From: Rich Graves <rich@c2.org>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 14:28:51 +0800
To: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: Why BlackNet *IS* a Data Haven
In-Reply-To: <ae3cf6e603021004c004@[205.199.118.202]>
Message-ID: <Pine.GUL.3.95.960818211954.27653A-100000@Networking.Stanford.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

True, for controversial political and artistic materials whose
authors/distributors have an interest in disseminating.

However, with neither a government to enforce contracts nor an identifiable
location/identity that can be used for the private enforcement of, ahem,
contracts, the barrier to entry for anonymous markets in real commercial
products seems rather high. How are buyers and sellers to trust each other?
How do you build reputation capital from zero? Once you have reputation,
transaction costs should be pretty low, but building it?

If what you're selling is a physical product, you're ultimately going to
have a location. If what you're selling is information, how do you
demonstrate the worth and trustworthiness of your data without distributing
it? And once you have distributed it, what's to stop a "counterfeiter" from
redistributing it, stealing your profits before you have had a chance to
establish your reputation capital as the preferred source?

I don't see anonymous digital cash as the tightest bottleneck. Distributed
trust in an anonymous marketplace seems more difficult.

- -rich

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2

iQBVAwUBMhftl5NcNyVVy0jxAQFJNQH/XaNdrku42unvP56Dku+QhPwWged5Qbdw
9wLcrwuSbBLeJg0lgsjN33oXMTTQUWV7JtY8hEhh0zS7WuWcEi5S8A==
=oiuA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----