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Re: Crypto Anachy MUD
At 12:01 AM 9/10/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
>At 5:10 AM 9/10/96, Jon Leonard wrote:
>>Duncan Frissell wrote:
>>> Did anyone make the point (I gave up on the thread) that we already have a
>>> great Crypto Anarchy MUD with lots of the coding already done. We call it
>>> the Internet. Digital cash, strong crypto, remailers, everything.
>>
>>Tim May expressed doubt that it was worth the effort: Not much easier
>>than the real thing, and not as good. That's the closest to your point,
>>I think.
>....
>>Finally, a MUD has the potential to spread crypto-anarchic ideas to people
>>who would not otherwise have considered them.
>>
>>It may be that I'm wasting my time, but I could come up with some useful
>>new crypto protocol too.
>
>Don't tar me with the "Tim said it was a waste of time" label. Rather, I
>said I thought it would be pretty tough to get a reasonable ontology, one
>with rich enough behaviors and reasonable incentives and disincentives.
>Simulations are an art...they were useful in nuclear war planning, where
>the degrees of freedom were constrained, and so on.
Jon Leonard made it clear to me that he was planning a human-assisted
game/MUD, rather than a computer simulation. His explanation is that it is
difficult to implement an unbiased simulation, because it is difficult to
"simulate" a human. But putting people controlling characters into the
equation restores the "human element" which arguably will make the results
more realistic. Makes sense to me.
The one item I suggested was that instead of people controlling individual
characters in this MUD, they control a "weighted character" whose weight
depends on the number of people of that type in the society. After all, in
the path towards a crypto anarchy-type situation, people will naturally have
to migrade away from government-oriented solutions, and towards other jobs.
Some will be killed, some will retire, some will switch jobs, etc. Turning
such a group into a weighted character would allow their number to reflect
societal changes a more quantitatively than individual characters.
Jim Bell
[email protected]