleaned from massive numbers of such missives. Yes, but I'm still speaking of information that is not online, not siphonable and locked in the overt experts in the private sector. It is not "current events" or "happenings" or "what's going on." It's analysis and intricacies that are critical for decision making. Not raw data or intelligence headlines. It's Mr. X and his theories on Y, that nobody knows about - Mr. X is hidden away in the private intelligence sector or some university closet. He's a specialist on ...uhmSouth African Zulu Warrior Chieftains dress and culture. He can tell you that when Zulus get in war dress and bring knives and spears to your VIP meeting - it's a sign of respect, and not a violence indicator. (I just ripped off the basics of this hypo from this guy: http://www.icon.co.za/~agrudko/ representative of the private intelligence sector) Without knowing this information, your diplomatic protection force is going to rat-tat-tat them to pieces and lead to a "diplomatic snafu" of major proportions. They need this information NOW, because the helicopter with your diplomat just landed in a remote area for this roundtable in a big grass hut, and is facing 1,000 Zulu Warriors jumping up and down and chanting in full war dress, and the protection force of 5 is counting rounds in the back of their heads. Their protocol officer fainted and is receiving medical assistance in the 'copter. They place a call - decision time is 8-10 minutes. Somebody has got to finger and find Mr. X's knowledge. This information is NOT online, not siphonable, outside of regular intelligence channels - it's in Mr. X. Mr. X is one of five western people in the world that know about these things. Right then, Chief Zulu walks up and points his knife at your diplomat. Was that a threat? Your diplomat pees in his pants in front of 1,000 Zulu Warriors. Ramifications? BTW, your diplomat is also president of a transcontinental resource-extractive company with operations in ZA and is a top-level kidnapping and hostage risk - his capture or death would have diplomatic ramifications and would affect upcoming treaty negotiations related to the world diamond market. National events often turn on intimate knowledge of the strangest facts - these facts are known by people like Mr. X. You have 8 minutes to tell these guys what to do. You can mine you data, use your CIA-google, ask your AI, make some phone calls - and you are still whistling Dixie. So, this is what you do: You CIA analyst, fire up your SIGINT/ELINT fed AI and analysis programs, you call around What have those Zulu Warrior's been talking about lately? You find, to your dismay, little informationZulus don't even use phones. So what do you do? You find pictures of "Zulu War Dress" and some basic protocol. Your internal experts agree. Your call: "Zulu War Dress = War = Aggression = take immediate evasive action." You go look at online and offline sources on this diplomat's diamond company. Sadly, you do not have an expert's competitive intelligence analysis which would have told you this man is about to become pivotal in the world diamond market, due to a secretly planned merger and acquisition with a gem company. Because of this one man, the entire gem and diamond markets are about to be revolutionized. *bloody gunfire exchange* Confused Zulu Warriors. The chief was just giving a sign of respect. Dead diplomat. Zulus go on the offensive. World diamond market: kaput. Mr. X happens to consult with PPS (private protection services) in ZA in Zulu territory. Private intelligence. Yet, for some reason, Mr. X doesn't appear on your screen. Why? Because you haven't developed information flows between yourself and the private intelligence sector. By and large, you don't talk to them. If you did, Mr. X's information would be in your
The Well-Read Cypherpunk
At 1:21 PM -0700 4/15/01, Greg Broiles wrote: At 01:46 AM 4/15/2001 -0700, Ryan Sorensen wrote: Read the hundreds of articles on these matters. Read "The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State," by Bruce Benson. Read David Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," and his other books. Read... The point is, Aimee, _read the background material_. Admittedly, I'm not Aimee. I was wondering if I could get a few helpful pointers towards the background material? Any assistance would be much appreciated. You might also take a look at Robert Axelrod's _The Evolution of Cooperation_. And there are a dozen other books. The Well-Read Cypherpunk should know something about free market economics (not the Samuelson technical stuff taught in introductory econ classes in college), a litte bit about game theory and evolutionary game theory, some basic anarchist theory (left or right, provided one can see through the ideology), and should have an exposure to primitive cultures and how they trade for goods, how international commerce evolved, etc. It used to be that wide reading in "Scientific American" would supply a lot of the basics, stripped of any ideology. (Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column was a staple...fortunately, his couple of dozen books are widely available.) The point of course is not to lay out a "logical proof" that crypto anarchy and related things are inevitable, but to establish a series of "paving stones" that allow the reader to stand and see how the gaps are likely to be filled in. (There are places where rigorous proof is useful, mainly in filling in these gaps. This view is in sharp contrast to the "pure logic" worldview demolished by Godel, Turing, Kleene, Chaitin, and others. Yes, such things have applicability even to epistemology.) Even fields dominated by ostensibly rigorous proof, like mathematics, fit this model. Before one can read a proof, a set of concepts has to be established. A few proofs, relating to geometry and number theory (no largest prime) are accesssible to young kids with little formal education, but even these kids must understand numbers and triangles and such, else the "proofs" are only manipulations of abstract symbols. (There's a small faction within mathematics which thinks this is all math is.) A demand that a "proof" be given that crypto anarchy is inevitable is thus not very interesting. What is more interesting is to establish the "paving stones" which make it more obvious what the implications of certain technologies are. (And thoughtful government analysts, even those who are no great friends of crypto anarchy, point to the dangers of crypto anarchy for the precise reason that they have enough of the paving stones to see how things are likely to unfold if certain trends continue.) Those of us who started the list, or who arrived in the first few years, were generally immersed in the writings of David Friedman, Bruce Benson, Vernor Vinge, Orson Scott Card, Robert Heinlein, Douglas Hofstadter, Hakim Bey, Martin Gardner, Robert Axelrod, Henry Hazlitt, and, last but not least, Ayn Rand. Not all of us had read all of this stuff, but it was a common enough set amongst techno-libertarians. Some were more knowledgeable about evolutionary game theory, others more knowledgeable about Unix. But when someone referred to Friedman's essays on Icelandic anarchy, it didn't draw the blanks I think we now see. Maybe people in those days, pre-Web, read more books. If someone didn't understand the reference, they tended to ask politely. Lately, we've had outsiders arrive on the list hostile to the core ideas. Though there is no ideological purity test, it is not interesting when someone like Aimee Farr--just the latest in a series--arrives and says, essentially, "OK, prove it to me!" Lacking the paving stones, the basis vectors, the building blocks, giving her some kind of logical proof would be pointless. And, as I said to her, if she wants one from me she can pay my daily consulting fee for as long as it takes me to write one. Many reading lists have been given over the years. Use search engines to find them (much Cypherpunks traffic shows up in Google, for example.) My Cyphernomicon has a bunch of book references, too, as well as supplying mini-essays on hundreds of topics. Read Steven Levy's article in "Wired." Read the essays of Eric Hughes, Duncan Frissell, and many others. Read about the Law Merchant, about international trade even before nation-states existed, much less international courts of justice. Read about the early bankers and how they enforced contracts. Read, read, read. I'm not saying every subscriber or interested person here should read hundreds of books. Just reading half a dozen, and thinking "outside the box" about the implications, is more important than reading but not integrating the ideas. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos,
Re: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
On Sun, Apr 15, 2001 at 02:11:56PM -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: You sell Alice a credit history on Bob; Bob takes a new identity; Alice is back to square one. Why would Alice buy credit histories? Not everyone will choose to be lost in the Net. So the solution is simple: I sell Alice a new report on Bob's new identity, after doing the appropriate research and employing the relevant investigators. All credit is a gamble. If I know a person's meatspace identity and ties with religious/social/family groups, I'm far more likely to lend them money then if they're using a throwaway hushmail account. If Bob is doing the latter, he won't get credit in the first place. If he's using a known meatspace identity, I can do the research and likely succeed. -Declan
Escrow agents
This is well-trod ground. I'll have to be brief here. At 2:06 PM -0700 4/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote: On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: Widespread black markets, for drugs, betting, etc., suggest otherwise. There are many markets out there which do not rely on the official court system to enforce contracts for. This is true, but look at the mechanisms for enforcing contracts that they *do* use. Most of them are not compatible with anonymity, and only a few are compatible with pseudonymity. Mafia Bosses don't buy information from someone when they don't know where that someone lives. It's the exact same enforceability of contracts problem that other parts of society uses lawyers to deal with. Legbreakers or cops, basically they have the same job with regard to contract enforcement. There has to be a hook where someone who does a ripoff can be punished, or else there is no deal. You are talking about what game theorists call "defection," or what drug dealers would call "burning." Cheating, deception, etc. No one can deny that animals, humans, and other agents use deception, hiding, coloration, etc. Nothing is perfect, not even in the "law-regulated economy" some folks seem to think is the only economy which can function. How non-law-regulated (black) markets work, and how they deal with deception and cheating, is a huge topic. (I recently suggested to David Friedman that he consider taking on this topic for a major book.) But the "paving stone," or touch stone, I want to bring up is this: the role of third party escrow agents. Use Google or a similar search engine and search on "cyphernomicon escrow". The section on use of escrow agents will come up immediately. One such URL is http://calvo.teleco.ulpgc.es/cyphernomicon/chapter16/16.24.html (I have written dozens of articles on this over the years, answering the same tired old question that Ray Dillinger asks.) When you have read this, and thought about the issue, we can discuss things further. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
RE: Making the Agora Vanish | OSINT distributed haven (Intellagora)
On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: At 02:06 PM 4/15/01 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote: When you talk about a one-time transaction, it pretty much has to involve something whose value can be ascertained ON THE SPOT. otherwise, there is either a continuing relationship that can't be unilaterally broken (ie, they know where you live) or there is I think this is a bit short-sighted. Assume there is an anonymous seller who has established reputation capital over time for small transactions on the order of pennies. I may be willing to risk a ten-cent transaction (to purchase an illicit MP3 or somesuch) if the perceived reward is sufficient. If I am successful and word spreads that the seller is to be trusted, the amount people will be willing to risk larger amounts will presumably increase. And your possible motive for spreading the word about his reputation, which ties you to an illicit transaction, is what exactly? Bear
Message from a Parallel Universe
Cypherpunks, I was twiddling the dials on my Hartle-Witten BraneNet, and I received this message from a parallel negative tension brane universe. Apparently there is a group similar to our own group in this world which is at this quasi-time debating "literary anarchy." Here's an excerpt: Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 15:53:24 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Aimless Fargone [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Literary Anarchy Cc: I get what you guys are saying about how maybe individual readers of books could decide for themselves like what books they could read. I even hear your point of view that government regulation of bookstores, writers, magazines, and libraries might be dispensed with in some far-off utopian future. But, like, I don't understand how it would work. How would people know what was the truth and what was a lie. You guys talk about these mysterious "reputations," but couldn't authors _lie_ about their reputations, couldn't publishers deceived the gullible? And what's to keep an author from pretending to be another author, or what's to keep him from copying the style and ideas of another writer? How would people even know what was important and what wasn't? And couldn't foreign intelligence agents write stuff that was uncontrolled, contaminating our value propositions? Really, punks, I'm just seeking a value proposition for why it is that this idea of "literary anarchy" would work.
making the agora vanish
Okay, as some have pointed out, I've been a little too flip in assuming that people's nyms will "vanish" if they get into real trouble. It's true that nyms like "Pr0duct Cypher", which represent the authorship claim to years of code and writing, are not going to be abandoned over a $10 transaction, and if P. Cypher were to put that nym on the line for a deal, I wouldn't hesitate to accept it. The problem arises because the means of building reputation are so utterly ill-defined. Having read P. Cypher's list contributions and software, and having a public key to check his/her/their signatures against, suffices in an individual case. But commerce - large, heavy, routine commerce between relative strangers, which is the fundamental strength of our markets, requires there to be some standard format or method of presenting reputation capital that can be checked. The only thing I can think of is a set of endorsements verifying deals done already. But that is exactly the information that most of you say you don't want disclosed. Escrow agents and reputation agents definitely help -- they can overcome a lot of difficulties involving who gets paid what and when. But now you've got a third party in your deal, charging vigorish when one of your main hopes was to get away from the tax man charging vigorish. Bear
