Re: The Continued Attack on Cash (Was: "The Right ofAnonymity"...)

At 10:51 PM -0800 2/1/98, Black Unicorn wrote:
>Mr. May said:
>
>>Suffice it to say that I find nearly all cases where someone is "demanding"
>>personal information to be cases where the government has required them to,
>>for various unseemly purposes, or in cases where credit is being arranged.
>
>Of late I tried to pay off a rather large American Express bill.
>
>Suddenly, AMEX won't take cash in excess of $1,000 in any single billing
>period (30 days).  The large sign on the wall indicated the substance of
....


It's worth noting (again) that a very simple technological/social solution
to the "credit card companies have records on people" problem, the one
often cited by "privacy law advocates" as the reason for a Data Privacy
Act, is easily found.

Namely, remove any impediments to the issuance of credit or debit cards
unlinkable to the True Name of a user.  A card issuer could feature this as
a Privacy Card, either backed by transfers of backing capital to accounts,
or using Chaum-style methods.

This is fully feasible using Chaumian credential-revealing mechanisms. (Cf.
Chaum's seminal "Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete," in
Communications of the ACM, November 1985. Updated a few times and available
in reprints or other places. Try search engines for latest locations.)

However, the trends are in just the opposite direction, as both Black
Unicorn and Bill Stewart have noted in this thread. Between the War on
Drugs, the laws about money laundering, the fears of tax evasion, and the
general burrowcrat desire to record the movements and actions of
citizen-units, such a Privacy Card would be frowned-upon.

Various roadblocks, ranging from "know your customer" restrictions on banks
to anti-money-laundering laws, would be thrown up to stop any such Privacy
Card.

The real solution is easy.

--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Tim May wrote:
> The real solution is easy.


Easier said than done.

Designing digital cash software is easy.  (Several prototypes exist.)
Getting people to accept it as having value is not.

But let's suppose that we build a complete fault-tolerant digital cash
system with multiply-redunant servers all over the world, and you can sit
at your computer and trade crypto-credits with whoever you want.

You've got a small fortune worth of e$.  What are you going to buy with it?

Seriously.

Are you going to buy groceries at the local supermarket with cypherbucks?
I doubt it.  Surely you can't use the system to pay for your house or car,
or other government-traceable assets.  And certainly not airline tickets.

Perhaps you could buy a new computer.  That would work, if you could
arrange delivery anonymously (which I doubt).  Or maybe you could pick it
up in person, but you don't need e-cash for that.

About the only practical thing you could buy would be a pre-paid phone
card.  Anything else, you'd need to arrange delivery for, and if you can
have contraband mailed to you, then you can have other things that you
don't want sent to you.

The problem is not digital cash.  The problem is delivering the goods
bought with it.  Solve the delivery problem and digital cash will follow.

At 10:31 pm -0500 on 2/2/98, Tim May wrote:


> At 6:42 PM -0800 2/2/98, Anonymous wrote:
> >Tim May wrote:
> >> The real solution is easy.
> >
> >
> >Easier said than done.

<snip>

> When I say the real solution is easy, I mean it. Get rid of the laws

Nope. Making or repealing laws won't mean too much for the privacy of
transactions, except to reallocate who gets screwed in some kind of
political zero-sum game.

Anyway, laws are there because there's an economic incentive for them to be
there. Reality is not optional. Physics creates economics which creates
laws. Not the other way around. Even morality and ethics come from culture,
which itself is a physical phenomenon, the collective response of humans to
the resources on hand,  which is an economic process if there ever was one.

So, only when digital bearer certificate technology like blind signatures
is proven to be *cheaper* than the current privacy-invasive book entry
transaction regime will there be any demand for digital bearer settlement
of assets, debt, and cash transactions.

Personally, I believe that that time is coming sooner than most people
realize. That's because when someone figures out how to save everyone a
bunch of money with digital bearer certificates, they're going to make a
bunch of money doing it, and the race to the bottom-line will begin.

As I've said here several times before, the paradox will prove to be that
digital bearer settlement will be cheaper to use *because* they're
physically anonymous. You don't *care* what the biometric identity of
someone is, as long as you're protected from bad economic actors, and can
do reputation damage to people who you can prove have damaged you
financially.

Which, as we all know here, is simply a matter of financial cryptography.


The cost of anything is the foregone alternative. People will only demand
more privacy when it's cheaper than not having it. I believe that that time
is coming, rather quickly.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga



-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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    Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> was purported to have 
    expostulated to perpetuate an opinion:

>The cost of anything is the foregone alternative. People will only demand
>more privacy when it's cheaper than not having it. I believe that that
>time is coming, rather quickly.
>
    that, and 

        "Americans do not buy for quality, they buy for price"


    as John Ruskin said:

    1.  those who buy for price alone are this man's lawful prey.

    2.  the price of oats is significantly cheaper when it has been
        processed by the horse.

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At 4:56 pm -0500 on 2/4/98, Attila T. Hun wrote:


>         "Americans do not buy for quality, they buy for price"


Which must explain our gross national product, then. Cheaper, as always,
*is* better.


>
>     as John Ruskin said:
>
>     1.  those who buy for price alone are this man's lawful prey.

Those who *don't* buy for price alone are usually somebody's lunch sooner
or later.


>     2.  the price of oats is significantly cheaper when it has been
>         processed by the horse.

It ain't oats, then. It's horseshit. Aparently aristocratic horseshit, if I
remember Mr. Ruskin's bio right...

;-).

Cheers,
Bob

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

At 6:42 PM -0800 2/2/98, Anonymous wrote:
>Tim May wrote:
>> The real solution is easy.
>
>
>Easier said than done.
>
>Designing digital cash software is easy.  (Several prototypes exist.)
>Getting people to accept it as having value is not.

The thrust of my arguments, in my several posts in this thread, has been
simply removing the laws which require True Names to be attached to
transactions, bank account, credit cards, etc.

No digital cash is needed.

The rest of Mr. Anonymous' argument is a straw man, based on the difficulty
of implementing digital cash.

When I say the real solution is easy, I mean it. Get rid of the laws
telling people how often and in what amounts they may take money out of
their bank account, get rid of laws telling banks they must narc out
customers who remove "too much" money, and get rid of any laws restricting
the use of names customers and their financial partners may use.

(BTW,  until these actions happen, no widespread use of digital cash is
likely to be accepted as legal. This has a lot to do, I think, with why
d.c. projects are moving so slowly.)

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."