Re: The Bank of the Internet!?

[Jim McCoy <mccoy@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

Arthur Chandler <arthurc@crl.com> writes:
>
>   It jarred me to see someone so blithely planning to enter into the world
> of international finance from an essentially "outsider" frame of
> reference. [...]
>
>   Put bluntly, any plans to enter international finance without a
> substantial component aimed at lining up political and traditional
> financial clout seems to me to be doomed to the dustbin of visionary
> schemes.  After the smoke clears, we are far more likely to see Chase
> Manhattan with a platoon of hired cryptologists than EFF or Cypherpunks
> wheeling and dealing on a global scale.

It has to start somewhere pal.  We are trying to start something small for
a specific reason (at least I am, I do not presume to speak for Doug or the
other cypherpunks working with us on the austin digital credit union):

	We want to be the ones who will define the protocol for currency on
	the net.

We have specific goals regarding privacy and security which may be at odds
with certain members of the traditional finance power structure.  If you
know anything about how network protocols really come into being it is
because someone actually goes out, does the damn coding, and then people
refine that work later.  We want to score first so that others are forced
to follow our lead, it only takes a small push at the beginning to
determine the course of certain phenomena.

I could care less if eventually the Citicorps and Chase Manhattans enter
our arena and provide real banking services to the net.  In fact, I one day
hope to pitch them on that very idea.  The point of our work down here is
that we want to define the currency.  We want to make it secure, private,
and anonymous.  What kind of standards your future net.bank may have on
transaction records and other items relating to the net currency is between
you and your bank, I want to make sure that the currency itself gives the
possiblity for the highest possible levels of these "cypherpunk qualities". 

We are staring small and have no real plans on becoming future banking
powerhouses (The Gnomes of Austin perhaps... :) but we would rather it be
us who define the standard than Chase Manhattan or the US Government.

jim mccoy