From: frissell@panix.com (Duncan Frissell)
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 12:07:20 PDT
To: Jason W Solinsky <solman@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Cyberspatial governments?
Message-ID: <199408301906.AA22809@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:39 AM 8/30/94 EDT, Jason W Solinsky wrote:

>You were
>writing about the problems of anonymous entities and suggested that
>you would have difficulty dealing with such entities because there is
>no way for you to know when a company you are dealing with undergoes a
>substantial change. But look at the physical realm. What is it that makes
>companies disclose changes in their upper management? Why do they announce
>major deals publicly? Why do they discuss strategy in their quarterly
>filings? They might well be motivated to disclose positive things without
>SEC regulations, but negative events show up because a government is
forcing them to make those disclosures.

An advanced telecommunications environment offers a number of ways to
protect yourself against the problems involved in dealing with anonymous
entities in a situation in which there is no monopoly Government. 

(Might I suggest that we adopt the typographic convention of using an upper
case 'G' to spell Government when we are speaking of The Great Enemy and a
lower case 'g' to refer to things like self government or corporate
government or engine government.)

When one's PBX finds that one's call is not going through via a particular
long distance carrier, it automatically switches to another one.  It is easy
to imagine one's intelligent agents testing various sorts of transaction
completions and switching vendors when one fails.  Professional checkers can
supply information on vendor status for a fee.  After all, we don't care if
a company we are dealing with changes if its service is unaffected.  

Eric Hughes is working on another approach, an Open Books protocol which
will let companies post anonymous but checkable sets of accounts which can
be accessed by anyone on the nets, can't be easily spoofed but give no
private info to anyone else.  Sort of Zero Knowledge Proof Bookkeeping.
(Could we call this triple-entry bookkeeping?)

It is important to note in any case that the use of third-party escrow as a
substitute for Government regulation was a feature of the Northern European
semi-anarchies of Iceland and Ireland that have informed modern libertarian
thought.  I doubt that my old Poli Sci prof Don Balmer would consider an
escrow company to be the equivalent of the Government of the United States.

DCF

"Though he may be poor
He will never be a slave"