From: yanek@novavax.nova.edu (Yanek Martinson)
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 14:55:51 PST
To: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Subject: enabling technologies
In-Reply-To: <9212172233.AA06614@netcom.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <9212172254.AA21668@novavax.nova.edu>
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> I'm amazed at the progress everybody's making on so many fronts.
> 
> --Tim

What we are witnessing (and participating in) here is the synergy of 
enabling technologies.  The availability of quality free software
such as perl, and C compilers makes it easy to quickly build useful
tools.  These can then be combined in various ways, without re-inventing
them.  For example, I do not need to reinvent the strong-pseudorandom
function, I can just "borrow" it from the PGP code.  I do not need to
write a public key system just to distribute seeds for the dc-net 
one-time pads system, I can use PGP.  I don't need to write a program
to take chunks of data and xor them together, perl has this capability.

I just design a system, and put it together from existing blocks.  This
is the reality of what the OOP "building-blocks" people are talking about.

And the important method is not object-oriented anything, but free
software, with source code, and cooperation of people widely separated
in time and space, some even anonymous, all linked through the nets.

My dc-net system will make life easier for people that are doing digital
cash, by providing a ready means of sending untraceable messages.

Many useful systems can be built on top of a working digital cash system.

All this is catalysed by the existence of this mailing list.  For example
I got the idea of reservation blocks from ILF's post of Chaum's article.

That was made possible by the anonymous remailers.

The anonymous remailers can be made more anonymous by linking then into
a dc-net.

There's a positive feedback loop developing here.


--
Yanek Martinson    mthvax.cs.miami.edu!safe0!yanek     uunet!medexam!yanek
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