Tim May: Cyberspace, Crypto Anarchy, and Pushing Limits

1994 Apr 3 See all posts
Tim May: Cyberspace, Crypto Anarchy, and Pushing Limits @ Satoshi Nakamoto
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Tim May

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[11208]  daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy C. May) Cypherpunks 04/03/94 22:18 (198 lines)
Subject: Cyberspace, Crypto Anarchy, and Pushing Limits
From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 1994 19:16:49 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)

This messages touches on two topics of recent interest (to some) here:

  1. Setting up payment systems for message transmission, to handle the issues of "mailbombing" and "flooding" in a more natural way (locality of reference, user of a service pays, avoidance of the "Morris Worm" explosion effects which could've happened with Detweiler bombed us, as Hal noted).

  2. The general issue of "Cyberspace." This lies at the root of some recent disagreements here, and is worthy of more discussion. Crypto will make this a very real cusp issue in the next several years.

Why debate it now? What could possibly come out of such a debate?

It happens that I'm reading a wonderful new book by Kip Thorne, entitled "Black Holes and Space Warps." This is widely available in bookstores, in hardback only at this time. ($30, but it's a whopping big book, and I got it at Barnes and Noble for $24. Speaking of Barnes and Noble, the Santa Clara store is selling Li and Vitanyi's "Intro. to Kolmogorov Complexity" book for $44, before the 20% hardback discount, which may be a mispricingm, as I paid $60 for mine. Check it out if you're interested....I think there were two copies.)

Thorne has spent 30 years studying gravitational collapse and black holes, and was a coauthor of the famed 1973 book on "Gravitation," which I got to use in a Xeroxed form for my general relativity class in 1973.

The point? Thorne describes his involvement with Carl Sagan in working out the physics of time travel via wormholes. Thorne had an epiphany: however unlikely the engineering or financing of something is, there is something valuable to be gained in examining the absolute limits of what is possible without regard for engineering practicalities. Thus, he and his students looked into the implications of an extremely advanced civilization able to somehow hold open the mouth of a wormhole. The conclusions are fascinating and led to a new line of thinking about the structure of space-time.

Pushing limits and seeing "ideal" behavior is invigorating.

The connection to crypto is this: Perhaps we should be thinking more about the implicaitons and effects of strong crypto, digital money, ideal remailers, etc., assuming that certain practical problems that bedevil us today are, or soon will be, solved. To some extent we already do this, as when we discuss Chaum's ideal mixes in the same way engineer's discuss ideal op amps–a useful abstraction of behavior in the limit that lesser, real world implementations can then be contrasted with.

And of course many of us have found Vernor Vinge's "True Names" to be an excellent (and quickly readable) treatment of how things could work in a world of fast, cheap, and secure communication. Other writers have seen things differently (e.g., "Shockwave Rider," "1984," "Snow Crash").

Here, to cut to the chase, are some brief statements of what I see as the "behavior in the limits." I won't elaborate on them right now.

This is the "crypto anarchy" I have been writing about since 1988. Cyberspace will turn out to be a far vaster frontier than anything we have seen so far. With "only" 10^70 or so particles in the entire universe, there's vastly more "space" (address space, key space, etc.) in even a relatively small set of digits. Cyberspace is mathematical space, and its spaciousness is truly unlimited.

And we'll be moving our trade, our entertainment, and much of our lives into cyberspace a whole lot faster than we'll be slowly moving into low Earth orbit and beyond. In fact, I consider that I'm already half-way in. In a few years, with Mosaic-like one-touch connectivity, with a plethora of network choices, with secure remailers and similar tools to anonymize my transactions, I'll be so far in there'll be turning back.

Enough for these remarks rigth now. I think it makes sense to take a slightly longer-range view of the inevitable trends, to see where we're going, to see what issues need more work.

I hope some of you agree with me.

– Tim May