Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon: Crypto Cop-Out
thomaspa...@yahoo.com
If ever a cyberpunk novel packed political
punch, this is it. Neal Stephenson's
Cryptonomicon hums with manic caffeinated glee,
proclaiming, Freedom through technology! Crypto-
Anarchy now! Crypto-Anarchy being a networked
global economy where bootleg information and
untraceable digital cash flow free, out of reach
of government regulatory agencies like the FBI
and the IRS.
Crypto-Anarchy didn't seem an unrealistic
dream in the late eighties, when David Chaum
first drew up the protocols for "e-cash" and
founded the Digicash Corporation. Before long,
Deutsche Bank was issuing Chaum's untraceable
Internet money on a trial basis. This early
incarnation of digital money wasn't quite good
enough for real Crypto-Anarchy, as Germany
frowned on money laundering. There'd be no
numbered accounts opened over the Internet; and
payers would know the identities of the parties
they were paying, though not the other way
around. But even crippled e-cash was exciting to
many Internet capitalists who looked forward to
the day that more tolerant countries, like
Panama, might have it too.
In early 1999, Digicash went bankrupt,
thwarting the hopes of Microsoft and Netscape,
both of which had tried unsuccessfully to
convince Chaum to incorporate e-cash protocols
into their Internet setups (Chaum rejected
Microsoft's one-hundred million dollar bid as too
stingy). So the hacker hordes and hot young CEOs
swarming cyberspace to reserve copies of Neal
Stephenson's latest novel (it broke Amazon's top-
10 before publication) must pay the old-fashioned
way, with credit cards.
This is ironic, because in large part
Cryptonomicon is the story of a Chaumish
character -- computer hacker Randy Waterhouse --
stumbling on a treasure trove of Japanese war
gold and using it to back his very own e-cash
bank, The Crypt. Law-enforcement types from all
over the world want to shut Randy down, but can't
reach The Crypt's servers, which are in a
bombproof cave in the libertarian-leaning
Sultinate of Kinakuta, a tiny island nation in
the South China Sea. Instead, border cops plant
heroin on Randy as he's clearing customs in
Manila, throw him in a dungeon, and... well, the
rest is a cyber-struggle to the death between (to
quote the dust jacket) "a future of personal and
digital liberty... or... universal
totalitarianism reborn."
Cryptonomicon is a fun and inspiring book
currently being devoured by an influential cross-
section of the population. Maybe by the time the
sequel comes out, David Chaum will have dusted
off those patents and found some new investors,
and Amazon will be accepting alternative forms of
electronic payment.
But I hope not.
Though it's trite to say, when lawmen aren't
tampering with evidence and brutalizing suspects,
they're often performing useful tasks like
directing traffic and putting away criminals.
And when governments aren't abusing their powers,
they're helping less fortunate members of society
to get by. Taxes aren't all bad.
And for what it's worth, I would rather have
the FBI learn the truth about me -- that I
occasionally spend some money on hard-core
sodomasochistic pornography -- than have my
daughter kidnapped and my life's savings
untraceably zapped for ransom. After all,
untraceable e-cash would facilitate all sorts of
"perfect crimes" -- blackmail, bribery,
extortion, murder contracts, sale of stolen
goods, insider trading, and the list goes on.
Crypto-Anarchists don't dispute this, but
accept these hazards as the price of digital
freedom: "Console yourself with the fact that
though some may die, fewer are dying as a result
of state-sponsored wars and terrorism
(historically a bigger killer than contract
killings!" (Timothy May, Cyphernomicon: The
Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto).
Cryptonomicon toes the party line on this
issue, in an extremely stupid way.
In the novel, The Crypt is funded by drug
kingpins and Third World kleptocrats, but the
idealistic hackers who code the anonymous banking
software have a supposedly moral reason for
building it -- distribution of the "Holocaust
Education and Avoidance Pod" (HEAP), a multi-
megabyte manual on guerrilla warfare.
Avi, a Crypt partner whose family was
decimated by the Nazi Holocaust, explains, "...
almost every government in the world would
prevent distribution to its citizens. It is
essential to build the Crypt so that the HEAP can
be freely distributed throughout the world"
Though untraceable digital cash will make it
easier for evil people to launder billions in
blood money, it will supposedly all be worth it
for the oppressed ethnic minorities who will be
empowered with bootleg printouts of the HEAP.
This probably makes sense to people who play
a lot of DOOM, but it doesn't make sense to me.
Thousands of guerrilla warfare tipsheets are
already circulating through cyberspace, and none
of the governments engaged in ethnic cleansing
seem to care. Homemade guns don't work on tanks.
Still, a government that did care could censor
the HEAP by shutting down phone service,
confiscating computers, and -- old trick --
killing dissidents. Maybe they could even pay
off the death squads with untraceable digital
cash.
In connecting the HEAP to digital cash,
Stephenson seems to be asserting Timothy May's
position that a liberal-democratic government
couldn't monitor Internet cash flows without
violating basic rights:
"Restricting digital cash may impinge on free
speech, as it is generally impossible to know
before looking if a message is 'pure speech'...
or has significant digital cash aspects. And
note that while money laundering and tax fraud
are illegal, the U.S. relies almost exclusively
on detection after the crime, as opposed to
inspecting private communications for evidence of
criminal behavior. For U.S. authorities to begin
random inspections of messages, or to ban
encryption, would almost certainly mean
violations of the First and Fourth and maybe
other Amendments." (Timothy May, Untraceaable
Digital Cash, Information Markets, and Blacknet).
But there are ways to shut down electronic
money launderers without inspecting private
communications or banning strong encryption.
A necessary first step would be to make an
international pariah out of any nation which,
like the fictional Kinakuta, legalized fully
anonymous electronic funds transfers within its
borders -- for instance, by permitting foreigners
to open numbered bank accounts over the Internet
without requiring identifying information. This
may seem excessive, but data havens profit by
abetting terrible crimes on foreign soil. Wars
have been fought for lesser reasons.
E-cash in a world without data havens would
probably feature payer-only anonymity of the sort
Deutsche Bank experimented with. Admittedly,
payer-only anonymity could be transformed to full
anonymity, with e-cash launderers operating
"remailer" style -- acting as middlemen, and
expunging records immediately after transmitting
e-cash. However, launderers who did this would
be vulnerable to sting operations where
government "launder-narcs" posed as criminals
needing money-laundering services. Payer-only
anonymity ensures that the launderer would not
know the identity of the paying party (a launder-
narc), but the launder-narc would have
incontrovertible proof of the launderer's crime.
This sort of activist enforcement would not
involve banning encryption or inspecting private
messages.
The second "good" reason Stephenson's Randy
has for building The Crypt is that the
introduction of a secure anonymous digital
currency backed by pilfered World War II gold
would help Asia recover from its recent economic
woes:
"... the gold was stolen from all of Asia by the
Nipponese, who intended to use it as a backing
for a currency that would become the legal tender
of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,
and... while it goes without saying that these
particular Nips were among the most egregious
buttheads in planetary history, some aspects of
their plan weren't such a shitty idea.... to the
extent life still sucks for many Asians, things
would get a lot better... if the continent's
economy could get jerked into the twenty-first,
or at least the twentieth, century and hopefully
stay there for a while instead of collapsing
whenever some dictator's-nephew-in-charge-of-a-
central-bank loses control of his sphincters and
wipes out a major currency. So maybe stabilizing
the currency situation would be a good thing to
accomplish with a shitload of gold, and that's
the only moral thing to do with it anyway..."
(p.817)
The locker-room language is amusing, but the
logic here is awfully vague.
First of all, the Holocaust loot recently
discovered in Swiss banks suggests at least one
other moral thing to do with the gold -- give it
back to the victims' families, before they sue.
That problem aside, Stephenson seems to be
asserting that currencies crash when central
bankers crack under the stress of debt
obligations and print too much money. This
reverses cause and effect. A central bank that
can't make interest payments to its creditors
must print money or shut down, and the latter is
hardly an option. Currencies devalue when
countries borrow too much money in the first
place; they stabilize when bankers start making
sound loans, and borrowers start paying them
back.
Hard money, whether backed by gold or a
monetarist central bank, isn't necessarily
healthy -- for example, when businesses really
need money to fund productive activity, but can't
afford the high interest rates that sometimes
result from a static money supply. But even if
hard money were a panacea, the world already has
plenty of them. It's unclear how the existence
of gold-backed e-cash would stabilize Southeast
Asia more effectively than U.S. Dollars or Euros
-- unless, somehow, The Crypt's lending
department is better than its First World
competitors at directing investment productively.
But Stephenson doesn't give any reason why
this should be, nor does he offer any other
sensible explanation. As Randy complains, "I
know currency fluctuations are important.... But
my god, it's so tedious I just want to run away"
(p. 563). Apparently the author shares his
protagonist's feelings -- the banker's art of
assigning realistic risk to loans is too boring
to think about. This leaves us with half-baked
economics as the other "good" reason to implement
Crypto-Anarchy.
If I seem bitter, it's because I am.
I used to love Neal Stephenson. Back when I
was a boy, and the world was a big scary place,
his novel Snow Crash put everything in
perspective. Snow Crash is set in a Crypto-
Anarchic near-future world where democracy has
quietly expired thanks to the tax consequences of
untraceable digital money. Life is exciting but
dangerous, and there are lots of mean people
running around. Roughly like the real world, in
other words.
The one issue Snow Crash never addressed was,
why didn't the world's liberal democracies do
something about the deteriorating law-enforcement
and tax situation before they died? I sort of
assumed that greedy corporations had engineered
the whole thing.
But along comes Cryptonomicon, showing how
untraceable e-cash gets put into place in a world
recognizably ours, by idealistic technophiles
like myself, working alongside drug lords and
dictators. They had to do it, because... well,
something or other.
Though libertarian agit-prop, Cryptonomicon
isn't Birth of a Nation or The Turner Diaries.
There is good mixed with the bad -- like,
Stephenson obviously detests racists. But the
book makes an emotional appeal for Crypto-Anarchy
without adequately exploring core issues,
fostering the smug illusion of understanding
where a more thoughtful job might have stimulated
intelligent discourse. Stephenson needs to look
at Crypto-Anarchy more critically if he really
wants to shed light on the future of Internet
cash.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Stefan E. Jones
Watch for the flames on this one.
On Thu, 09 Sep 1999 00:02:48 GMT, thomaspa...@yahoo.com
wrote:
> Crypto Cop-Out
>
> If ever a cyberpunk novel packed political
>punch, this is it. Neal Stephenson's
>Cryptonomicon hums with manic caffeinated glee,
>proclaiming, Freedom through technology! Crypto-
>Anarchy now! Crypto-Anarchy being a networked
>global economy where bootleg information and
>untraceable digital cash flow free, out of reach
>of government regulatory agencies like the FBI
>and the IRS.
>[MASSIVE SNIP]
> But along comes Cryptonomicon, showing how
>untraceable e-cash gets put into place in a world
>recognizably ours, by idealistic technophiles
>like myself, working alongside drug lords and
>dictators. They had to do it, because... well,
>something or other.
>
> Though libertarian agit-prop, Cryptonomicon
>isn't Birth of a Nation or The Turner Diaries.
>There is good mixed with the bad -- like,
>Stephenson obviously detests racists. But the
>book makes an emotional appeal for Crypto-Anarchy
>without adequately exploring core issues,
>fostering the smug illusion of understanding
>where a more thoughtful job might have stimulated
>intelligent discourse. Stephenson needs to look
>at Crypto-Anarchy more critically if he really
>wants to shed light on the future of Internet
>cash.
--
+-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-+
SeJ@ay-oh-el-dot-com ~ stefanj@eye-oh-dot-com
http://www.io.com/~stefanj/
CHARGES APPLIED FOR UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL EMAIL!
David A Molnar
> Interesting analysis!
> Watch for the flames on this one.
Indeed. Hopefully not in sci.crypt.
-David
Tom Knight
Hmm. IMHO, You seem to be confusing the ideas of the protagonist with
the ideas of the author. I didn't know whether Stephenson himself
supported e-cash before I read Cryptonomicon, and I don't now. However,
anyone could argue that someone can write a tract without actually
believing what it says. A more important point is that I don't really
think that Cryptomomicon, as a book, had any kind of an agenda. I'd
say that Stephenson is far too good an author to fall into the trap of
prolatising(?). The main protagonists favor the system, but the book
makes them all out as, at the very least, mildly unbalanced. Randy is,
in a way, seen as a sane person commenting on an insane situation, but
we are shown his idosincracies(?) as well. I don't think many people
would regard it as promoting some kind of political cause, and I
certainly don't.
John Savard
>Snow Crash is set in a Crypto-
>Anarchic near-future world where democracy has
>quietly expired thanks to the tax consequences of
>untraceable digital money.
For technical reasons, untraceable e-cash is awkward in any case.
There is a low-tech form of truly untraceable cash; if we could just
get governments to start minting gold coins again.
It is possible that some of the politics in the book were contrived,
rather than serious, simply to get the plot moving.
I suppose, though, that the real political issue isn't whether anarchy
is preferable to humane liberal democracy. You're saying it is not,
and I agree, and I think most people agree.
Generally, though, if someone wants to make it easier for people to
dodge taxes, or otherwise evade law enforcement, while that does mean
they are preferring anarchy, it doesn't mean that it is humane liberal
democracy to which they are preferring it. Instead, they believe -
misguidedly or not - that the world's governments are not capable of,
or not to be trusted to, maintain humane liberal democracy in the
future.
What basis might someone have for such a belief?
The cynical attitude toward politicians that followed Watergate. The
increased social tensions associated with the deteriorating economic
conditions for the average worker compared with those of the 1960s.
Many people, too, who have no love for anarchy would still like to see
liberal democracy return to its roots. Electronic eavesdropping on
private conversations was not possible before there was electronics.
Money was untraceable when it consisted of coins and bills. And there
was a time when the Second Amendment was observed in the observance,
not the breach.
In other words, whether by technological or electoral means, there are
those who would like to see governments in general prevented from
engaging in any intrusive activities that would not have been accepted
in the United States...in 1780.
No concession to the anonymous nature of today's large cities. No
concession to the fact that in 1780, the poor and discontented didn't
have the same rights as the gentleman farmer. No concession to the
power of modern technology in the hands of a terrorist.
One might not agree with such a viewpoint in its entirety to feel that
today's democratic governments are (as was true of any kind of
government even in 1780) inclined to expand their power in ways
inimical to democracy, requiring a vigilance from the citizenry. An
intelligent debate on these concerns is needed, but it's too much to
expect from the pages of a novel.
John Savard ( teneerf<- )
http://www.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/crypto.htm
Brad Johnson
:>
: Hmm. IMHO, You seem to be confusing the ideas of the protagonist with
I'd be surprised if most of the attitudes expressed in Cryptonomicon
aren't Stephenson. Check out this earlier bit of fiction by Neal, from
Time in 1995:
The Great Simoleon Caper
http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/documents/simoleon.html
It's the crypto cash scenario of Cryptonomicon, effectively.
It's interesting how Stephenson used essays and short fiction
to write Cryptonomicon; his Wired pieces and the "In the beginning"
essay were both incorporated into Cryptonomicon as well.
-- bradj.
------------------------Nullus Oppidenda Est--------------------------
brad johnson (bgjo...@unix.amherst.edu) 'Disc, God, Country, Pork'
http://www.amherst.edu/~bgjohnso/ 'Chickens! No Cynics!'
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold
agrees with the beliefs and arguments of his protagonists. In fact, he's
stated publicly that it's an artist's job *not* to take political
stands, because they interfere with the craft of telling a good story.
So just because Avi thinks that the HEAP justifies the creation of a
data haven, don't assume that it actually does justify it, or that
Stephenson thinks it does -- he's simply telling you what *Avi* thinks,
and trusting you to make up your own mind about whether you agree (if
you even care to speculate about it).
Re: plausibility, my own question about a data haven is whether most
programmers would really be in favor of it, since it would seem to make
software piracy unstoppable. But probably the "coolness" of the Crypt
would attract enough tech people to get it off the ground.
-- M. Ruff
Tim May
jsa...@tenMAPSONeerf.edmonton.ab.ca (John Savard) wrote:
> thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote, in part:
>
> >Snow Crash is set in a Crypto-
> >Anarchic near-future world where democracy has
> >quietly expired thanks to the tax consequences of
> >untraceable digital money.
>
> For technical reasons, untraceable e-cash is awkward in any case.
> There is a low-tech form of truly untraceable cash; if we could just
> get governments to start minting gold coins again.
Canada mints gold coins. Mexico mints gold coins. South Africa mints gold
coins. Austria mints gold coins. China mints gold coins. The United States
even mints gold coins. Visit any coin store. Or any online store, e.g.,
http://www.numismaticproperties.com/main.htm#PRECIOUS METALS
And I'm referring to _current_ mintages, not past mintages. The U.S. coins
are called Gold Eagles, and are available in one ounce, half ounce,
quarter ounce, and tenth ounce sizes.
However, they are not any more spendable online, digitally, than paper
currency is.
This is what _digital_ cash is all about.
--Tim May
--
Y2K: "It's not the odds...it's the stakes." (unknown)
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
thomaspa...@yahoo.com
jsa...@tenMAPSONeerf.edmonton.ab.ca (John Savard) wrote:
> thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote, in part:
>
> >Anarchic near-future world where democracy has
> >quietly expired thanks to the tax consequences of
> >untraceable digital money.
>
>
I would love it if there really were serious technological barriers to
untraceable ecash, but I don't believe there are. Chaum's original
one-time-blind protocol was clunky (inefficient algorithm, transactions
took a long time to procss), but Stefan Brands recently devised an
elegant workaround that solves most of the original issues. Digicash
may have been in the process of incorporating Brands's ideas into their
technology before they went under. (There is good discussion of these
topics on J. Orlen Grabbe's pages. Math-intensive though.) In any case,
as the world's networks upgrade to speedy fiber and other high-bandwidth
media, clunky protocols will become less of a bottleneck.
A more serious problem is key theft, in my opinion. (Steal or break a
bank's cryptkey, and you can mint unlimited amounts of anonymous ecash
until the key expire.) However, with appropriate security precautions
this problem could be overcome, especially in light of the enormous
potential profits an anonymous clearance server (i.e. an
e-money-launderer) might make.
If you are aware of any other technological barriers, please share
them.
Otherwise, the only real barriers to anonymous ecash will be political -
and as the Cryptonomicon scenario rightly implies, political on a global
scale. Anonymous ecash in one country means anonymous ecash in every
country. After pondering the issue at length I've come to the
conclusion that it may well come down to sending in marines to smash
servers, someday down the line.
thomaspa...@yahoo.com
jsa...@tenMAPSONeerf.edmonton.ab.ca (John Savard) wrote:
> thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote, in part:
>
> Electronic eavesdropping on
> private conversations was not possible before there was electronics.
Ordinary people have more privacy than ever, if they only avail
themselves of the technology that's out there. This is a good thing,
and a fait accompli -- Clipper is dead. But I fear the next crypto
policy challenge may be something very like what Stephenson describes in
Cryptonomicon. And this would be very bad.
One of the primary aims of my post was to clear a confusion that seems
to permeate the cypherpunk community -- there is this belief that
anonymous money is somehow linked to private and free speech (though you
do not make this claim). Not so.
> Money was untraceable when it consisted of coins and bills.
As to this, some form of PHYSICAL anonymous currency may serve a useful
social function, though obviously it also facilitates crime. We could
probably all but eliminate financial crime (which encompasses virtually
all crime that are not crimes of passion -- fencing, drug dealing, money
laundering, everything done with a profit in mind) by having all
economic ransactions logged in some cetral database. But then again, we
might wind up with an entrenched dictatorship equipped with awesome
monitoring powers. So I say, keep paper cash.
However, electronic cash tilts the balance too far towards perfect
crimes and financial hooliganism. Imagine how much more the embezzlers
in the Russian Duma could have gotten away with if there were something
like the Crypt, which is so much more anonymous than Caribbean private
banking.
> And there was a time when the Second Ammendment was observed in the
> observance, not the breach.
When was this time?
Groups in positions of power are always better armed, and
have always done their utmost to keep arms out of the hands of the less
fortunate. Back in 1780, slaves didn't get to have guns. And in the
1960s, Black Panthers were thrown in jail for patrolling their
neighborhoods armed. Alas, where was the NRA then?
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold
>
> For technical reasons, untraceable e-cash is awkward in any case.
> get governments to start minting gold coins again.
Isn't all cash relatively untraceable? I don't see the advantage of gold
coins over paper money, and I can think of a number of disadvantages.
-- M. Ruff
Matthew Devney
Offhand I can think of a half-dozen disadvantages to paper money, the
biggest of which is that, without a solid government backing it, it's
worthless. I can only think of one disadvantage to gold money: its
weight. But that's such a minor thing, I doubt that's what you were
talking about.
So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to paper
currency?
--
Matthew Devney
Work probably won't kill you,
but why take chances?
Nancy Lebovitz
Matthew Devney <mde...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>Offhand I can think of a half-dozen disadvantages to paper money, the
>biggest of which is that, without a solid government backing it, it's
>worthless. I can only think of one disadvantage to gold money: its
>weight. But that's such a minor thing, I doubt that's what you were
>talking about.
>
>So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to paper
>currency?
The weight is a serious disadvantage for large transactions.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com
Calligraphic button catalogue available by email!
MA Lloyd
>Offhand I can think of a half-dozen disadvantages to paper money, the
>biggest of which is that, without a solid government backing it, it's
>worthless. I can only think of one disadvantage to gold money: its
>weight. But that's such a minor thing, I doubt that's what you were
>talking about.
>So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to paper
>currency?
If you mean in a physical sense, nothing. However if you mean in the
sense of value tied to the actual gold content, then that's the problem,
the value is tied to the actual gold content. Followed absolutely rigorously
banking is impossible, a bank can't loan out your money at interest
and still allow you the use of it, because it can't supply enough gold to
cover all the deposits; you can't control the relative value of your currency
on the international market against other currencies not based in the same
metal (every time something changes the commodity price of gold, your
currency changes value and there is nothing you can do, this one was the
main consideration for the US dropping the gold standard) and the total
value of your currency in circulation is limited by your supply of gold -
should your economy suddenly expand, you suffer serious deflation (which
sounds nice until you notice what it means for investors and the way it
causes international investors to avoid your market). While you can get
around all of those problems by only partly backing your currency, that
takes you right back to the value of your currency not being backed by
anything physical. There's also the difficulty you have holding on to
the gold, negative trade balances mean you export gold, which reduces
your supply and puts you back in that deflationary spiral (this one, mostly
in silver, was a major factor in several ancient world economic crises).
--
-- MA Lloyd (mall...@io.com)
Nancy Lebovitz
>
>If you mean in a physical sense, nothing. However if you mean in the
>sense of value tied to the actual gold content, then that's the problem,
>the value is tied to the actual gold content. Followed absolutely rigorously
>banking is impossible, a bank can't loan out your money at interest
>and still allow you the use of it, because it can't supply enough gold to
>cover all the deposits; you can't control the relative value of your currency
>on the international market against other currencies not based in the same
>metal (every time something changes the commodity price of gold, your
>currency changes value and there is nothing you can do, this one was the
>main consideration for the US dropping the gold standard) and the total
>value of your currency in circulation is limited by your supply of gold -
>should your economy suddenly expand, you suffer serious deflation (which
>sounds nice until you notice what it means for investors and the way it
>causes international investors to avoid your market). While you can get
The supply of gold isn't totally fixed--if gold becomes a lot more valuable,
people take it out of storage, melt jewelry, and mine less accessible sources.
>around all of those problems by only partly backing your currency, that
>takes you right back to the value of your currency not being backed by
>anything physical. There's also the difficulty you have holding on to
>the gold, negative trade balances mean you export gold, which reduces
>your supply and puts you back in that deflationary spiral (this one, mostly
>in silver, was a major factor in several ancient world economic crises).
>
--
David Friedman
>However if you mean in the
> sense of value tied to the actual gold content, then that's the problem,
> the value is tied to the actual gold content. Followed absolutely rigorously
> banking is impossible, a bank can't loan out your money at interest
> and still allow you the use of it, because it can't supply enough gold to
> cover all the deposits;
Or in other words, one cost of a commodity money is that an amount of the
commodity equal to the money supply is actually tied up--unlike a
fractional reserve or fiat money. That doesn't make banking impossible, it
just means that banks have to borrow from one person the money they loan
to another--which, of course, they do now.
>you can't control the relative value of your currency
> on the international market against other currencies not based in the same
> metal (every time something changes the commodity price of gold,
You can't control the value of your money relative to more than one other
money anyway, if the other moneys move independently. But why would you
want to be able to control the value of your money relative to multiple
other currencies?
> your
> currency changes value and there is nothing you can do,
But given what governments have done when able to control the value of
their (fiat) currencies, that might be seen as a feature, not a bug. Your
"you" seems to conflate the user of the money with the issuer. They are
generally different people with different interests.
> and the total
> value of your currency in circulation is limited by your supply of gold -
> should your economy suddenly expand, you suffer serious deflation
If you think about those two statements, you should see that they are
inconsistent--deflation means that the purchasing power of gold is going
up, which means that the value of the currency in circulation is going up.
Consider the case of a single isolated economy on the gold standard. There
is no limit to the value of the currency in circulation, just to the
number of ounces--if the demand for real money balances goes up, so does
the real value of gold. So the problem is not value of currency in
circulation, it is that prices are affected by the demand for money
balances. The question is whether this (plus the effect of supply changes)
leads to more or less instabilty than the factors affecting fiat money.
Comparing the record of the nineteenth century to that of the twentieth,
the answer seems to be that fiat money is much less stable than gold, not
more.
>(which
> sounds nice until you notice what it means for investors and the way it
> causes international investors to avoid your market).
I don't follow that one at all.
>There's also the difficulty you have holding on to
> the gold, negative trade balances mean you export gold, which reduces
> your supply and puts you back in that deflationary spiral
There is no "spiral" since the specie flow mechanism doesn't have positive
feedback. What you are describing is the mechanism by which relative price
levels across gold standard countries are maintained roughly constant.
> (this one, mostly
> in silver, was a major factor in several ancient world economic crises).
Could you be more specific? I don't find that historians, at least in the
past, are very reliable on economics--witness the "the dark ages were poor
because all the money was sucked out of Europe" argument, which makes very
little economic sense.
--
David Friedman
www.best.com/~ddfr/
Tom Knight
Brad Johnson wrote:
> I'd be surprised if most of the attitudes expressed in Cryptonomicon
> aren't Stephenson. Check out this earlier bit of fiction by Neal, from
> Time in 1995:
>
I'd still say that there's nothing in Cryptonomicon that seems to favor the pro
encryption attitude. I wouldn't be too surprised if Stephenson himself was pro
encryption, but the book definitely never reads like it's trying to put a point
across. As I said, he's far too clever for that.
Red Elf
>>currency?
>
Well, you could substitute other precious metals or gems even... Of course,
not many ppl today use cash for large transactions anyway; mostly it's just
credit or checks....
It would be a bother, however, to have to weigh your gold every time you
wanted to buy something... otherwise, ppl could shave bits off like they
used to in the middle ages.
Just MHO.
--
Red Elf
red...@3-cities.com
http://www.3-cities.com/~redelf/
Nancy Lebovitz
Red Elf <red...@3-cities.com> wrote:
>>>So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to paper
>>>currency?
>>
>>The weight is a serious disadvantage for large transactions.
>
>Well, you could substitute other precious metals or gems even... Of course,
Natural gems (that is, the valuable ones) have too many subtle variations
to be used as currency.
>not many ppl today use cash for large transactions anyway; mostly it's just
>credit or checks....
Wouldn't that have a lot of the same problems as paper currency?
>
>It would be a bother, however, to have to weigh your gold every time you
>wanted to buy something... otherwise, ppl could shave bits off like they
>used to in the middle ages.
That's why a lot of coins have ridged edges and/or a raised rim--shaving
and wear become more noticable.
David G. Bell
mde...@earthlink.net "Matthew Devney" writes:
> Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold wrote:
> >
> > John Savard wrote:
> > >
> > > For technical reasons, untraceable e-cash is awkward in any case.
> > > There is a low-tech form of truly untraceable cash; if we could just
> > > get governments to start minting gold coins again.
> >
> > Isn't all cash relatively untraceable? I don't see the advantage of gold
> > coins over paper money, and I can think of a number of disadvantages.
> >
> > -- M. Ruff
>
> Offhand I can think of a half-dozen disadvantages to paper money, the
> biggest of which is that, without a solid government backing it, it's
> worthless. I can only think of one disadvantage to gold money: its
> weight. But that's such a minor thing, I doubt that's what you were
> talking about.
>
> So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to paper
> currency?
How much does the value of gold currency (or silver) depend on people
thinking it is valuable?
It's not so long ago that computer RAM chips were being used as a medium
of exchange.
--
David G. Bell -- Farmer, SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
JSwing
>In article <37DBA4...@earthlink.net>
<snip debate of gold vs paper>
>
>How much does the value of gold currency (or silver) depend on people
>thinking it is valuable?
>
>It's not so long ago that computer RAM chips were being used as a medium
>of exchange.
>
Correct me if I'm wrong, but human societies have used a great variety of
materials for currency. Precious metals, feathers, beads, shells, just about
anything that a sufficiently large group of people could agree on to use.
I think the requirement for any physical currency is
1) That it is rare enough to make small amounts meaningful
2) It's not too rare, so that there is enough to use for the economy
3) It's not so easily duplicated that everyone will simply make their own
4) Something that won't physically decay very easilly or rapidly
Gold fits all of those requirements, but using natural resources like gold or
copper isn't IMO a good idea. Society can probably make better use of the
materials in industrial or technological applications rather than as currency.
JSwing
Matthew Devney
>
> > So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to paper
> > currency?
>
> thinking it is valuable?
>
as money -- it's a metal, and can be used to make things. Fiat money
would have no worth whatever were it not for government backing.
> It's not so long ago that computer RAM chips were being used as a medium
> of exchange.
>
Only by morons.
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold
>
> Offhand I can think of a half-dozen disadvantages to paper money, the
> biggest of which is that, without a solid government backing it, it's
> worthless.
You mean that paper money is not intrinsically valuable -- *somebody*
has to issue it and guarantee it, though not necessarily a government. I
don't consider this a major drawback. If the world situation gets so bad
that I can't find even *one* stable currency somewhere in the global
marketplace, I figure I'm pretty screwed anyway.
> I can only think of one disadvantage to gold money: its
> weight. But that's such a minor thing, I doubt that's what you were
> talking about.
>
> So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to
> paper currency?
The disadvantages I can see have to do mainly with convenience, or the
lack thereof. Gold *is* heavy, not a minor point if you plan to make a
large transaction. Because gold is intrisically valuable, its face value
can become meaningless fairly quickly. If a cashier has to weigh my
money to make sure I haven't been shaving off bits, and then check the
spot price of gold to verify what the coin is really worth, that strikes
me as a major disadvantage. There's also the problem of what you use for
small change -- even the tiniest gold coins are going to have a fairly
high value. I don't think I want a $25 coin that weighs a tenth of an
ounce and can slip through a hole in my pocket without my feeling it,
especially if people keep saying, "do you have anything smaller than
that?"
-- M. Ruff
jsa...@ecn.ab.ca
: After pondering the issue at length I've come to the
: conclusion that it may well come down to sending in marines to smash
: servers, someday down the line.
That would be in violation of the UN Charter.
However, cutting off some country's Internet access, or making it
difficult for the depositors of that country's banks to make withdrawals,
are responses that seem perfectly within the capacity of the U.S..
John Savard
Nancy Lebovitz
JSwing <JSw...@NOSPAMWport.com> wrote:
>
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but human societies have used a great variety of
>materials for currency. Precious metals, feathers, beads, shells, just about
>anything that a sufficiently large group of people could agree on to use.
>
>I think the requirement for any physical currency is
>1) That it is rare enough to make small amounts meaningful
>2) It's not too rare, so that there is enough to use for the economy
>3) It's not so easily duplicated that everyone will simply make their own
>4) Something that won't physically decay very easilly or rapidly
5) It's homogeneous and divisible.
>
>Gold fits all of those requirements, but using natural resources like gold or
>copper isn't IMO a good idea. Society can probably make better use of the
>materials in industrial or technological applications rather than as currency.
>
Jordan S. Bassior
>thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote:
>: After pondering the issue at length I've come to the
>: conclusion that it may well come down to sending in marines to smash
>: servers, someday down the line.
>
>That would be in violation of the UN Charter.
Depends what the other country was doing. If it was knowingly aiding and
abetting criminals in other countries, this might count as a just cause to wage
war, and hence the country which invaded might be seen as doing so in
self-defense.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
"Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; but he is halfway between an ape and
a god and he is travelling in the right direction." (Dean William R. Inge)
mi...@okcforum.org
: hmmm, getting back to the notion of paper money being untraceable, what
: about the serial numbers? they are always written down when money is stored
: or transferred in large sums.
: one of the many reasons for having serial numbers isn't it?
It appears probable that you're thinking of the 1920s/1930s
mystery novel in which the baddie is caught because he spent
a five-pound note, serial number ZYX98765432, which was issued
by Teller number Three at the Eastminster and Mumble Bank
yesterday at 11:15 A.M.
I venture to suggest that this no longer is the case, if
indeed it ever was, for "small" bills -- say, 100 pounds
or USD 100 and under. ICBW, of course. Bank-teller types?
--
Mike Andrews
Tired old sysadmin
mi...@okcforum.org
Terry Austin
mi...@okcforum.org wrote in message <0IeD3.238$k64...@news.flash.net>...
from the Federal Reserve. Once a bill has been in circulation,
and the numbers of a stack of bills are no longer sequential,
it becomes essentially impossible to track them except
under very special circumstances. The technology exists
for banks to scan and OCR them automatically as part of
a bill counting machine, but the amount of storage space
it would take to actually track it would be staggering.
Terry Austin
Red Elf
>to be used as currency.
Well, duh! That's why we use the synthetic ones! Gee whiz....*
>Wouldn't that have a lot of the same problems as paper currency?
Obvously not.*
>That's why a lot of coins have ridged edges and/or a raised rim--shaving
>and wear become more noticable.
Actually, you're wrong. Coins are always featureless and smooth.*
*Note: Each asterisk identifies a statement to prevent me from possibly
being proved
incorrect on any particular subject.
jeff wiel
: In article <gbXC3.3916$JG2....@newsfeed.slurp.net>,
Could calligraphic buttons be used as a medium of exchange?
: Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com
Phil Fraering
>I think that in the slave-holding states, there were competent militias,
>intended to apprehend runaway slaves and suppress slave revolts. Hmm...
>this throws a drear light on the connection between an armed populace and
>liberty.
>Chris Henrich
So you're saying the militias were incompetent everywhere except where
it suits your argument for them to be bad if they're competent?
--
Phil Fraering "My name... is Amiga Montoya.
p...@globalreach.net You killed my computer.
/Will work for tape/ prepare to die!"
Goobs.
about the serial numbers? they are always written down when money is stored
or transferred in large sums.
one of the many reasons for having serial numbers isn't it?
peace, love and a pc named gertrude,
goobs
Nancy Lebovitz
>Nancy Lebovitz (na...@unix3.netaxs.com) wrote:
>: In article <gbXC3.3916$JG2....@newsfeed.slurp.net>,
>: JSwing <JSw...@NOSPAMWport.com> wrote:
>: >
>: >Correct me if I'm wrong, but human societies have used a great variety of
>: >materials for currency. Precious metals, feathers, beads, shells, just about
>: >anything that a sufficiently large group of people could agree on to use.
>: >
>: >I think the requirement for any physical currency is
>: >1) That it is rare enough to make small amounts meaningful
>: >2) It's not too rare, so that there is enough to use for the economy
>: >3) It's not so easily duplicated that everyone will simply make their own
>: >4) Something that won't physically decay very easilly or rapidly
>
>: 5) It's homogeneous and divisible.
>: >
>: >Gold fits all of those requirements, but using natural resources like gold or
>: >copper isn't IMO a good idea. Society can probably make better use of the
>: >materials in industrial or technological applications rather than as currency.
>
--
James Lownie
> However, cutting off some country's Internet access, or making it
> difficult for the depositors of that country's banks to make withdrawals,
> are responses that seem perfectly within the capacity of the U.S..
You could make things difficult for American depositors to make withdrawals,
but how can America cut off a country's internet access (without invading
it)?
James
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
jw...@world.std.com (jeff wiel) spake:
>Could calligraphic buttons be used as a medium of exchange?
No, but Button Men could be: <http://www.cheapass.com/butnftrs.html>
-- <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
Ian
>> And there was a time when the Second Ammendment was observed in the
>> observance, not the breach.
>
>When was this time?
>
>Groups in positions of power are always better armed, and
>have always done their utmost to keep arms out of the hands of the less
>fortunate. Back in 1780, slaves didn't get to have guns. And in the
>1960s, Black Panthers were thrown in jail for patrolling their
>neighborhoods armed. Alas, where was the NRA then?
Not to mention that really widespread gun ownership in the USA didn't occur
until after the Civil War. Prior to that point, guns were very expensive
items and rather rarer. It's also amusing to note that the citizen
militias were legendary for their incompetence, lack of preparedness, and
general absence of equipment.
Ian
>I think you are making a mistake in assuming that Stephenson necessarily
>agrees with the beliefs and arguments of his protagonists. In fact, he's
>stated publicly that it's an artist's job *not* to take political
>stands, because they interfere with the craft of telling a good story.
Yet he IS an advocate of various "crypto-anarchy" sorts of idea, as you can
read in bunches of his stuff. The general thrust of his books DOES seem to
be the sort of future he advocates.
Ian
> The second "good" reason Stephenson's Randy
>has for building The Crypt is that the
>introduction of a secure anonymous digital
>currency backed by pilfered World War II gold
>would help Asia recover from its recent economic
>woes:
Good grief. I want to ask "can he really be that dumb?", but I read part
of his operating systems screed on the net, so I already know the answer.
(FYI, he has a big essay on the net on computers and operating systems. A
big part of it is a standard OS Holy War screed that I can paraphrase as
"why oh why do people buy operating systems like Windows, instead of free
and powerful operating systems like Linux that have poor software support,
often-spotty hardware support, and interfaces that most of them find really
hard to learn to use?")
>"... the gold was stolen from all of Asia by the
>Nipponese, who intended to use it as a backing
>for a currency that would become the legal tender
>of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,
>and... while it goes without saying that these
>particular Nips were among the most egregious
>buttheads in planetary history, some aspects of
>their plan weren't such a shitty idea.... to the
>extent life still sucks for many Asians, things
>would get a lot better... if the continent's
>economy could get jerked into the twenty-first,
>or at least the twentieth, century and hopefully
>stay there for a while instead of collapsing
>whenever some dictator's-nephew-in-charge-of-a-
>central-bank loses control of his sphincters and
>wipes out a major currency. So maybe stabilizing
>the currency situation would be a good thing to
>accomplish with a shitload of gold, and that's
>the only moral thing to do with it anyway..."
>(p.817)
Good god. That is... ludicrous. Wrong in soooo many ways I hardly know
where to begin. Asia, not in the twentieth century? This IS the region
that everybody was afraid would come to dominate the world ten years ago,
home of the second wealthiest nation on Earth, and so on and so forth?
Whose economy, far from periodically collapsing, was mostly in a period of
incredible growth for decades on end until a few years ago? Whose current
problems are based in fundamental economic policy issues that have
essentially nothing to do with problems maintaining stable currencies? I
could go on, but you get the point... that passage was extremely efficient
in terms of numbers of errors packed in relative to word count.
> The locker-room language is amusing, but the
>logic here is awfully vague.
>
> First of all, the Holocaust loot recently
>discovered in Swiss banks suggests at least one
>other moral thing to do with the gold -- give it
>back to the victims' families, before they sue.
(Note that the lost gold from Swiss banks wouldn't make a blip in the
economy of Asia, there was not all THAT much of it).
> That problem aside, Stephenson seems to be
>asserting that currencies crash when central
>bankers crack under the stress of debt
>obligations and print too much money. This
>reverses cause and effect. A central bank that
>can't make interest payments to its creditors
>must print money or shut down, and the latter is
>hardly an option. Currencies devalue when
>countries borrow too much money in the first
>place; they stabilize when bankers start making
>sound loans, and borrowers start paying them
>back.
Not to mention that this has essentially nothing to do with Asia's current
economic woes. Last I checked, they weren't suffering hyperinflation as an
effect, let alone a cause.
> Hard money, whether backed by gold or a
>monetarist central bank, isn't necessarily
>healthy -- for example, when businesses really
>need money to fund productive activity, but can't
>afford the high interest rates that sometimes
>result from a static money supply. But even if
>hard money were a panacea, the world already has
>plenty of them. It's unclear how the existence
>of gold-backed e-cash would stabilize Southeast
>Asia more effectively than U.S. Dollars or Euros
>-- unless, somehow, The Crypt's lending
>department is better than its First World
>competitors at directing investment productively.
In fact, bank lending was a substantial problem in Japan - but because
domestic banks were too ready to lend money, not because there wasn't
enough to go around.
> But Stephenson doesn't give any reason why
>this should be, nor does he offer any other
>sensible explanation. As Randy complains, "I
>know currency fluctuations are important.... But
>my god, it's so tedious I just want to run away"
>(p. 563). Apparently the author shares his
>protagonist's feelings -- the banker's art of
>assigning realistic risk to loans is too boring
>to think about. This leaves us with half-baked
>economics as the other "good" reason to implement
>Crypto-Anarchy.
Get used to it. When dealing with anarchists of any stripe (crypto and
otherwhise), you will frequently encounter voodoo economics of truly
bizarre sorts.
> If I seem bitter, it's because I am.
>
> I used to love Neal Stephenson. Back when I
>was a boy, and the world was a big scary place,
>his novel Snow Crash put everything in
>perspective. Snow Crash is set in a Crypto-
>Anarchic near-future world where democracy has
>quietly expired thanks to the tax consequences of
>untraceable digital money.
Except that this is another near-impossibility, as Larry was quick to
inform me. (Larry is the greatest economics professor in the universe, who
specializes in computer-related stuff). Governments have plenty of ways to
tax your money, even if transactions occur with "untraceable e-cash".
There are many ways this could be done, but the more obvious are
transaction or sales taxes. The government could just tax off a small
portion of any e-cash transaction without stopping to enquire whose money
it is. It could do the same thing as modern governments, and require that
anybody who is selling stuff collect a sales tax for the government,
regardless of who is buying it or what they are paying. A really extreme
version of the system might make income tax really easy to cheat on, but it
takes a lot of short-sightedness to think that this leaves governments
without means of collecting revenue. Even if you aren't acquainted with
sales taxes, property taxes, and their ilk, a simple bit of historical
knowledge helps. Income tax wasn't widely used until World War I - yet
governments didn't collapse for lack of revenue before that.
Of course, such a system would probably be rather less popular and
equitable than income taxes. Which would tend to generate strong public
support for restricting e-cash so that it isn't quite so untraceable. And
when you are talking about fundamental aspects of a national economy and
tax base, and issues that will be very important to the individual citizens
as well, there is one thing you will NOT see. And that is the people and
the government saying "Oh gee whiz, it's hard to keep up with this new
system, guess we have no choice but to give in and fly wherever the wind
happens to blow us".
>Life is exciting but
>dangerous, and there are lots of mean people
>running around. Roughly like the real world, in
>other words.
>
> The one issue Snow Crash never addressed was,
>why didn't the world's liberal democracies do
>something about the deteriorating law-enforcement
>and tax situation before they died? I sort of
>assumed that greedy corporations had engineered
>the whole thing.
>
> But along comes Cryptonomicon, showing how
>untraceable e-cash gets put into place in a world
>recognizably ours, by idealistic technophiles
>like myself, working alongside drug lords and
>dictators. They had to do it, because... well,
>something or other.
>
> Though libertarian agit-prop, Cryptonomicon
>isn't Birth of a Nation or The Turner Diaries.
>There is good mixed with the bad -- like,
>Stephenson obviously detests racists. But the
>book makes an emotional appeal for Crypto-Anarchy
>without adequately exploring core issues,
>fostering the smug illusion of understanding
>where a more thoughtful job might have stimulated
>intelligent discourse. Stephenson needs to look
>at Crypto-Anarchy more critically if he really
>wants to shed light on the future of Internet
>cash.
Gurripato
(Ian) wrote:
>thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>Not to mention that really widespread gun ownership in the USA didn't occur
>until after the Civil War. Prior to that point, guns were very expensive
>items and rather rarer. It's also amusing to note that the citizen
>militias were legendary for their incompetence, lack of preparedness, and
>general absence of equipment.
Which is probably the reason why the US abandoned the gun
amendmentę first words ("A free militia being necessary for...") and
built a regular army instead. I would like to see the contributions
made by the "citizen militias" to US security in the past hundred
years, beside the "keep-america-free" hype.
Nancy Lebovitz
cut off a country's internet access as a joke. I can ask for details
if people are interested.
Thomas
Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
> In article <37DDC147...@hotmail.com>,
> James Lownie <jlo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >jsa...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> >
> >> However, cutting off some country's Internet access, or making it
> >> difficult for the depositors of that country's banks to make withdrawals,
> >> are responses that seem perfectly within the capacity of the U.S..
> >
> >You could make things difficult for American depositors to make withdrawals,
> >but how can America cut off a country's internet access (without invading
> >it)?
> >
> I've heard from a reliable source that some individual has already
> cut off a country's internet access as a joke. I can ask for details
> if people are interested.
You can cut of internet acces but it requires direct intervention.
You have to cut cables or sabotage key servers. And if you
are willing to do that you might as well go directly for the black
banks you want to nail.
John Savard
>And
>when you are talking about fundamental aspects of a national economy and
>tax base, and issues that will be very important to the individual citizens
>as well, there is one thing you will NOT see. And that is the people and
>the government saying "Oh gee whiz, it's hard to keep up with this new
>system, guess we have no choice but to give in and fly wherever the wind
>happens to blow us".
There are those who believe we are already seeing this right now,
which is why we aren't seeing a vast grassroots political movement
saying "This globalization stuff is putting money in the pockets of
the rich; we've got to ban cheap overseas imports, and return to the
good old days when unions were strong and TV sets and cars were made
in America (or Canada, as the case may be)".
John Savard ( teneerf<- )
http://www.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/crypto.htm
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
>> >You could make things difficult for American depositors to make withdrawals,
>> >but how can America cut off a country's internet access (without invading
>> >it)?
>> >
>> I've heard from a reliable source that some individual has already
>> cut off a country's internet access as a joke. I can ask for details
>> if people are interested.
Yes please.
> You can cut of internet acces but it requires direct intervention.
> You have to cut cables or sabotage key servers. And if you
> are willing to do that you might as well go directly for the black
> banks you want to nail.
Not necessarily. An international cable is (by definition) long, and will
never be guarded along most of its length. Any particular machine room can
be guarded. Not that the US can't cruise-missile anything in chooses, but
you can locate things so that this is requires a military strike into your
capital city. Which obviates the point of "cryptological warfare".
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
John Savard
>Followed absolutely rigorously
>banking is impossible, a bank can't loan out your money at interest
>and still allow you the use of it, because it can't supply enough gold to
>cover all the deposits;
That is an objection to any and all national currencies as well. A
bank lending U.S. dollars doesn't have enough U.S. dollars, as printed
by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, to lend out either.
This is solved by the legal requirement that banks get collateral on
their loans; they are responsible for the money they create. Precisely
the same would apply if gold, rather than the paper money of some
government, was the fundamental unit of value. And before World War I,
the two were essentially the same for most of the world's richer
countries.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
(Gurripato) wrote:
> Which is probably the reason why the US abandoned the gun
>amendmentę first words ("A free militia being necessary for...")
That's "A well-regulated militia..." Not "free."
--
The Misenchanted Page: http://www.sff.net/people/LWE/ Last update 7/24/99
Alan Gore
>However, electronic cash tilts the balance too far towards perfect
>crimes and financial hooliganism. Imagine how much more the embezzlers
>in the Russian Duma could have gotten away with if there were something
>like the Crypt, which is so much more anonymous than Caribbean private
>banking.
Universal wiretaping? Marines invading foreign countries for
"economic" crimes? Humbug! I would consider those futures a lot more
baleful than the idea of Russian mosters hiding cash in the Caribbean.
Encrypted cash makes centralized government as obsolete as the divine
right of kings.
ag...@primenet.com | "Giving money and power to the government
Alan Gore | is like giving whiskey and car keys
Software For PC's | to teenaged boys" - P. J. O'Rourke
http://www.alangore.com
Ulf Mƶller
>Good god. That is... ludicrous.
And Lawrence Waterhouse's theories about sex are ludircous. Right?
Hey, it's a novel!
Thant Tessman
Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 1999 07:34:03 GMT, aqui...@goliat.ugrx.es_x=NOSPAM
> (Gurripato) wrote:
>
> > Which is probably the reason why the US abandoned the gun
> >amendmentę first words ("A free militia being necessary for...")
>
> That's "A well-regulated militia..." Not "free."
At the time the Constitution was written, "well-regulated" meant "smoothly
functioning." The modern tendency to interpret the phrase as implying some
sort of government regulation is totally fallacious--as anyone who bothers to
crack open the Oxford Unabridged English Dictionary can confirm for
themselves.
More of the same paragraph by Gurripato:
> Which is probably the reason why the US abandoned the gun
> amendmentę first words ("A free militia being necessary for...") and
> built a regular army instead.
They didn't build a regular army *instead* of a militia. This is completely
backwards. The founders almost decided that a professional standing army in
times of peace would be too dangerous to "the security of a free state," but
eventually decided that a well-trained, smoothly-functioning militia would
keep that danger in check--hence the Second Amendment.
-thant
Thant Tessman
Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
> In article <gbXC3.3916$JG2....@newsfeed.slurp.net>,
> JSwing <JSw...@NOSPAMWport.com> wrote:
> >
> >Correct me if I'm wrong, but human societies have used a great variety of
> >materials for currency. Precious metals, feathers, beads, shells, just about
> >anything that a sufficiently large group of people could agree on to use.
> >
> >I think the requirement for any physical currency is
> >1) That it is rare enough to make small amounts meaningful
> >2) It's not too rare, so that there is enough to use for the economy
> >3) It's not so easily duplicated that everyone will simply make their own
> >4) Something that won't physically decay very easilly or rapidly
>
> 5) It's homogeneous and divisible.
While all this influences what will be used as money, it is not the defining
characteristic of money.
Money is any commodity which is used to facilitate indirect exchange. In other
words, money is anything you accept in payment, not because you want to consume it,
but because you expect to be able to exchange it for something else that you DO
want to consume.
Dollars used to be gold. Bank notes--what we now call dollars--were receipts for
the actual dollars being stored in a bank. But the banks and the government found
the use of gold as money to be too...um...too restrictive. First, it interfered
with banks' ability to lend out more money than they actually had. (Don't we all
wish we could do this?) And second, it interfered with the government's ability to
borrow more money than people were actually willing to lend it. (Don't we all wish
we could do this?) The gradual process of moving to fiat currency 'fixed' all that.
Nowdays, dollars are money not because they are backed by anything, but because
there is a reliable market for them. People sometimes argue that the reason there's
a market for them is that there's a market for them--that is, they argue the value
of dollars is solely a matter of convention. This is not true. Dollars nowdays
ultimately derive their value from the fact that they are required for the payment
of taxes. Were taxes eliminated, or dollars no longer accepted as payment for
taxes, the value of the dollar would eventually collapse. (Of course, neither of
these scenarios is likely any time soon.)
-thant
Tom Knight
Ian wrote:
Yes, Stephenson is an advocate of that kind of thing, and yes, that kind of
thing does turn up a lot in his books. I'd still say that he never seems to be
trying to influence opinions. None of the characters in his books can be seen
as heroic mouthpieces.
John Savard
>jsa...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>> However, cutting off some country's Internet access, or making it
>> difficult for the depositors of that country's banks to make withdrawals,
>> are responses that seem perfectly within the capacity of the U.S..
>You could make things difficult for American depositors to make withdrawals,
>but how can America cut off a country's internet access (without invading
>it)?
Well, the U.S. already pressured a university in Austria into closing
down Iran's only Internet link with the outside world.
Thant Tessman
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold wrote:
> Matthew Devney wrote:
> >
[...]
>
> > So tell me, what are the disadvantages to gold money as opposed to
> > paper currency?
>
> The disadvantages I can see have to do mainly with convenience, or the
> lack thereof. Gold *is* heavy, not a minor point if you plan to make a
> large transaction.
...which is why people tended not to trade gold directly, but instead tended
to trade receipts for gold on deposit at the bank. This is, in fact, what
"paper currency" used to be.
> Because gold is intrisically valuable, its face value
> can become meaningless fairly quickly.
Face value in terms of what? A dollar used to be DEFINED as 1/20th of an
ounce of gold. It wasn't 'set' at 1/20th, it WAS 1/20th. The idea of
'setting' the value of the dollar used to be just as silly as the idea of
'setting' the value of a dozen at 12.
It was only when the banks got in trouble for printing more gold receipts
(bank notes) than they actually had gold to back does the idea that a paper
dollar being worth less than the gold it denotes come into play. But banks
are very politically powerful. So instead of getting in trouble for fraud,
the banks merely got the government to make it legal. The practice came to
be referred to as "fractional-reserve banking." Of course, instead of fixing
things, it actually made things worse, as our history of economic
depressions attests to. It got so bad that in 1933 (?) banks were absolved
of the responsibility of redeeming bank notes for anyone but other banks and
foreign governments. In other words, the banks confiscated everyone's gold
through government edict. It was actually illegal for citizens to own gold.
Eventually (in 1971) the banks were even absolved of the responsibility to
redeem notes at all. The stagflation of the '70s was the result. But I
digress.
> If a cashier has to weigh my
> money to make sure I haven't been shaving off bits, and then check the
> spot price of gold to verify what the coin is really worth, that strikes
> me as a major disadvantage.
This is why Sir Isaac Newton invented the mill-edged coin. Take a look at
the edge of a dime or quarter.
> There's also the problem of what you use for
> small change -- even the tiniest gold coins are going to have a fairly
> high value. I don't think I want a $25 coin that weighs a tenth of an
> ounce and can slip through a hole in my pocket without my feeling it,
> especially if people keep saying, "do you have anything smaller than
> that?"
This is why dimes and quarters were (until very recently) made of silver.
And nickels used to be made of (surprise) nickel, and pennies made of
copper. The fact that this is so unimaginable now attests to how much the
government and banks have stolen from people through inflation of the money
supply.
Trying to fix the value of one metal in terms of another does have problems,
but these problems are minor compared to those caused by fiat currency.
Coins weren't valuable because of the symbols on them. Rather, the symbols
on them were supposed to certify that the coin was made of a certain amount
of metal at a certain purity. This is what was meant in the Constitution
when the Congress was given the power to coin money and regulate the value
thereof.
-thant
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
>Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 14 Sep 1999 07:34:03 GMT, aqui...@goliat.ugrx.es_x=NOSPAM
>> (Gurripato) wrote:
>>
>> > Which is probably the reason why the US abandoned the gun
>> >amendmentę first words ("A free militia being necessary for...")
>>
>> That's "A well-regulated militia..." Not "free."
>
>At the time the Constitution was written, "well-regulated" meant "smoothly
>functioning."
So what? I was correcting the misquotation, not arguing with him.
*plonk*
Aaron Bergman
>On Tue, 14 Sep 1999 09:40:30 -0600, Thant Tessman <th...@acm.org>
>wrote:
>>
>>functioning."
>
>So what? I was correcting the misquotation, not arguing with him.
>*plonk*
Don't be too harsh. It's a spinal column reflex, after all.
Aaron
--
Aaron Bergman
<http://www.princeton.edu/~abergman/>
Thant Tessman
Aaron Bergman wrote:
> In article <FKbeN=IubA1dJW68G...@4ax.com>, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
> >On Tue, 14 Sep 1999 09:40:30 -0600, Thant Tessman <th...@acm.org>
> >wrote:
> >>
> >>At the time the Constitution was written, "well-regulated" meant "smoothly
> >>functioning."
> >
> >So what? I was correcting the misquotation, not arguing with him.
> >*plonk*
>
> Don't be too harsh. It's a spinal column reflex, after all.
My apologies for the overreaction. I've been reading too much total nonsense in
the papers lately.
-thant
John Schilling
>In article <937163...@zhochaka.demon.co.uk>, db...@zhochaka.demon.co.uk wrote:
>>In article <37DBA4...@earthlink.net>
><snip debate of gold vs paper>
>>How much does the value of gold currency (or silver) depend on people
>>thinking it is valuable?
>>It's not so long ago that computer RAM chips were being used as a medium
>>of exchange.
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but human societies have used a great variety of
>materials for currency. Precious metals, feathers, beads, shells, just about
>anything that a sufficiently large group of people could agree on to use.
>I think the requirement for any physical currency is
>1) That it is rare enough to make small amounts meaningful
>2) It's not too rare, so that there is enough to use for the economy
>3) It's not so easily duplicated that everyone will simply make their own
>4) Something that won't physically decay very easilly or rapidly
5) Supply can reasonably be expected to increase in proportion to economic
growth in general.
>Gold fits all of those requirements, but using natural resources like gold or
>copper isn't IMO a good idea. Society can probably make better use of the
>materials in industrial or technological applications rather than as currency.
Gold doesn't do so well on #5. Whether or not someone opens a new gold mine
is only weakly dependant on whether or not there is lots of new stuff to buy
with gold.
Silver actually works somewhat better. Silver is used in a wider range of
industrial activities, and is produced as a by-product of a wider range of
other mining/extraction activities, than gold. You almost can't help but
get increased silver production in a general economic expansion.
Same with the platinum-group elements, and alloy standards help buffer
against fluctuations in individual commodity prices.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Paul Rubin
>The technology exists for banks to scan and OCR them [currency serial
>#'s] automatically as part of a bill counting machine, but the amount
>of storage space it would take to actually track it would be
>staggering.
Why do you say staggering? How much storage space are we talking
about? How much would that much storage cost at the local computer
store, say at $1.00 per 680 MB (blank CD-R media)? I have my own
estimates of these numbers but maybe yours are different than mine.
Thant Tessman
John Schilling wrote:
> JSw...@NOSPAMWport.com (JSwing) writes:
>
>
> >I think the requirement for any physical currency is
> >1) That it is rare enough to make small amounts meaningful
> >2) It's not too rare, so that there is enough to use for the economy
> >3) It's not so easily duplicated that everyone will simply make their own
> >4) Something that won't physically decay very easilly or rapidly
>
> 5) Supply can reasonably be expected to increase in proportion to economic
> growth in general.
Why is it a bad thing if the money supply doesn't expand in proportion to economic
activity? It just means that prices will fall. This isn't an inherently bad thing. Yes
falling prices and wages are endemic to economic depressions, but this is a result of
misallocated resources, not the cause. There's nothing wrong with falling prices when
they are a true reflection of increases in the efficiency of economic production.
(Yes I know this goes against mainstream economics, but even mainstream economics has
changed its mind on the issue. The original justification for the Federal Reserve was
to make the money supply more "elastic" in response to supposed demands of the
business community. After the Great Depression, the Keynesian justification for the
Fed was to manipulate the money supply in such a way as to guarantee full employment.
Now the justification for the Federal Reserve is to create "stability" in the price
mechanism. One can't help but get the suspicion that these are all excuses, not
reasons, especially since they all share the common goal of justifying why it is the
banks should be allowed to print money.)
[...]
-thant
John Schilling
>It appears probable that you're thinking of the 1920s/1930s
>mystery novel in which the baddie is caught because he spent
>a five-pound note, serial number ZYX98765432, which was issued
>by Teller number Three at the Eastminster and Mumble Bank
>yesterday at 11:15 A.M.
>I venture to suggest that this no longer is the case, if
>indeed it ever was, for "small" bills -- say, 100 pounds
>or USD 100 and under. ICBW, of course. Bank-teller types?
The U.S. $100 note no longer qualifies as a "small" bill, being
the largest denomination still in general circulation. Oh, there
are larger notes still out there, and if you've got a stash of
old $1K bills in your safe the banks will still honor them for
deposit.
But they'll be turned in to the Treasury in exchange for $100 notes
not long after, then disposed of. And if you ask to withdraw your
life savings in $1K notes, you won't get any.
Terry Austin
Paul Rubin wrote in message <7rme1f$9...@dfw-ixnews15.ix.netcom.com>...
Go to a bank and ask them how many individual bills cross
their counters every day. Multiply by 250 or so for a year.
I'd guess that first number would average in the thousands,
or tens of thousands, at the average bank. Now, to make
this useful, multiply by the number of banks in the US,
because if you can't search *all* of them, there is absolutely
no value whatsoever. Putting them on CDs won't be of
much help, since then someone at *every* *bank* will
have to go and switch CDs while the Powers That Be
do a search. It'd have to be in a database with
powerful, fast search capabilities. Now figure the bandwidth -
encrypted, no doubt - to manage such a search from a
central location, and the processing power and memory
necessary just to coordinate.
Mind you, I wouldn't put the Feds past thinking they
could pull it off. They thought they could force
phone companies to build - at their own expense -
the capacity to simultaneously tap 10% of all the
phones in the US, until someone showed that the
cost, which was more than the GDP for a year.
But from a practical standpoint, it ain't gonna
happen. For now.
Terry Austin
BrianG
the enemies network, but to obtain access to information stored therein and keep
your knowledge of that information secret. (eg. the plot in Neal Stephenson's
Cryptonomicon)
--BrianG
On Tue, 14 Sep 1999, Andrew Plotkin
wrote: >In rec.arts.sf.written Thomas <c96...@student.dtu.dk> wrote:
...
Christopher J. Henrich
> thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> >> And there was a time when the Second Ammendment was observed in the
> >> observance, not the breach.
> >
> >When was this time?
> >
> >Groups in positions of power are always better armed, and
> >have always done their utmost to keep arms out of the hands of the less
> >fortunate. Back in 1780, slaves didn't get to have guns. And in the
> >1960s, Black Panthers were thrown in jail for patrolling their
> >neighborhoods armed. Alas, where was the NRA then?
>
> Not to mention that really widespread gun ownership in the USA didn't occur
> until after the Civil War. Prior to that point, guns were very expensive
> items and rather rarer. It's also amusing to note that the citizen
> militias were legendary for their incompetence, lack of preparedness, and
> general absence of equipment.
I think that in the slave-holding states, there were competent militias,
intended to apprehend runaway slaves and suppress slave revolts. Hmm...
this throws a drear light on the connection between an armed populace and
liberty.
Chris Henrich
Bill "Houdini" Weiss
>In article <7rmjb0$16...@enews4.newsguy.com>,
>Terry Austin <tau...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>>>Why do you say staggering? How much storage space are we talking
>>>about? How much would that much storage cost at the local computer
>>>store, say at $1.00 per 680 MB (blank CD-R media)? I have my own
>>>estimates of these numbers but maybe yours are different than mine.
>>
>>Go to a bank and ask them how many individual bills cross
>>their counters every day. Multiply by 250 or so for a year.
>>I'd guess that first number would average in the thousands,
>>or tens of thousands, at the average bank.
>
>How many do you get, if you do that multiplication?
Let me take a shot.
Assume 5628 bills a day (semi-random #)
5628 * 250 = 1,407,000 bills
(Random bill out of my wallet) s/n : L90727787E
36 possible characters... 10 spaces...
36^10 = 3,656,158,440,062,976 possible combinations.
Would take a standard 2 ^ 8 bits, or 256 bits, or 32 bytes, per
character.
32 * 10 = 320 bytes, or .3125 kb
320 * 1,407,000 = 450,240,000 kb, or 439,687.5 mb, or 429.3823
(rounded, of course) GB per year.
So, minimum of (say) 430 GB/year of space, per bank. There are, say,
15 banks in Santa Fe (here), so 430 * 15 = 6,450 GB, or 6.2989 TB for
Santa Fe, a city of < 100,000 people.
Distribute that to the people, get (use 6.3 TB here) :
6,606,028.8 MB / (say) 86,000 people = 76.8143 (rounded) MB per
person.
Any one have the amount of people in the US?
If USA = 1billion people, :
76.82 MB * 1,000,000,000 = 76,820,000,000 MB, or 75,019,531.25 GB, or
73,261.261 TB
73,261.261 TB / YEAR, mind you.
That all is, of course, if you only store the serial, not any info as
to where, when, how it was used/spent/cashed/etc...
>>Now, to make this useful, multiply by the number of banks in the US,
>>because if you can't search *all* of them, there is absolutely no
>>value whatsoever. Putting them on CDs won't be of much help, since
>>then someone at *every* *bank* will have to go and switch CDs while
>>the Powers That Be do a search. It'd have to be in a database with
>>powerful, fast search capabilities. Now figure the bandwidth -
>>encrypted, no doubt - to manage such a search from a central
>>location, and the processing power and memory necessary just to
>>coordinate.
>
>How much memory, processing power, etc.? Where do you expect the
>queries to come from, and how often?
Well, let's see.
at a rate of 73,261.261 TB/year, 250 days a week, 7 hour days :
73,261.261 / ( 250 * ( 7 * 60 ) ) = 73,261.261 / 105,000 =
714.4717 MB a minute.
I don't know what that type of bandwidth costs, but it's not cheap.
I'm not a processing guru, someone else can figure this out.
>I'm interested in seeing your estimates of these numbers, but the
>estimates should be actual NUMBERS, not handwaving. (It's ok if
>the numbers are *based* on handwaving, of course).
>
>I'll post my own estimates, if you like.
>
>Part II of the exercise: how much storage, etc. would it take to
>permanently archive an audio recording of every long distance phone
>call in the US?
There's no way, put it like that.
--
Bill "Houdini" Weiss
PGP key: http://home.earthlink.net/~cultobill/bill_weiss.asc
ICQ#: 43270740
--
"O.J. was guiltier than a mother fucker, but I got him I off didn't
I?"
Johnnie Cochran to a group of law students at
Georgetown University
04/01/98
Phil Fraering
>pgf@lungold (Phil Fraering) wrote:
>>"Christopher J. Henrich" <chen...@monmouth.com> writes:
>>
>>>I think that in the slave-holding states, there were competent militias,
>>>intended to apprehend runaway slaves and suppress slave revolts. Hmm...
>>>this throws a drear light on the connection between an armed populace and
>>>liberty.
>>
>>>Chris Henrich
>>
>>So you're saying the militias were incompetent everywhere except where
>>it suits your argument for them to be bad if they're competent?
>Don't be foolish. He's saying that the militias were incompetent in
>general, as I've said, but competent in the one specific situation he can
>confirm, which he draws a conclusion from.
Well, from what I have heard of the area, militias were unimportant
to most of the Deep South, especially wrt the slave issue, for which
really official police forces could be used (and were). A local militia
would too easily run into jurisdictional problems.
--
Phil Fraering Now I lay me down to sleep
p...@globalreach.net Try to count electric sheep
/Will work for tape/ Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night. - Marvin, the Paranoid Android.
Phil Fraering
>>Universal wiretaping? Marines invading foreign countries for
>>"economic" crimes? Humbug! I would consider those futures a lot more
>>baleful than the idea of Russian mosters hiding cash in the Caribbean.
>They embezzled billions, greatly contributing to the continued collapse of
>a nation of over 200 million people. With something like the Crypt, they
>would probably have had a much easier time. That's pretty "baleful", and
>only a single example.
Except they literally made their money off of the economic instability
of the country, which the Crypt, by being an apolitical banking system,
would have done much to counteract.
The Crypt taketh away, but The Crypt also giveth.
>>Encrypted cash makes centralized government as obsolete as the divine
>>right of kings.
>I hope you are kidding, because that statement is ludicrously incorrect.
>It would change the focus of some law-enforcement, and it would change the
>method of collecting taxes (to one likely much less equitable than the one
>we have now), but it would do nothing to attack centralized government
>itself.
It would probably make government a lot more dependent on property
taxes.
thomaspa...@yahoo.com
who (among other things) proposes an alternative type of "perfect
crime."
>--- Steve Schear <sch...@lvcm.com> wrote:
>>
>> ...much deleted....
>>
>> > E-cash in a world without data havens would
>> >probably feature payer-only anonymity of the sort
>> >Deutsche Bank experimented with. Admittedly,
>> >payer-only anonymity could be transformed to full
>> >anonymity, with e-cash launderers operating
>> >"remailer" style -- acting as middlemen, and
>> >expunging records immediately after transmitting
>> >e-cash. However, launderers who did this would
>> >be vulnerable to sting operations where
>> >government "launder-narcs" posed as criminals
>> >needing money-laundering services. Payer-only
>> >anonymity ensures that the launderer would not
>> >know the identity of the paying party (a launder-
>> >narc), but the launder-narc would have
>> >incontrovertible proof of the launderer's crime.
>> >This sort of activist enforcement would not
>> >involve banning encryption or inspecting private
>> >messages.
>>
>> I think you misunderstand the Know Your Customer
>> requirements rules and
>> their widespread lack of enforcement outside the
>> G10. As you note, the
>> remailer doesn't know the identity of the payer and
>> so couldn't know source
>> of the funds. Ergo, no crime. Worldwide the standard
>> to which law
>> enforcement is held in pursing these matters against
>> financial institutions
>> is much higher than you assume. One has only to look
>> at the Carlos Salinas
>> affair with Citibank and the recent BNY russian
>> connection recently in the
>> news. You haven't heard of any indictments and you
>> probably won't.
>> Plausible deniability works and so will anonymous
>> cash remailers and
>> intermidiaries for digital cash transactions.
>>
>> --Steve
>>
>
>I am aware that Government regulators tend to look the other way at
>money laundering today. This makes sense because, to a great extent,
>odious regimes that rule without the consent of the people rely on
>money laundering to keep their grip on power. The more the
>kleptocrats' shenanigans are exposed to the public eye, the more
>ridiculous they look, and the higher chance of their being overthrown.
>
>So, you are right that money laundering is widely tolerated. Today.
>
>My contention is that if there was the technology to commit perfect
>crimes, global public opinion would swiftly turn against the
>e-launderers who abetted it.
I think it would depend upon whom the initial 'perfect crimes' were
committed. I dare say that if Saddam were the successful target of an
assassination for hire plot using anonymous money most of the western
public would just shrug and say good riddance, but the government elite
would not be so dismissive. There is substantial frustration by many
global citizens that many governments and their minions routinely
violate the
basic human rights of their citizens and that, for economic and
political reasons, their own democratic governments are either powerless
to stop
the carnage or do so only after thousands or even tens of thousands are
killed. If a 'democratic' means of 'encouraging' an end to these
criminals were
easily accessible to the average Netizen I believe enough would
participate to make this a new global political force to be recconned
with.
As you may know Jim Bell is serving time for minor offense
Substantially because he penned his Assassination Politics tome,
describing the way
in which one such anonymous betting pool might operate. Another, Carl
Johnson is also serving time related to his comic endorsement of Bell's
plan.
>I think of the current "private banking"
>regime of money laundering as a sort of gentleman's agreement. Private
>bankers will help criminals do their thing, but only up to a point.
>And the criminal always runs the risk of the private banker exposing
>his or her identity to the authorities.
>
>Okay, maybe not the master criminal's identity, but his agent's. At
>some point there's usually some kind of face to face contact.
>
>E-laundering would be fundamentally different. Here, the shady
>middleman would not know any identifying information about the parties
>she is assisting. It would all done by servers, left mostly
>unattended. Even if the sysadmin of the e-money-laundry wanted to help
>the authorities, she could not. Thus, the potential for evil is
>greatly expanded.
Or the potential good. See my comments above.
>
>Imagine this. Terrorists announce that they have planted a big bomb in
>an important heavily-populated building somewhere in the world. Unless
>50 million anonymous dollars are posted to such and such newsgroup,
>encrypted with such and such key, within half an hour, the bomb goes
>off. The money can come from anywhere, as long as it clears. The
>leaders of the first world refuse to negotiate with the terrorists.
>The bomb goes off and hundreds of people die. A week later the
>terrorists post another message asking for money (digitally signed so
>that there can be no doubt that this is the same group of bad guys).
>
>Plausible deniability sounds pretty feeble at this point. They don't
>call it perfect crime for nothing.
Such crimes can already be committed without anonymous digital cash.
Instead of the above scenario they merely ask that an leading U.S.
corporation (e.g., Microsoft, Intel or Cisco) announce dramatically
lower quaterly results. The criminals have been buying up put options or
indexes over several months using otherwise normal accounts under phoney
names.
The announcement causes a significant price decline and the criminals
cash
out their positions. Tracing them down could be on a scale comperable
with
the digital cash scenario.
>
>Thanks for the feedback.
>
>Thomas
>
>PS I won't post your part of this exchange without your go-ahead, but
>I would like it if you would. This touches on the heart of why I
wrote
>my original post in the first place.
Please feel free if you include my current response as well.
--Steve
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Paul Rubin
Terry Austin <tau...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>>Why do you say staggering? How much storage space are we talking
>>about? How much would that much storage cost at the local computer
>>store, say at $1.00 per 680 MB (blank CD-R media)? I have my own
>>estimates of these numbers but maybe yours are different than mine.
>
>Go to a bank and ask them how many individual bills cross
>their counters every day. Multiply by 250 or so for a year.
>I'd guess that first number would average in the thousands,
>or tens of thousands, at the average bank.
How many do you get, if you do that multiplication?
>Now, to make this useful, multiply by the number of banks in the US,
>because if you can't search *all* of them, there is absolutely no
>value whatsoever. Putting them on CDs won't be of much help, since
>then someone at *every* *bank* will have to go and switch CDs while
>the Powers That Be do a search. It'd have to be in a database with
>powerful, fast search capabilities. Now figure the bandwidth -
>encrypted, no doubt - to manage such a search from a central
>location, and the processing power and memory necessary just to
>coordinate.
How much memory, processing power, etc.? Where do you expect the
queries to come from, and how often?
I'm interested in seeing your estimates of these numbers, but the
John M. Gamble
Ian <iadm...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> The second "good" reason Stephenson's Randy
>>has for building The Crypt is that the
>>introduction of a secure anonymous digital
>>currency backed by pilfered World War II gold
>>would help Asia recover from its recent economic
>>woes:
>
>Good grief. I want to ask "can he really be that dumb?", but I read part
Well, no. This book review doesn't accurately reflect the contents
of the book.
I have my own quibbles with some of the characterizations in the
novel, but you wouldn't recognize the plot nor the people based
on this review.
-john
--
Pursuant to US Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter II, '227,
any and all unsolicited commercial E-mail sent to this address
is subject to a download and archival fee in the amount of $500
US. E-mailing denotes acceptance of these terms.
NEil Phillips
wisdom:
>I've heard from a reliable source that some individual has already
>cut off a country's internet access as a joke. I can ask for details
>if people are interested.
In that case, I've got a feeling someone has been having an ongoing
joke with Australia..
(In the past, say about 2 years ago, the link between Aus and the US
used to be dodgy as hell..)
--
NEil (phil...@webzone.net.au)
Support the use of real names on the Internet.
The opinions expressed in this message are not my own,
but rather are those of Microsoft Corporation.
tomwomack00
news:lBHfNwTjROcsMo...@4ax.com...
> On 15 Sep 1999 00:49:03 GMT, p...@netcom.com (Paul Rubin) wrote:
> >How many do you get, if you do that multiplication?
>
> Let me take a shot.
The use of units in this document is so embarrassingly wrong as almost to
suggest malevolence on the part of the author ... let me have a go.
> Assume 5628 bills a day (semi-random #)
> 5628 * 250 = 1,407,000 bills
Yes.
> (Random bill out of my wallet) s/n : L90727787E
> 36 possible characters... 10 spaces...
> 36^10 = 3,656,158,440,062,976 possible combinations.
> Would take a standard 2 ^ 8 bits, or 256 bits, or 32 bytes, per
> character.
> 32 * 10 = 320 bytes, or .3125 kb
Um, no; it takes 1 byte per character; if you're doing this in a clever
database you might well compress, and fit one bill into 64 bits (36^10 is a
53-bit number, but 64 bits is a more convenient unit to carry around). So 8
bytes per bill, for about 12 megabytes a year per bank. That's doable on
floppy discs.
If we assert that a bank serves 5000 people, which seems a bit low to me,
and the population of the US (CIA World Factbook 1998) is 270 million, you
have about 55000 banks, and a total data capacity of around 600 gigabytes
annually (to store something like eighty billion transactions). That's a
factor two smaller than the TerraServer Microsoft set up to demonstrate that
they could build data warehouses; it's the same sort of scale
(unsurprisingly) as the data warehouse somewhere like Wal-Mart would build
to record its transactions and look for interesting patterns. It would fit
in one fully-loaded Sun E6500 server, which costs about a million dollars
with 14 CPUs; that single computer would be able to do eighty billion
lookups a year, with one hand tied behind its back, and the bandwidth
between each bank and the server is, again, 600G annually, which is 19kb a
second - three ISDN channels, or a single ADSL one, and much narrower than a
T1.
> >Part II of the exercise: how much storage, etc. would it take to
> >permanently archive an audio recording of every long distance phone
> >call in the US?
That's quite a lot, I suspect, though I'm not quite sure how many
long-distance phone calls occur annually in the US; CELP encoding gets voice
down to 15kb per minute, so a tape silo containing 20,000 20G DLTs would
store about 25 billion minutes. I suspect the average USA citizen makes more
than two hours of long-distance calls annually, so you start talking about
procuring a new silo every six months, you need lots of warehouse space for
them (they take up a few thousand square feet each), and everything becomes
unwieldy. Maybe as much as $200 million a year, that would cost.
Tom
NEil Phillips
the following wisdom:
>Would take a standard 2 ^ 8 bits, or 256 bits, or 32 bytes, per
>character.
Hang on! Hang on hangon hangon. 32 bytes per character? Now, forgive
me if I'm wrong, but one byte = one character, right? Jsut to check, I
made a 10 character text file. Whattaya know! The filesize is 10
bytes. (Now I wonder where the name of the text tfile is stored.. :) )
Why did I bother checking that?
>32 * 10 = 320 bytes, or .3125 kb
No, 10 bytes.
>If USA = 1billion people, :
Ahem. The USA is NOWHERE near China's population. Try about 1/4 that
figure..
OK, estimates are fine. I estimate my age to be about 68. Or is it 5?
I can't be sure..
You're estimaes are way off.
I'll leave the tedious arithmatic to someone else, tho :)
BTW, what is the point of a list of numbers? You'd need a bunch of
other stuff too, perhaps 100 bytes worth per note? Of course, you
could do "Following notes issued form teller 3:" etc, which would cut
it down alot. Depending on what you want, it may jsut be a case of
putting a date and bank identifier at the start of each list.
Very doable, it would seem. From a technical point of view. However,
if you want to tell every bank in america to buy OCR hardware, train
all their tellers withthe new equipment, etc..
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold
>
> Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold wrote:
>
>> Because gold is intrisically valuable, its face value
>> can become meaningless fairly quickly.
>
> Face value in terms of what? A dollar used to be DEFINED as 1/20th
> of an ounce of gold.
Well, it's not anymore. A dollar, for better or worse, is now an entity
in its own right, and we speak of a given amount of gold as being worth
X number of dollars. If reinstating gold coinage requires everybody to
change their definition of "dollar", that's another big strike against
it.
>> If a cashier has to weigh my money to make sure I haven't been
>> shaving off bits, and then check the spot price of gold to verify
>> what the coin is really worth, that strikes me as a major
>> disadvantage.
>
> This is why Sir Isaac Newton invented the mill-edged coin.
*Newton* invented milling? Is that for sure or is it like Galileo's
invention of the telescope?
> Take a look at the edge of a dime or quarter.
I know what milling is, and what it used to be used for. But in U.S.
coins at least, it hasn't been used as a security measure for decades --
no one's going to bother shaving copper-nickel alloy. If coins were
still made of precious metals, though, I wonder whether modern
coin-clippers wouldn't find a way to "beat" milling.
>> There's also the problem of what you use for small change -- even
>> the tiniest gold coins are going to have a fairly high value. I
>> don't think I want a $25 coin that weighs a tenth of an
>> ounce and can slip through a hole in my pocket without my feeling
>> it, especially if people keep saying, "do you have anything
>> smaller than that?"
>
> This is why dimes and quarters were (until very recently) made of
> silver. And nickels used to be made of (surprise) nickel, and
> pennies made of copper. The fact that this is so unimaginable now
> attests to how much the government and banks have stolen from
> people through inflation of the money supply.
>
> Trying to fix the value of one metal in terms of another does
> have problems, but these problems are minor compared to those
> caused by fiat currency.
If it's legal to buy and sell precious metals, what's stopping people
from minting coin-like bits and using them as currency right now? I
gather such unofficial coins wouldn't be "legal tender" but that
wouldn't stop people from treating them as such if they wanted to, would
it?
-- M. Ruff
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold
>
> The U.S. $100 note no longer qualifies as a "small" bill, being
> the largest denomination still in general circulation.
Can you still get $2 bills, or has the treasury put the $2 "revival"
behind them?
-- M. Ruff
Daniel James
wrote:
> I'd still say that [Stephenson] never seems to be
> trying to influence opinions. None of the characters in his books can be seen
> as heroic mouthpieces.
>
Indeed, in the preface to "Zodiac", his first published novel, he says that he
knew he was on the right track when one of his friends read the manuscript and
described the central character as "an asshole".
But then, of course, books can influence opinions even if the author does not
intend that they should...
Cheers,
Daniel.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
They're still legal tender and plenty of them are still sitting in
vaults; I don't think the Bureau of Engraving & Printing has run off a
batch since 1996, though.
I could ask, if you like -- my wife works for the BEP.
Richard D. Latham
[ deletia ]
> If we assert that a bank serves 5000 people, which seems a bit low to me,
> and the population of the US (CIA World Factbook 1998) is 270 million, you
> have about 55000 banks, and a total data capacity of around 600 gigabytes
> annually (to store something like eighty billion transactions). That's a
> factor two smaller than the TerraServer Microsoft set up to demonstrate that
> they could build data warehouses; it's the same sort of scale
> (unsurprisingly) as the data warehouse somewhere like Wal-Mart would build
> to record its transactions and look for interesting patterns. It would fit
> in one fully-loaded Sun E6500 server, which costs about a million dollars
> with 14 CPUs; that single computer would be able to do eighty billion
> lookups a year, with one hand tied behind its back, and the bandwidth
> between each bank and the server is, again, 600G annually, which is 19kb a
> second - three ISDN channels, or a single ADSL one, and much narrower than a
> T1.
>
[ deletia ]
I had a Press Release in my e-mail yesterday, which I've unfortunately
discarded <sigh>, that discusses a just completed benchmark by one
the major ATM transaction database vendors .
I unfortunately can't remember which DB company ... it was a
specialized DB, not one of the "big three" DB companies.
I think the name of the benchmark is "ATMBench" ... or some such.
The report indicated that one _single_ IBM 24 CPU S70 machine was performing
600,000 ATM transactions per minute, with an average response time of
under 0.1 seconds, and with a _maximum_ transaction response time of
less than 0.6 seconds.
(381,600 minutes per year) * ( 600,000 transactions per minute )
yields 228,960,000,000 or so transactions per year. In round figures,
1/4 Trillion transactions per year per machine.
I don't know the details of the benchmark definition, but my personal
experience of using my ATM card says that the vast majority of the
transactions are "query + update", with rather demanding ACIDity
requirements <smile>. Just logging a transaction is massively simplier
to implement, and the data involved is likely about 1/4 to 1/8
smaller, also.
I'd guess that "logging the time/place of every bill that crosses a
bank counter" is pretty easily doable with off-the-shelf technology.
--
#include <disclaimer.std> /* I don't speak for IBM ... */
/* Heck, I don't even speak for myself */
/* Don't believe me ? Ask my wife :-) */
Richard D. Latham lat...@us.ibm.com
Nancy Lebovitz
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@netcom.com> wrote:
>In rec.arts.sf.written Thomas <c96...@student.dtu.dk> wrote:
>>
>>> >You could make things difficult for American depositors to make withdrawals,
>>> >but how can America cut off a country's internet access (without invading
>>> >it)?
>>> >
>>> I've heard from a reliable source that some individual has already
>>> cut off a country's internet access as a joke. I can ask for details
>>> if people are interested.
>
>
I got less detail than I'd hoped for--just that the country might have
been Denmark (for some reason, I'd thought it was an Eastern European
country that was cut off), and the culprit might be someone who goes
by IRS-Agent.
At this point, I'd write the whole thing off as too vague to be important.
>> You can cut of internet acces but it requires direct intervention.
>> You have to cut cables or sabotage key servers. And if you
>> are willing to do that you might as well go directly for the black
>> banks you want to nail.
>
>Not necessarily. An international cable is (by definition) long, and will
>never be guarded along most of its length. Any particular machine room can
>be guarded. Not that the US can't cruise-missile anything in chooses, but
>you can locate things so that this is requires a military strike into your
>capital city. Which obviates the point of "cryptological warfare".
>
Would there be some software method of substantially (even if not totally)
cutting off a country, perhaps by sending out rogue cancels? How about
a virus that makes servers send out rogue cancels? (It may be evident
that I've heard just a little bit about such things--possibly just
enough to be thoroughly wrong.)
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com
Calligraphic button catalogue available by email!
Terry Austin
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold wrote in message <37DF8C...@worldnet.att.net>...
>> This is why Sir Isaac Newton invented the mill-edged coin.
>
>*Newton* invented milling? Is that for sure or is it like Galileo's
>invention of the telescope?
>
>> Take a look at the edge of a dime or quarter.
>
>I know what milling is, and what it used to be used for. But in U.S.
>coins at least, it hasn't been used as a security measure for decades --
>no one's going to bother shaving copper-nickel alloy. If coins were
>still made of precious metals, though, I wonder whether modern
>coin-clippers wouldn't find a way to "beat" milling.
The reason for milling, at this point in time, is so that
people can tell by touch the difference between
a quarter and a nickel, and a dime and a penny.
That is also the reason the Susan B. dollars
have faceted edges, to be different from both
quarters and nickels, which they are close to the
size of.
>
>>> There's also the problem of what you use for small change -- even
>>> the tiniest gold coins are going to have a fairly high value. I
>>> don't think I want a $25 coin that weighs a tenth of an
>>> ounce and can slip through a hole in my pocket without my feeling
>>> it, especially if people keep saying, "do you have anything
>>> smaller than that?"
>>
>> This is why dimes and quarters were (until very recently) made of
>> silver. And nickels used to be made of (surprise) nickel, and
>> pennies made of copper. The fact that this is so unimaginable now
>> attests to how much the government and banks have stolen from
>> people through inflation of the money supply.
>>
>> Trying to fix the value of one metal in terms of another does
>> have problems, but these problems are minor compared to those
>> caused by fiat currency.
>
>If it's legal to buy and sell precious metals, what's stopping people
>from minting coin-like bits and using them as currency right now? I
>gather such unofficial coins wouldn't be "legal tender" but that
>wouldn't stop people from treating them as such if they wanted to, would
>it?
>
Such exist. Legally, they amount of a barter system,
and are perfectly legal, though tracking income (which
is mandated by law) can be tricky and onerous.
Terry Austin
Terry Austin
tomwomack00 wrote in message <37df...@plato.netscapeonline.co.uk>...
>Bill "Houdini" Weiss <cult...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
>news:lBHfNwTjROcsMo...@4ax.com...
>> On 15 Sep 1999 00:49:03 GMT, p...@netcom.com (Paul Rubin) wrote:
>
>> >How many do you get, if you do that multiplication?
>>
>> Let me take a shot.
>
>The use of units in this document is so embarrassingly wrong as almost to
>suggest malevolence on the part of the author ... let me have a go.
>
>> Assume 5628 bills a day (semi-random #)
>> 5628 * 250 = 1,407,000 bills
>
>Yes.
>
>> (Random bill out of my wallet) s/n : L90727787E
>> 36 possible characters... 10 spaces...
>> 36^10 = 3,656,158,440,062,976 possible combinations.
>> character.
>
>database you might well compress, and fit one bill into 64 bits (36^10 is a
>53-bit number, but 64 bits is a more convenient unit to carry around). So 8
>bytes per bill, for about 12 megabytes a year per bank. That's doable on
>floppy discs.
Not if you want to be able to search it. Not to mention,
floppies don't have much of a shelf life. That aside
from that, now factor in some kind of ID information.
Knowing what bank a bill went out through is useless.
Who did it go to? Do we now have to show ID to
conduct cash transactions? Yeah, the court cases
on that are going to be resolved in our lifetimes.
Most practical way would be date stamps on each
cash transaction and archiving surveillance video.
Which gets archived now, but not for long enough.
And still can't be searched quickly, but at least
it's only one bank involved in the search now,
instead of all of them.
You also need bank identifier info somewhere,
to be able to search from a central location.
Time and date stamp, teller ID, and other
incidental info. Probably double the size.
Then you have to have a search routine for
looking through thousands of different
databases on thousands of different systems,
plus one way encryption.
The bottom line is, from a technical standpoint,
it's not exactly trivial, and from a financial
standpoint, it's far from it.
>
>If we assert that a bank serves 5000 people, which seems a bit low to me,
>and the population of the US (CIA World Factbook 1998) is 270 million, you
>have about 55000 banks, and a total data capacity of around 600 gigabytes
>annually (to store something like eighty billion transactions). That's a
>factor two smaller than the TerraServer Microsoft set up to demonstrate
that
>they could build data warehouses; it's the same sort of scale
>(unsurprisingly) as the data warehouse somewhere like Wal-Mart would build
>to record its transactions and look for interesting patterns. It would fit
>in one fully-loaded Sun E6500 server, which costs about a million dollars
>with 14 CPUs; that single computer would be able to do eighty billion
>lookups a year, with one hand tied behind its back, and the bandwidth
>between each bank and the server is, again, 600G annually, which is 19kb a
>second - three ISDN channels, or a single ADSL one, and much narrower than
a
>T1.
>
>> >Part II of the exercise: how much storage, etc. would it take to
>> >permanently archive an audio recording of every long distance phone
>> >call in the US?
>
>That's quite a lot, I suspect, though I'm not quite sure how many
>long-distance phone calls occur annually in the US; CELP encoding gets
voice
>down to 15kb per minute, so a tape silo containing 20,000 20G DLTs would
>store about 25 billion minutes. I suspect the average USA citizen makes
more
>than two hours of long-distance calls annually, so you start talking about
>procuring a new silo every six months, you need lots of warehouse space for
>them (they take up a few thousand square feet each), and everything becomes
>unwieldy. Maybe as much as $200 million a year, that would cost.
>
Terry Austin
Nancy Lebovitz
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold <Storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>I know what milling is, and what it used to be used for. But in U.S.
>coins at least, it hasn't been used as a security measure for decades --
>no one's going to bother shaving copper-nickel alloy. If coins were
>still made of precious metals, though, I wonder whether modern
>coin-clippers wouldn't find a way to "beat" milling.
>
put it in a specialized press, slam down on it, and end up with a slightly
smaller coin with the same sort of milled edge and, one hopes, enough
coin shreds to be worth melting into bars or coins.
If the coin does have a raised edge (I'm betting that it will have
an ornamental border), then it might be necessary to re-strike the
design, or at least the border. This still might be feasible, since
the cost of making a store-of-value coin should be small compared to
the metal in it.
On the other hand, if the coins are that valuable, then there'd probably
be some way of weighing them at the sales register--probably something
that's no more trouble than the felt-tip pen test they use at Staples. [1]
At that point, counterfeiters would mostly give up clipping and begin
making coins from scratch with less valuable alloys.
[1] Staples (an office-supply chain), checks currency with a felt-tip
pen that writes gold (non-metallic) on currency and black on ordinary
paper.
Tom Knight
Daniel James wrote:
>
>
> Indeed, in the preface to "Zodiac", his first published novel, he says that he
> knew he was on the right track when one of his friends read the manuscript and
> described the central character as "an asshole".
>
> But then, of course, books can influence opinions even if the author does not
> intend that they should...
>
Yeah, but the author shouldn't be held responsible, IMHO.
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel.
Tom Knight
> If a 'democratic' means of 'encouraging' an end to these
> criminals were
> easily accessible to the average Netizen I believe enough would
> participate to make this a new global political force to be recconned
> with.
>
Wow. Like a kind of twisted, charity-funded version of Special
Circumstances. This one's definitely going in the RPG bag.
Terry Austin
Paul Rubin wrote in message <7rmqdv$c...@dfw-ixnews10.ix.netcom.com>...
>In article <7rmjb0$16...@enews4.newsguy.com>,
>Terry Austin <tau...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>>>Why do you say staggering? How much storage space are we talking
>>>about? How much would that much storage cost at the local computer
>>>store, say at $1.00 per 680 MB (blank CD-R media)? I have my own
>>>estimates of these numbers but maybe yours are different than mine.
>>
>>Go to a bank and ask them how many individual bills cross
>>their counters every day. Multiply by 250 or so for a year.
>>I'd guess that first number would average in the thousands,
>>or tens of thousands, at the average bank.
>
>
>
>>because if you can't search *all* of them, there is absolutely no
>>value whatsoever. Putting them on CDs won't be of much help, since
>>then someone at *every* *bank* will have to go and switch CDs while
>>the Powers That Be do a search. It'd have to be in a database with
>>powerful, fast search capabilities. Now figure the bandwidth -
>>encrypted, no doubt - to manage such a search from a central
>>location, and the processing power and memory necessary just to
>>coordinate.
>
>How much memory, processing power, etc.? Where do you expect the
>queries to come from, and how often?
>
>I'm interested in seeing your estimates of these numbers, but the
>estimates should be actual NUMBERS, not handwaving. (It's ok if
>the numbers are *based* on handwaving, of course).
No idea at all. I don't often deal with banks, and when I do,
it's usually as a merchant, which involves hundreds or
even thousands of individual bills (not dollars) rather than
a few dozen at a time. Though that, too, would have to
be tracked precisely for this to be of any value. Who many
individual bills are in circulation? Billions, I suspect, and
there would have to be capacity to track every single one
of them changing hands hundreds of times a year, because
nearly every bill that you spend in a store will end up in a
bank at some point within a day or two as a result, when
a merchant deposits his daily proceeds. Big bills will
be tracked coming in, small bills going out as merchant's
get singles and 5's for change. And merchant transactions
would be the deposits that would be of most interest,
since far more transactions take place that way. It's easier
to track someone when you can track where they shop
than just what banks they go to.
>
>I'll post my own estimates, if you like.
Treasury Department says it prints 22.5 million
bills per day. Demoninations between $1 and
$20 average between 15 and 24 months in
life, probably about 18 months overall. Larger
demoninations last longer, but there aren't
nearly as many of them.
So, 365 * 1.5 * 22.5 is about 12 billion bills
printed every 18 months to keep the supply
stable.
Figure that every one of them will cross a bank
teller's desk at least once a week, on average,
for about 85 billion transactions a year. Times
at least 128 bytes per bill per transaction,
and that's if a fair amount of the information,
like what bank the transaction takes place at,
it indexed for a whole database. That'd be
something like 10 terrabytes of info a year,
by my guess, distributed throughout the
country on thousands of systems running
on different, and mostly proprietary to at
least some degree, operating systems and
applications.
Now, your homework assignment is
to write the search routine for that.
>
>Part II of the exercise: how much storage, etc. would it take to
>permanently archive an audio recording of every long distance phone
>call in the US?
An inconceivable amount. I've heard it seriously
proposed (in a Y2K newsgroup, so take it for what
it's worth) that the reason that computers still have
the tinny little speakers on them when you can't
buy a system without a sound card any more was
that it is used as a microphone, recording everything
that you say near it to be sent off to the government
every time you connect to the Internet. It's amazing
how little most people know about computers.
Terry Austin
Globalhead
<inte...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <37DE84BF...@planetoftheapes.freeserve.co.uk>, Tom Knight
>wrote:
>> I'd still say that [Stephenson] never seems to be
>> trying to influence opinions. None of the characters in his books can be seen
>> as heroic mouthpieces.
>>
>
>Indeed, in the preface to "Zodiac", his first published novel
For the sake of accuracy I should point out that "Zodiac" was Neal
Stephenson's second published novel. His first was "The Big U", if memory
serves.
Larry --
"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous.
Do not attempt it in your own home."
-- "Good Omens", by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
ICQ No. 37523426
Terry Austin
Richard D. Latham wrote in message ...
>"tomwomack00" <tomwo...@netscapeonline.co.uk> writes:
>
>[ deletia ]
>
>> If we assert that a bank serves 5000 people, which seems a bit low to me,
>> and the population of the US (CIA World Factbook 1998) is 270 million,
you
>> have about 55000 banks, and a total data capacity of around 600 gigabytes
>> annually (to store something like eighty billion transactions). That's a
>> factor two smaller than the TerraServer Microsoft set up to demonstrate
that
>> they could build data warehouses; it's the same sort of scale
>> (unsurprisingly) as the data warehouse somewhere like Wal-Mart would
build
>> to record its transactions and look for interesting patterns. It would
fit
>> in one fully-loaded Sun E6500 server, which costs about a million dollars
>> with 14 CPUs; that single computer would be able to do eighty billion
>> lookups a year, with one hand tied behind its back, and the bandwidth
>> between each bank and the server is, again, 600G annually, which is 19kb
a
>> second - three ISDN channels, or a single ADSL one, and much narrower
than a
>> T1.
>>
>
>I had a Press Release in my e-mail yesterday, which I've unfortunately
>discarded <sigh>, that discusses a just completed benchmark by one
>the major ATM transaction database vendors .
>
>I unfortunately can't remember which DB company ... it was a
>specialized DB, not one of the "big three" DB companies.
>
>I think the name of the benchmark is "ATMBench" ... or some such.
>
>The report indicated that one _single_ IBM 24 CPU S70 machine was
performing
>600,000 ATM transactions per minute, with an average response time of
>under 0.1 seconds, and with a _maximum_ transaction response time of
>less than 0.6 seconds.
>
>(381,600 minutes per year) * ( 600,000 transactions per minute )
>yields 228,960,000,000 or so transactions per year. In round figures,
>1/4 Trillion transactions per year per machine.
>
>I don't know the details of the benchmark definition, but my personal
>experience of using my ATM card says that the vast majority of the
>transactions are "query + update", with rather demanding ACIDity
>requirements <smile>. Just logging a transaction is massively simplier
>to implement, and the data involved is likely about 1/4 to 1/8
>smaller, also.
>
>I'd guess that "logging the time/place of every bill that crosses a
>bank counter" is pretty easily doable with off-the-shelf technology.
>
information, or just handling the back and forth?
Seems to me it'd be the latter, as the account information
is stored on the bank's computer of the ATM card holder.
Also, note that you're talking about a fraction of the
amount of information. A single transaction on an ATM
could easily include 10 bills, each of which would have
to be tracked by serial number. See my post on the
number of bills in circulation and how often they
cross bank teller desks.
Terry Austin
Thant Tessman
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold wrote:
> [...] If reinstating gold coinage requires everybody to
> change their definition of "dollar", that's another big strike against
> it.
Why? Up until as recently as 1971 you could in theory redeem a dollar for
1/35th an ounce of gold if you were a foreign government. (In practice you
probably couldn't because the Fed had 'printed' way more dollars than they
could possibly redeem.) Many economists describe ways to re-peg the dollar
to gold. The problem isn't technical or social, it's political.
>
> > This is why Sir Isaac Newton invented the mill-edged coin.
>
> *Newton* invented milling? Is that for sure or is it like Galileo's
> invention of the telescope?
I think you're thinking of gravity--as in "Sir Isaac Newton invented
gravity."
> [...] If coins were
> still made of precious metals, though, I wonder whether modern
> coin-clippers wouldn't find a way to "beat" milling.
I'm sure they could. I'm sure they could also just make flat-out forgeries
too. But the effort put into both making and detecting forgeries will be
proportional to their value. I don't think there will be much of a
counterfeiting problem with small denominations, and larger transactions
will probably happen electronically or through harder-to-counterfeit notes
the way it works now. Things like smart cards and other cryptographic
techniques will make fraud less likely, as well as hopefully make anonymous
electrionic transactions more prevalent. That is, assuming the government
allows it.
> If it's legal to buy and sell precious metals, what's stopping people
> from minting coin-like bits and using them as currency right now? I
> gather such unofficial coins wouldn't be "legal tender" but that
> wouldn't stop people from treating them as such if they wanted to, would
> it?
I don't know about minting their own coins, but people already use precious
metals as a medium of exchange despite the ubiquitousness of the market for
dollars. For an interesting example, see http://www.e-gold.com
Here are the main features of a commodity-backed currency:
* Puts a limit on banks' ability to expand the number of notes in
circulation (i.e. print money).
* Makes it harder to trace (and tax) transactions.
These are either pros or cons depending on who you ask. More specifically,
they are definitely cons if you are a bank or the government. In recent
years the Federal Reserve has been fairly self-restrained, but no doubt the
"looser" the Fed gets with its policies, the more incentive there will be to
conduct economic transactions using an alternative medium of exchange. Of
course this happens all the time all over the world in countries with
central banks that print money to the point of making it worthless (i.e.
e.g. Russia).
-thant
Terry Austin
Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote in message ...
>On Wed, 15 Sep 1999 11:35:55 -0400, Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold
><Storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>>John Schilling wrote:
>>>
>>> The U.S. $100 note no longer qualifies as a "small" bill, being
>>> the largest denomination still in general circulation.
>>
>>Can you still get $2 bills, or has the treasury put the $2 "revival"
>>behind them?
>
>They're still legal tender and plenty of them are still sitting in
>vaults; I don't think the Bureau of Engraving & Printing has run off a
>batch since 1996, though.
>
>I could ask, if you like -- my wife works for the BEP.
>
They just don't print them very often because they don't
get used as lot.
Terry Austin
John Schilling
>John Schilling wrote:
>> The U.S. $100 note no longer qualifies as a "small" bill, being
>> the largest denomination still in general circulation.
>Can you still get $2 bills, or has the treasury put the $2 "revival"
>behind them?
You can still get them if you ask for them. The Feds are actively
opposed to the circulation of >$100 notes, they simply no longer
care about the $2. I believe they still print them to demand, but
as they never caught on that demand consists of a vanishingly small
novelty market.
They should probably charge $2.50 for the things...
And a quick check of the U.S. Treasury web site confirms that the
$2 bill is still being printed, with a new series issued in 1996.
Not noticeably different than the old ones.
The $500 to $10K notes were withdrawn in 1969.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
tomwomack00
news:7roimu$r...@netaxs.com...
> Would there be some software method of substantially (even if not totally)
> cutting off a country, perhaps by sending out rogue cancels?
Cancels are a fairly specifically Usenet concept and, whilst it's possible for a
single private individual to cancel every post coming from Denmark, this only
affects Denmark Usenet users and the cancels will be ignored by most sites
(since the Sc*ent*l*g*sts were fond of mass cancelling some time back).
To cut off a country, the easiest technique would be to find some subtle bug in
the operating system of the routers connecting it to the Internet-at-large
analogous to the various attacks for crashing Windows or Linux remotely; crash
the routers every couple of seconds, ideally from suborned hosts all over the
place, and there's not much connectivity left.
Tom
Danny Sichel
> On the other hand, if the coins are that valuable, then there'd probably
> be some way of weighing them at the sales register--probably something
> that's no more trouble than the felt-tip pen test they use at Staples. [1]
> [1] Staples (an office-supply chain), checks currency with a felt-tip
> pen that writes gold (non-metallic) on currency and black on ordinary
> paper.
From what I've read, these Counterfeit-Detecting Pens are... well,
"fraudulent" is the wrong word... "Useless", perhaps.
They're based on the assumption that any counterfeit money will be on
low-grade paper.
Gurripato
<Storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>Thant Tessman wrote:
>> This is why Sir Isaac Newton invented the mill-edged coin.
>
>*Newton* invented milling? Is that for sure or is it like Galileo's
>invention of the telescope?
>
AFAIK, it is. After he became Sir he was put in charge of
BritainĀ“s coinage bureau (however it is called). He fought hard
against money counterfeiting. He might be the first scientist to
"make money!"
Charles Frederick Goodin
Terry Austin <tau...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
[a bunch of stuff, then:]
>An inconceivable amount. I've heard it seriously
>proposed (in a Y2K newsgroup, so take it for what
>it's worth) that the reason that computers still have
>the tinny little speakers on them when you can't
>buy a system without a sound card any more was
>that it is used as a microphone, recording everything
>that you say near it to be sent off to the government
>every time you connect to the Internet. It's amazing
>how little most people know about computers.
Yeah. Like some people thing that you can't buy a system without a sound
card anymore.
--
chuk
Ian
>In article <37ebae71...@news.math.uwaterloo.ca>,
>Ian <iadm...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>>thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote:
>>
>>> The second "good" reason Stephenson's Randy
>>>has for building The Crypt is that the
>>>introduction of a secure anonymous digital
>>>currency backed by pilfered World War II gold
>>>would help Asia recover from its recent economic
>>>woes:
>>
>>Good grief. I want to ask "can he really be that dumb?", but I read part
>
>Well, no. This book review doesn't accurately reflect the contents
>of the book.
>
>I have my own quibbles with some of the characterizations in the
>novel, but you wouldn't recognize the plot nor the people based
>on this review.
Well I read the quoted paragraph on the explanation of what it would do for
Asia. If that even vaguely resembles Stephenson's views, he's very very
wrong.
Ian
>thomaspa...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>>However, electronic cash tilts the balance too far towards perfect
>>crimes and financial hooliganism. Imagine how much more the embezzlers
>>in the Russian Duma could have gotten away with if there were something
>>like the Crypt, which is so much more anonymous than Caribbean private
>>banking.
>
>Universal wiretaping? Marines invading foreign countries for
>"economic" crimes? Humbug! I would consider those futures a lot more
>baleful than the idea of Russian mosters hiding cash in the Caribbean.
They embezzled billions, greatly contributing to the continued collapse of
a nation of over 200 million people. With something like the Crypt, they
would probably have had a much easier time. That's pretty "baleful", and
only a single example.
>Encrypted cash makes centralized government as obsolete as the divine
>right of kings.
I hope you are kidding, because that statement is ludicrously incorrect.
It would change the focus of some law-enforcement, and it would change the
method of collecting taxes (to one likely much less equitable than the one
we have now), but it would do nothing to attack centralized government
itself.
Ian
>iadm...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (Ian) wrote, in part:
>
>>And
>>when you are talking about fundamental aspects of a national economy and
>>tax base, and issues that will be very important to the individual citizens
>>as well, there is one thing you will NOT see. And that is the people and
>>the government saying "Oh gee whiz, it's hard to keep up with this new
>>system, guess we have no choice but to give in and fly wherever the wind
>>happens to blow us".
>
>There are those who believe we are already seeing this right now,
>which is why we aren't seeing a vast grassroots political movement
>saying "This globalization stuff is putting money in the pockets of
>the rich; we've got to ban cheap overseas imports, and return to the
>good old days when unions were strong and TV sets and cars were made
>in America (or Canada, as the case may be)".
I don't see why there would be an unusual impetus toward such a thing,
because it does not in fact seem to be happening. Income inequity in
Canada, for example, is fairly stable and our middle class is definitely
_not_ shrinking. Inequity may be on the rise in the US, but the US is also
in the middle of a boom time with employment at the highest in decades and
so on.
Ian
>>I am aware that Government regulators tend to look the other way at
>>money laundering today. This makes sense because, to a great extent,
>>odious regimes that rule without the consent of the people rely on
>>money laundering to keep their grip on power. The more the
>>kleptocrats' shenanigans are exposed to the public eye, the more
>>ridiculous they look, and the higher chance of their being overthrown.
>>
>>So, you are right that money laundering is widely tolerated. Today.
>>
>>My contention is that if there was the technology to commit perfect
>>crimes, global public opinion would swiftly turn against the
>>e-launderers who abetted it.
>
>I think it would depend upon whom the initial 'perfect crimes' were
>committed. I dare say that if Saddam were the successful target of an
>assassination for hire plot using anonymous money most of the western
>public would just shrug and say good riddance, but the government elite
>would not be so dismissive. There is substantial frustration by many
>global citizens that many governments and their minions routinely
>violate the
>basic human rights of their citizens and that, for economic and
>political reasons, their own democratic governments are either powerless
>to stop
>the carnage or do so only after thousands or even tens of thousands are
>killed. If a 'democratic' means of 'encouraging' an end to these
>criminals were
>easily accessible to the average Netizen I believe enough would
>participate to make this a new global political force to be recconned
>with.
Of course, anonymous e-cash would not be the slightest bit useful in
providing such an impetus. If someone really wants to hire an assassin,
they are going to have to have some personal contact to do it (we're
talking the ultra-sensitive and dangerous job of assassinating a national
leader, not a "hit"), and they can pay in plain old ordinary cash. The
barrier to assassination isn't getting paid, it's the difficulty of
succeeding, surviving the attempt, and managing to escape. The method of
payment is trivial in comparison.
>>I think of the current "private banking"
>>regime of money laundering as a sort of gentleman's agreement. Private
>>bankers will help criminals do their thing, but only up to a point.
>>And the criminal always runs the risk of the private banker exposing
>>his or her identity to the authorities.
>>
>>Okay, maybe not the master criminal's identity, but his agent's. At
>>some point there's usually some kind of face to face contact.
>>
>>E-laundering would be fundamentally different. Here, the shady
>>middleman would not know any identifying information about the parties
>>she is assisting. It would all done by servers, left mostly
>>unattended. Even if the sysadmin of the e-money-laundry wanted to help
>>the authorities, she could not. Thus, the potential for evil is
>>greatly expanded.
>
>Or the potential good. See my comments above.
Except that the supposed potential for good identified above does not in
fact exist. It's getting so I'm no longer stunned by the naivete of people
advocating various anarchist economic schemes.
>>Imagine this. Terrorists announce that they have planted a big bomb in
>>an important heavily-populated building somewhere in the world. Unless
>>50 million anonymous dollars are posted to such and such newsgroup,
>>encrypted with such and such key, within half an hour, the bomb goes
>>off. The money can come from anywhere, as long as it clears. The
>>leaders of the first world refuse to negotiate with the terrorists.
>>The bomb goes off and hundreds of people die. A week later the
>>terrorists post another message asking for money (digitally signed so
>>that there can be no doubt that this is the same group of bad guys).
>>
>>Plausible deniability sounds pretty feeble at this point. They don't
>>call it perfect crime for nothing.
>
>Such crimes can already be committed without anonymous digital cash.
>Instead of the above scenario they merely ask that an leading U.S.
>corporation (e.g., Microsoft, Intel or Cisco) announce dramatically
>lower quaterly results. The criminals have been buying up put options or
>indexes over several months using otherwise normal accounts under phoney
>names.
>The announcement causes a significant price decline and the criminals
>cash
>out their positions. Tracing them down could be on a scale comperable
>with
>the digital cash scenario.
This requires considerably more advanced planning and intelligence on the
part of the criminals. They have to be sophisticated players who know
exactly what they are doing, instead of having e-cash do their work for
them. It requires that someone obtain the cooperation of the corporation
in question to produce payment - which likely has to be a major government
because the corporation cannot really predict the results of the
announcement and the resulting financial trouble is variable. The person
making the payment can be identified, which may cause problems in some
scenarios.
In general, that example shows that while you can perform the "perfect
crime" very simply with e-cash (in terms of collecting payment anonymously,
but you can also perform a possibly as "perfect" crime without e-cash if
you are a skilled planner with the right idea and organization.
Ian
>> If a 'democratic' means of 'encouraging' an end to these
>> criminals were
>> easily accessible to the average Netizen I believe enough would
>> participate to make this a new global political force to be recconned
>> with.
>
>Wow. Like a kind of twisted, charity-funded version of Special
>Circumstances. This one's definitely going in the RPG bag.
Except that it changes nothing from the present day.
Present-day, the US could easily offer a reward on Saddam Hussein's head.
Some large sum of US dollars, payable in cash at a secret location or
whatever. With the cooperation of both sides of the exchange, one of which
is a government for crying out loud, tracing it isn't a realistic option.
The problem is that anyone who attempts to kill Saddam is likely to fail.
Even if he succeeds, he is likely to be caught and have nasty things happen
to him before he escapes. If he does escape Iraq, he can collect his
payment and move somewhere safe, irrespective of what form it came in. The
Iraqis would be tracking his identity, not his money.
Now we add e-cash to the equation. What changes? Nothing.
Ian
>"Christopher J. Henrich" <chen...@monmouth.com> writes:
>
>>I think that in the slave-holding states, there were competent militias,
>>intended to apprehend runaway slaves and suppress slave revolts. Hmm...
>>this throws a drear light on the connection between an armed populace and
>>liberty.
>
>>Chris Henrich
>
>So you're saying the militias were incompetent everywhere except where
>it suits your argument for them to be bad if they're competent?
Don't be foolish. He's saying that the militias were incompetent in
general, as I've said, but competent in the one specific situation he can
confirm, which he draws a conclusion from.
Richard D. Latham
> Is the database you're referring to storing transaction
> information, or just handling the back and forth?
> Seems to me it'd be the latter, as the account information
> is stored on the bank's computer of the ATM card holder.
>
> Also, note that you're talking about a fraction of the
> amount of information. A single transaction on an ATM
> could easily include 10 bills, each of which would have
> to be tracked by serial number. See my post on the
> number of bills in circulation and how often they
> cross bank teller desks.
>
Terry, I scrounged around and found a copy of the press release, and
it points to "http://www.progress.com/benchmark/v91.htm" .
There aren't many technical details there ... but I'm confident that
e-mail to Progress could get you a full disclosure report on the
benchmark composition.
P.S. A paragraph off their web-page states:
"The Progress ATM (Automated Teller Machine) benchmark application
updated the database at a rate of over 6 billion record operations per
day and generated recovery data at a rate of over 360GB per
day. During the benchmark 99.9% of all transactions were completed in
0.1 seconds or less, and 100% of the transactions were completed in
0.6 seconds or less."
... which indicates to me that this application probably is providing
"diasaster recovery" services in addition to providing clearing-house
like services ...
Sounds interesting, and I wish I had more time this month to delve
intot the gory details . (I'm a software perf. analyst, so this is
more than tangentially related to my job in real-life ).
Regards
Tom Knight
Ian wrote:
> Tom Knight <kni...@planetoftheapes.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >> If a 'democratic' means of 'encouraging' an end to these
> >> criminals were
> >> easily accessible to the average Netizen I believe enough would
> >> participate to make this a new global political force to be recconned
> >> with.
> >
> >Wow. Like a kind of twisted, charity-funded version of Special
> >Circumstances. This one's definitely going in the RPG bag.
>
> Except that it changes nothing from the present day.
>
> Present-day, the US could easily offer a reward on Saddam Hussein's head.
> Some large sum of US dollars, payable in cash at a secret location or
> whatever.
I don't think you fully understood. I did say charity funded. The idea seemed
to be that large amounts of ordinary people would each contribute a small
amount to the payment. I don't personally agree with the idea, I just find it
interesting. In the real world, as you point out, it's not really a simple
matter to assassinate political leaders, even if you have government backing.
For example, the enitre Castro thing.