[extropy-chat] Reccommendations for a mailing list

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 12:19:46AM -0800, Samantha Atkins wrote:

> Now there is a bit of history I would be very interested in and that is 
> directly applicable to extropy.   How was e-cash and crypto-anarchy 

Ecash and crypto-anarchy were never stopped. They never happened.

A small circle of smart, devious people outlined a machinery, but never
implemented enough for it in a practically usable form even for an initial
user base. Johnny Doe hasn't even heard about any of this. Tim May is just a
Usenet troll these days. Most cypherpunks work for The Man.

(Speaking of lists, cypherpunks@ is one of the former great ones which has been
completely reduced to prebiotic urslime. Every single smart person has left. I'm still
there, which I guess tells something. Cryptography@ putters on, greatly
diminished but still usable -- due to moderation).

Cryptography is hard, and only a few people can create a working set of
protocols and an implementation. Instead, Chaum et al. secured key IP by
patents, which gathered dust on the virtual shelves. Some of these recently
expired, and there are some startups trying to get somebody to notice that
they exist. Since you haven't heard of them, they're not succeeding very
well.

Very few instances of working cypherpunk technology (anonymous remailers) are
a great pain to use and a major hassle to operate, and are completely overrun
by assholes, spam, and are a great virus vector (this is not conjecture, in
case somebody is wondering).

There are a few ongoing, promising projects (not Freenet) which very few
people here are aware of.

> stopped?  Is it a dead issue or is there still reason for hope along 
> these lines?

There are three keystones which must happen: working traffic remixing at TCP/IP
level, persistent nyms and a distributed filestore with agoric throttling
(abuse runs rampant when anything truly anonymous happens).

Some rudimentary prototypes of parts of that infrastructure exist, not not a
working whole, nor a way to deploy initial userbase.

I'm sure Hal Finney (if he's still here) can tell great many more details.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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