[Cryptography] Chaum Has a Plan to End the Crypto War

[Robert Hettinga]

> On Jan 7, 2016, at 8:57 AM, arxlight <arxlight at arx.li> wrote:
> 
> Call me crazy but there have been times past were I have wondered if
> Chaum wasn't one of the worst things that has happened to cryptography.
> Or at least the effective merger of cryptography and finance, which is
> maybe the same thing.

:-)

Remember that finance has always been cryptographic. Authentication is very important. Seals on bullae representing assets for trade go all the way back to the Sumerians in the 8th century BC. Chops and sigils and seals required to authenticate transactions are older. 

Writing was invented to count. Book-entry transactions are as old as writing.


> Now we have what amounts to the Chaumian "Star Chamber."  I'm not sure
> exactly how I feel about that, except that all I need to start
> distrusting "trusted councils" is to watch what the permanent members of
> the United Nations Security Council end up voting unanimously on.

I believe the proper term of financial cryptographic art is airy-fairy statist happy horseshit. :-) Okay. The cryptography works. Until the rubber hoses come out. Somewhere Thomas Sowell is laughing at William Godwin again…

> Lots of questions crop up.

They sure do, don’t they?


> It all sounds very 1990s era X.509 to me.

Yup. There's an echo in here…


> Perhaps now is a good time to coin the term "Chaumian Quagmire”.

One has to forgive quasi-state-funded academics their quasi-statism. The paradox of modern financial cryptography is that it was invented by leftist academics to prevent businesses from knowing who we were doing business with.

It was discovered by Rothbardian anarchocapitalists as a panacea against totalizing statism, then it was evangelized, *cough*, by (now-not-so-)Hamiltonian conservatives as a way to dramatically collapse transaction costs and achieve Freedom Through World Trade.

Fortunately, as bad as it looks, The Future is not only unevenly distributed, but it’s also very much Out Of Control, Kevin, which is what we all wanted. Mostly.

I personally think Chaum’s pissing in the wind, here.

It’s like me thinking I could walk Chaumian protocols into the front door of the financial system on transaction costs alone, surfing the dot-com bubble right into the brick wall of 9/11.

I watched the actual End of The Happy Cypherpunk Future, oddly enough, in Cayman at FC00. 

People spent a two hour pre-lunch session and most of the allotted lunch hour trying to desperately pound the Undo button on Bush’s election. I noted at the time, after standing second in line behind Jean Camp and her mean rock-throwing left arm, that cryptography allowed us to be anonymous only if we could sell our votes, and that in finance, that was called “equity”, which didn’t go down too well.

The gravity of The Forward March Into The Free (as in speech) Cypherpunk Future lessened somehow, degenerate rent-seeking electron pressure reasserted itself, and we all became Republicans and Democrats again. Maybe we never were anything else after all. It was good while it lasted, but maybe it’s not over, even now.

Notice that book-entry settlement and bearer transactions are as old as writing itself. Trading cryptographically unique tokens *caused* writing, which was invented for accounting. Nothing ever goes away.

Cheers,
RAH
Anguilla, BWI