Hughes Markets? (Was Re: Copyright commerce and the streetmusician protocol)

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 8:24 pm -0500 on 11/5/97, Ian Grigg wrote:

> DEFCON IV was well before FC97.  This was an issue I was chasing Eric
> Hughes on.  As far as I understand it, this was unpublished in any form,
> just presented, but many people have saw it (must have been a big
> conference :-).  If anyone knows any different, please let me know
> (except, "get in touch with Eric" because that was not resultful).

Fine.

Since it seems -- for the time being -- Eric was the first person to figure
this stuff out and talk about it publically (so, what else is new? :-)), we
should give him credit for it.

A whole bunch of people are now talking about these cash-settled recursive
auction processes, and they're a direct, and now obvious, consequence of
bearer (or at least instant) settlement markets for information on geodesic
networks. When you add anonymity to the transaction, you pretty much have
the final straw for "rights" tracking. Watermarks just tell you who the
information was stolen from, for instance. So, one more industrial
information process bites the dust.

And, since a lot of people, like myself :-), claim that anonymous bearer
settlement will be the cheapest way to effect a transaction in an
internetworked environment, then this kind of market process should
approach ubiquity sooner or later, and we should have a nice short name for
it. :-).

So, I propose that we call these things "Hughes markets" or "Hughes
auctions" or something. At least until we find the apocryphal 1940's
Atlantic Monthly article, like they did with hypertext. :-).

If it *does* turn out that Eric was the first person to see this, he might
end up with a trip to Stockholm someday...

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga






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