[Cryptography] Curating opinion: Re: Anonymous rendezvous

[jrzx]

On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 6:41 AM jrzx <jrzx at protonmail.ch> wrote:
> > > > If NewEgg and its reviewers were strongly
> > > > pseudonymous, and their product links
> > > > were hashes to immutable data or a third party
> > > > signature to mutable data, it would
> > > > work even better.

PM Salz, Rich via cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:
> > > Why would it be better

Intimidation. Enron.

On Monday, May 10, 2021 9:42 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com> wrote:
> Enron was a very different type of criminal enterprise that was
> made possible by the very 'anti-government', 'free-market'
> rhetoric of which the above is premised.

The question is: What is the advantage of a strongly pseudonymous
moderated message board, with a strongly pseudonymous moderator,
some of whose commenters are also strongly pseudonymous, over a
message board rooted in certificate authority regulated by civic
authorities?

What made Enron possible is that people would sell it stuff on
credit, which it sold for cash.

What made it possible for Enron to buy stuff on credit was that
highly regulated government supervised accountants said it was good
for the money, thus civic authority could and would force it to pay
its debts.

What made people believe this obvious untruth (a lot of people
noticed that Enron was buying dear, selling cheap, and making it up
on volume) is that respectable government regulated accountants
said so and other respectable accountants were reluctant to call
out the books, which eventually had to be called out by
disrespectable accountants who did not have respectable accounting
jobs.

So, what made Enron possible was intimidation.

In this case, intimidation by the respectable and well connected,
though in other cases there was no lack of intimidation by the
(secretly) well connected but considerably less respectable.

We know it was intimidation because, after much public cynicism
about Enron's books by non accountants, Enron's books were called
out by accountants without accounting jobs.

> California had a completely serviceable means of producing and
> distributing electricity. It was boring as heck but it worked
> since Loomis and co financed rural electrification in the 1930s.
> The whole enterprise ran as a regulated public utility.
>
> Then the Grifters Obvious Party came along and persuaded people
> that 'deregulation' would be so much more efficient.

That most of what Enron was selling was deregulated electricity is
irrelevant to the basic structure of the fraud, and thus irrelevant
to cryptography, except that the nature of electricity makes it
easy to have direct delivery from the man you buy from on credit,
to the man you sell to for cash.

The electricity distribution system in California is getting us a
long way from discussion of cryptography.

Enron is relevant because fraud and accounting is relevant.
What is the best system for electrical power distribution in
California is not,

> Frauds the scale of Enron are unusual in the regulated finance
> industry and they are usually made possible by corrupt
> politicians being paid to pass legislation to remove regulations

Are they unusual?

Weimar Papiermark, French Assignat, the Continental Currency, and
the Great Mortgage Meltdown.

The reason so few Continentals were issued as coins, is that by
the time they got around to stamping out dollar coins in pewter,
the pewter was worth more than a Continental.

Will the same thing happen with crypto currency? To some of them,
certainly. It is far too easy to issue more Dogecoin, and issuing more
Monaro is alarmingly undetectable.

But with a proof of work crypto currency, inflating the currency requires
the consensus of miners, who do not seem all that keen on inflation,
and with a proof of stake currency, it requires the consensus of the
stakeholders, who are always keen on deflation.

There are certainly a lot of scams in crypto currency, but the claim that
bitcoin is a scam has not fared well. What was it worth when you first
called Bitcoin a scam?

And the claim that you can trust the government and the courts has run
into some bad weather in recent years. No one went to jail in the Great Mortgage Meltdown, and the cpi today smells as funny as most of those mortgages did
back then. If you cannot trust the cpi, can you trust the Federal Reserve?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20210513/74889c16/attachment.htm>