Re: Let's Not Merge Mailing Lists, OK?

[rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)]

I'm cc:-ing this to both lists just this once, because this message is more
or less administrative. I'm not trying to merge www-buyinfo with
cypherpunks.

tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) said:

>There is great danger in constantly "casting the net wider," in trying to
>reach more and more people. I understand the temptation for some on both
>lists to cross-post some messages. I urge that they do this, as Bob H. has
>done on occasion, by personally forwarding the message, with only _one_ of
>the lists getting it. (This because the real danger is as above, where
>multiple lists are in the recipient or cc: fields, and followups semi-spam
>multiple lists.)

I agree with Tim.

I've been doing one-way forwards from cypherpunks to www-buyinfo for most
of a year now.  Most of the people on www-buyinfo are business people who
understand that digital commerce *is* financial cryptography, but they
don't have time to read all of cypherpunks to find the e$ juicy-bits. When
I do this, I put a "(cpx)" in the subject line so that the sizable
community of cypherpunks on www-buyinfo can filter them out and won't have
to see double. I've gotten a lot of fan-mail for this, even though it's not
really in keeping with the original charter for www-buyinfo, which seems to
have been subsumed by other groups, like the e-payments list and others.
Recently Dave Kristol has said that he's going to retool www-buyinfo, and
when he does, I'm hoping to have set up my own structure of 3 hypermail
archived e$ lists (a netwide e$ digest, a discussion list, and a
newsletter). I'm talking to about 3 or 4 different people about it, and I
should have the details worked out within a few days, with an announcement
next week, if I'm lucky.

Anyway, I've sent a few messages in the opposite direction on occasion
(from www-buy to c'punx), but I do try to hold it down, mostly because
whatever the topic is, we've usually talked about it on cypherpunks before.
I should note, however, that there's a good-sized discussion, for www-buy,
anyway, going on over on over there about anonymity, which has heated up
over the past few days. I forwarded a message here from Nick Szabo as an
example of it yesterday. The cross-posting Tim's talking about is a result
of that discussion.

There's a whole lot of "what do we need anonymity for, anyway?" opinion in
the business community, and it should be addressed with as much reason as
possible, and not by shouting them down with moral arguments to the
contrary, no matter how right those moral arguments are. Fortunately, I
believe there's a great business case for anonymity, and frankly, there had
better be, because, in a cryptoanarchic geodesic economy like the one we're
fixing to have, nothing is going to survive without a market.

Anyway, like I said, I agree with Tim.  If you want to post to cypherpunks,
you should subscribe to cypherpunks, and suffer the firehose like the rest
of us have to do. However, those of us who are on both lists, especially
those of us longer-term cypherpunks like Hal, and Nick, and Adam Shostack,
should be the ones to forward messages, if any, to cypherpunks, because
they are the ones who know whether cypherpunks has seen this before.  For
instance, the posting of Nick Szabo's that I sent to cypherpunks was more
of a rah-rah exercise (no pun intended) than anything else. It was so well
thought out that I thought it bore passing around a bit. However, as an
actual contribution to the information content on cypherpunks, what Nick
said has been said on cypherpunks before, if not typically with such
eloquence.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga



-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131
USA (617) 323-7923
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
>>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf@clark.net  http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<