Re: A Geodesic Society?

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

At 10:18 AM 2/20/98 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>The following is something I wrote for a private online conference
>sponsored by Nikkei, the Japanese financial news organization. Since
>they're supposedly combing the list for quotable bon mots, I may end up in
>the Japanese papers. :-).
Heh - West Coast Cypherpunks end up on Japanese TV :-)

Good article.  If you're trying to emphasize the financial stuff, 
moving it up to the beginning would help, but I don't know the audience 
you wrote it for.  A few nitpicks:

>Okay. Now let's look at the future, shall we? Oddly enough, the "future"
>starts with the grant of telephone monopoly to AT&T in the 1920's in
>exchange for universal telephone service. When AT&T figured out that a
>majority of people would have to be telephone operators for that to happen,
>it started to automate switching, from electricomechanical, to electronic
>(the transistor was invented at Ball Labs, remember), to, finally,
>semiconducting microprocessors.  

_Bell_ Labs, and BTW they developed one of the first 8-bit microprocessors;
the MAC-8 was used for building telephone things back in late 4004 days.
However, the Electro-Mechanical telephone switch was Not Invented Here -
Strowger developed it to protect privacy and increase reliability
(he suspected that a competitor had bribed the telephone operator to
connect customers to the competitor's business instead of Strowger's.)
He offered it for sale to the Bell Telephone Companies, who were too
clueless to see the economics and buy it; they caught on a few years later,
and had to pay tons of money to the competitor who'd licensed the patent. 

> But, what, you ask, do I do when someone defrauds me? .....
> In a geodesic market, if someone commits fraud, everyone knows it. 
> Instantly. And, something much worse than incarceration happens to
> that person. That person's reputation "capital" disappears. 

The difficulty, of course, is that geodesic markets with bearer 
instruments make it easy to do business anonymously - so everyone
may know that fraud was committed, but not know who committed it.
(Like the US political excuse "Mistakes were made".)
The lack of need for accounts and reputation capital is part of what
makes geodesic markets financially advantageous.  On the other hand,
reconciling these differences is complex enough that cryptographers
and financial folks can make big bucks getting it right :-)
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639