Back to the Basics in Crypto

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Paul Robichaux makes some good points: (which I'll only quote briefly)

> An unsolicited opinion: one of the best things about cypherpunks'
> early days is that the list members (spurred on by the examples set by
> a few folks) generally posted informative and incisive material to the
> list and kept the flames, potentially-silly questions, and other
> detritus in private e-mail.

Yes, many people have commented on the greater information content of
the "early days." (Interestingly, I sense that the "early days" for
each member are of course that person's early days on the List!)

We each have our favorite interests, even our areas of expertise. So,
in our early days on the List (which for me was a year ago) we
naturally tend to write a lot of essays, raise new points, and
generally act in an enthusiastic, excited way (by excited I don't mean
flaming). After a few months of this, most folks drop their level of
enthusiasm. Very natural and expected...after all, the material is no
longer new.

One just can't keep writing essays about the same material, though
occasionally we see "golden oldies" reposted to the List (as I
recently did with a year-old essay on "Dining Cryptographers").

So, if newcomers want to see new material, and not just reactive
comments, it is largely up to them to find some areas of interest,
gain some relative expertise, and then to write essays or pieces on
these topics.

There's just a huge amount of stuff out there, stuff on "zero
knowledge proof systems," on the existence (or not) of digital coins,
on the nature of data havens and offshore black markets, on
alternatives to RSA, and on and on. Reading and absorbing this stuff
will take any person I know at least a few days of very intensive
reading and thinking (I spent at least six or eight hours in 1989
reading and rereading Chaum's DC-Net paper before it really made sense
to me....no summary on the Net could possibly do it justice or obviate
the need to pore over the paper, preferably in printed form).

My point? If the List gets to be too much for you, what with the
occasional outbreaks of flames and the "trivial" (to some) debates
about foo and bar, then go off and do some very intensive reading of
the cryptographic, banking, and information theory literature,

For example, I just received yesterday a spectacular new book in the
mail: "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity Theory and its
Applications," by Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi (Springer-Verlag, $59, call
800-SPRINGE to order, or find it eventually in your local university
library--maybe). Kolmogorov and Chaitin (and a few others, like
Martin-Lof and Solomonoff...a lot of "loffs" in their!) developed what
is also called "algorithmic information theory (AIT)," which is interested
in issues of randomness, descriptive complexity, etc.

This is currently my main interest, and we had a "virtual seminar"
over on Extropians several months ago on AIT. Nick Szabo, Hal Finney,
and Derek Zahn, all now on the Cypherpunks list as well, were
participants with me in this virtual seminar. Folks actually read some
of the key papers, thought about the issues, and came up with
interesting conclusions about the connections between AIT,
cryptography, neural nets, evolution, and several other things. Very
stimulating!

So, if things are "dragging" here, it's maybe time for folks to go off
and recharge, to "Use the Force, Read the Source." The Net is great,
but it can't possibly convey the sheer depth of information present in
books, formal papers, graphs, equations, etc. The Net is typically a
chat forum, like the coffee house someone remarked on.

But even if coffee houses, folks have to bring something exciting to
talk about.

I'm not chastising anyone....we all have other projects, work, our
private lives, and so on. Not everyone wants to become an expert in
some area, not everyone has the backround. And many of you are
_already_ world-class experts in important areas (inventor of public
key itself reads the list, experts in Unix security do, and on and on).

These experts in most cases did in fact write wonderful essays on some
aspect of what they're interested in, be it spread spectrum
communications, e-mail standards, digital money, steganography,
capability-based systems, whatever. It's understandable that they
don't keep writing the same essays.

("Why not archives?" I hear some of you saying---unless I'm just
hearing voices in my head, of course. Well, the toad.com machine does
have the archives, and hugh Daniel tells me they may someday be
accessible. Also, the List has in some cases been gatewaayed into
local Usenet form, so some sites may already have archives. However,
my experience with archives is that newcomers will perhaps
understandably not wade through several dozen megabytes of archived
postings, and prefer to see currently-written essays instead. A
dilemma we're not likely to solve.)

My biggest conclusion: If the List is not what you want it to be, _make_
it what you want it to be! Stop reading the List for a few days and
instead use the time saved to dig up the "Crypto" Proceedings and the
other crypto materials. You may find some articles that excite you
enough to summarize them for the List or even to prompt you to go off
and try to implement the ideas yourself.

Happy hunting!

--Tim May

-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.