"R. A. Hettinga" wrote: > > The Third Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering Conference > > This is so fucking boring. No one gets laid any more for doing FC.
No, no, NO!! You are talking about Financial Cryptography, the conferences running on a bunch of Caribbean islands. Very different animal :-) The original goal for a mixed business and law and accounting and a tad of crypto was perverted into YACC - yet another crypto conference - and became very academic, very mathematical, very crypto, very junior, and very ignorable. (Even if I do say so myself, having presented two papers at FC. :-) Nobody that I ever heard of got laid at FC. That's why we started EFCE. Literally we, the waiting debutantes, got bored of not getting any after our 3rd (4th?) attempt at the prom. How many dresses does a girl have to buy? So we rewrote the rules to be a. everything that FC doesn't do, and b. nothing that FC does. And it worked. We got laid, or, at least, some of us did. As programme chair for the first two EFCEs, I monitored the mating patterns of FCers with interest. I found that one third of the presenters managed to close/advance/secure deals that moved money into their pockets. Not huge amounts, I grant you. FC - the art - really does suffer from the academic throw-more-formulas at yet-another- hype-problem legacy of FC - the conference. People simply don't expect it to go anywhere because of that. So when the money turns up (several banks, several regulatory types, several settlement types) to EFCE, they get caught by surprise. Often times, nothing gets consumated because the guys don't come in the appropriate dress, and have to ask us ladies for phone numbers instead. Which is why, when the *2nd* EFCE happened, another 1/3 of the presenters walked around with knowing, self-satisfied smiles. > Who cares for Yet Another Implementation of Something That No One Will Ever > Use ? Nobody. But, you *are* invited to present it at EFCE, and there you get to tap into the combined market wisdom of *why* no one will ever use that system. You won't get that anywhere else. You certainly won't get it at FC, as they are mostly interested in the crypto content, which is not compatible with a business assessment at all. Go to FC and you will hear about voting (with crypto), content protection (with crypto), cracking machines (of crypto). Yet another session on the unworkable CA model (another fine waste of good crypto). More crypto than you know what to do with. Come to EFCE and find out why your business sucks. See how transactions are done. Measure them. Watch them fail. See how your competitors already thought of it and coded it several years ago. Watch the presenters get courted by the audience, with numbers (yes, we rated the presentations with numbers)! > We have credit cards. Nothing will ever replace them, in spite of 2% > transaction fees. Oh, you are assuming a retail application. There are many interesting applications in FC, and retail is only one of them. The systems that have succeeded have not done so within retail. For example, PayPal succeeded in e-bay auction settlements. PS: everything above is past history; this year I probably won't make EFCE, and Rodney Thayer is doing the programme chair. He might change the dress code somewhat, and other elements of the courting protocol. Up to him. -- iang
