AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE: [extropy-chat] Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[Greg Burch]

> From: Eugen Leitl
> Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 4:19 AM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Reccommendations for a mailing list
>
> 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.
> [snip]
> 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.

Sasha and I -- and many others -- used to dream big dreams about the convergence of these technologies. (As a personal note, Sasha's death was a punctuation mark for many, many people in that old core group, but that's another, even more painful topic.)

Thinking back on the world we imagined being implemented with AnarchoCyphertopian(c) technologies, it seems in hindsight there were two phenomena that we didn't foresee with enough clarity -- terrorism and spam.  And they seem like they are related in an important way.  They are both examples of a class of users of such technology that have no consideration for secondary values; they sacrifice everything else to achieve just one aim that is all-important to them and that are complete spoilers for all other members of the user community.  I like the sound of what you've written -- "agoric throttling" -- is that your term, Eugen?  At any rate, it seems here in this after-age of 2005 that the problem of the "totalistic user," the user willing to burn the community to achieve a single goal, has to be solved.

GB