At 07:29 PM 4/10/2002 -0700, Tim May wrote: >How do we trust bits to represent money? >I argue that the question is, as stated, not well-grounded at this time.
I agree. It is interesting to be back on cypherpunks after a five or more year vacation, only to find most of the same discussions we had ten years ago. >Trust. Trust is a misleading concept. I think this is key. Trust was used in the early crypto papers as a handy word that had very little of the emotional baggage that people place on it now. The whole mangling of Certification Authorities and whether trust is transitive is missing the point. Alice trusts money because she can get ice cream cones. Banks exchange bits thru the ACH networks based on a belief that their exchange is valid. Bits are bits, there is no way to know that the bits are special; yet there is a cultural contract that allows money to move. Recent discussions talk about money in consumer terms. Banks move millions on faith alone. Large banks, mortgage houses, etc. move billions of dollars (with a B) with far less real security than many cypherpunks would use to secure a Tim May rant. >Furthermore, the entire "is-a" object model, where "is-a bank" and "has-an account >balance of" can and SHOULD (IMO) be replaced with a more realistic and more >interesting model of "believes." All of digital money is recastable in terms of Alice >believes, Bob believes, Charles believes, etc. All of finance is about belief. Yes, Bank A believes that the bits coming down the Fedwire belong to Bank B. That is how money moves today. And there is a risk that this is not true, which is one of the things banks are paid to do: assess the probability of getting paid back for a transaction, and charging accordingly. We need to ask better questions if we expect to stop talking about the same real and imagined problems ten years from now. Pat Pat Farrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pfarrell.com
