1996-09-11 - Re: Crypto Anachy MUD

Header Data

From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: aeb3af75098dad3fed01030dbb7625ce9fb153901a9d8098335b9ae93dd0be79
Message ID: <199609110534.WAA14548@mail.pacifier.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1996-09-11 07:58:44 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 15:58:44 +0800

Raw message

From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 15:58:44 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Crypto Anachy MUD
Message-ID: <199609110534.WAA14548@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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
jimbell@pacifier.com





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