[17847] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: the limits of crypto and authentication
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (R.A. Hettinga)
Wed Jul 13 12:01:33 2005
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.0.20050712144002.02bc3b10@pop.idiom.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 19:17:39 -0400
To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>, cryptography@metzdowd.com,
perry@piermont.com
From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
At 2:48 PM -0700 7/12/05, Bill Stewart wrote:
>It'd be nice if good crypto and authentication methods
>could create a market for improved products
It can, it does, and it's called significantly reduced risk-adjusted
transaction cost in financial econ-speak. Maybe the marketing droids need
to come up with a 50's-era "secret" ingredient, a cryptographic
"Floristan(tm)", but frankly, I don't think they're going to have to.
Frankly, however, I think that reduced transaction costs creates
*dis*economies of scale by reducing barriers to market entry and thus
firm-size, and reducing proprietary anything to fungible graded commodities
traded in so-called (see your Econ 51 textbook) perfectly competitive
markets, instead of monopolistic competition (brands, trademarks, patents
and other artifacts of batch-driven industrial production), which is what
we have today. Think of it as the financial equivalent of grey-goo, or,
better, blood-music, or whatever.
Linux vs Novel/MS-DOS/Unix(tm) for instance, or, again better, IETF-esque
protocols replacing various proprietary secret-sauce bit-slinging methods.
BTW, Perry, I think that as we get to online instantaneity for every
transaction, we eventually converge to pre-underwritten pre-encrypted
pre-authenticated quasi-anonymous unique value-bits circulating on public
networks: internet bearer financial cryptography protocols, in other words.
Cheers,
RAH
"But you *knew* I was gonna say *that*, right?"
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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