From: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 06:58:01 +0800
To: William Knowles <adam@homeport.org>
Subject: Re: (eternity) autonomous agents
In-Reply-To: <199801132039.PAA14695@homeport.org>
Message-ID: <v03102803b0e19e7f4d1e@[207.167.93.63]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:

>If I remember Black Unicorn's posts some months back about the
>Seychelles, The Rene government will protect you from extradition
>from any country with their military for what? $6 million?

Or until a higher bid comes in....

Really, there is no security in meatspace. Not compared to the security
mathematics provides.

Whether floating offshore barges or abandoned oil rigs or compliant Third
World dictatorships, no "data haven" with an identifiable nexus in
meatspace will last for long, at least not serving all types of materials.

When I read Sterling's "Islands in the Net," in 1988, I was initially upset
that he'd "discovered" my own developing ideas about data havens (though I
called it crypto anarchy), but then pleased to see how he he'd missed the
boat on the role cyberspace and strong crypto would inevitably play.

But the legacy of "data havens" is that people get the wrong idea, by
thinking of a data haven as a "place." In actuality, what's important are
the retrieval mechanisms, not the place things are possibly stored.

Hence approaches like Blacknet.

(The parallels with the international money system are obvious...it is less
important each year that passes just "where" the underlying store of value
is physically stored. There are some important issues and differences,
though.)


--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."