0outofcontrol-kevinkelly

https://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/ooc-mf.pdf
Chapter 12 (pg 176-197)
E-Money
 Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins
In Tim May’s eyes a digital tape is a weapon as potent and subversive as a shouldermounted
Stinger missile. May (fortyish, trim beard, ex-physicist) holds up a $9.95 digital
audio tape, or DAT. The cassette—just slightly fatter than an ordinary cassette—contains
a copy of Mozart equivalent in fidelity to a conventional digital compact disc. DAT
can hold text as easily as music. If the data is smartly compressed, one DAT purchased
at K-Mart can hold about 10,000 books in digital form.
One DAT can also completely cloak a smaller library of information interleaved
within the music. Not only can the data be securely encrypted within a digital tape, but
the library’s existence on the tape would be invisible even to powerful computers. In the
scheme May promotes, a computer hard disk’s-worth of coded information could be
made to disappear inside an ordinary digital tape of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The vanishing act works as follows. DAT records music in 16 binary digits, but that
precision is beyond perception. The difference contained in the 16th bit of the signal is
too small to be detected by the human ear. An engineer can substitute a long message—a
book of diagrams, a pile of data spreadsheets (in encrypted form)—into the positions
of the 16th bits of music. Anyone playing the tape would hear Michael Jackson crooning
in the exact digital quality they would hear on a purchased Thriller tape. Anyone
examining the tape with a computer would see only digital music. Only by matching an
Tim May, cypherpunk.
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untampered-with tape with the encrypted one bit by bit on a computer could someone
detect the difference. Even then, the random-looking differences would appear to be
noise acquired while duping a digital tape through an analog CD player (as is normally
done). Finally, this “noise” would have to be decrypted (not likely) to prove that it was
something other than noise.
“What this means,” says May, “is that already it is totally hopeless to stop the flow
of bits across borders. Because anyone carrying a single music cassette bought in a
store could carry the entire computerized files of the stealth bomber, and it would be
completely and totally imperceptible.” One tape contains disco music. The other tape
contains disco and the essential blueprints of a key technology.
Music isn’t the only way to hide things, either. “I’ve done this with photos, “ says
May. “I take a digitized photo posted on the Net, download it into Adobe Photoshop,
and then strip an encrypted message into the least significant bit in each pixel. When I
repost the image, it is essentially indistinguishable from the original.”
The other thing May is into is wholly anonymous transactions. If one takes the
encryption methods developed by military agencies and transplants them into the vast
terrain of electronic networks, very powerful—and very unbreakable—technologies of
anonymous dealing become possible. Two complete strangers could solicit or supply
information to each other, and consummate the exchange with money, without the least
chance of being traced. That’s something that cannot be securely done with phones and
the post office now.
It’s not just spies and organized crime who are paying attention. Efficient means
of authentication and verification, such as smart cards, tamper-proof networks, and
micro-size encryption chips, are driving the cost of ciphers down to the consumer level.
Encryption is now affordable for the everyman.
The upshot of all this, Tim believes, is the end of corporations in their current form
and the beginning of more sophisticated, untaxed black markets. Tim calls this movement
Crypto Anarchy. “I have to tell you I think there is a coming war between two
forces,” Tim May confides to me. “One force wants full disclosure, an end to secret dealings.
That’s the government going after pot smokers and controversial bulletin boards.
The other force wants privacy and civil liberties. In this war, encryption wins. Unless the
government is successful in banning encryption, which it won’t be, encryption always
wins.”
A couple of years ago May wrote a manifesto to alert the world to the advent of
widespread encryption. In this electronic broadside published on the Net, he warned of
the coming “specter of crypto anarchy”:
...The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing
national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and
fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will
allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be
traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets
for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users
of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.
Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds
and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the
nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined
with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for
any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly
minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and
farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West,
so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come 
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to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.
The manifesto was signed:
Timothy C. May, Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks,
digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets,
collapse of government.
I asked Tim May, a retired Intel physicist, to explain the connection between
encryption and the collapse of society as we know it. May explained, “Medieval guilds
would monopolize information. When someone tried to make leather or silver outside
the guilds, the King’s men came in and pounded on them because the guild paid a levy
to the King. What broke the medieval guilds was printing; someone could publish a
treatise on how to tan leather. In the age of printing, corporations arose to monopolize
certain expertise like gunsmithing, or making steel. Now encryption will cause the
erosion of the current corporate monopoly on expertise and proprietary knowledge.
Corporations won’t be able to keep secrets because of how easy it will be to sell information
on the nets.”
The reason crypto anarchy hasn’t broken out yet, according to May, is that the
military has a monopoly on the key knowledge of encryption—just as the Church once
tried to control printing. With few exceptions, encryption technology has been invented
by and for the world’s military organizations. To say that the military is secretive about
this technology would be an understatement. Very little developed by the U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA)—whose mandate it is to develop crypto systems—has ever
trickled down for civilian use, unlike technologies spun off from the rest of the military/
industrial alliance.
But who needs encryption, anyway? Only people with something to hide, perhaps.
Spies, criminals, and malcontents. People whose appetite for encryption may be thwarted
righteously, effectively, and harshly.
The ground shifted two decades ago when the information age arrived, and intelligence
became the chief asset of corporations. Intelligence was no longer the monopoly
of the Central Intelligence Agency, but the subject of seminars for CEOs. Spying meant
corporate spying. Illicit transfer of corporate know-how, rather than military plans,
became the treasonous information the state had to worry about.
In addition, within the last decade, computers became fast and cheap; enciphering
no longer demanded supercomputers and the superbudgets need to run them. A generic
brand PC picked up at a garage sale could handle the massive computations that decent
encryption schemes consumed. For small companies running their entire business on
PCs, encryption was a tool they wanted on their hard disks.
And now, within the last few years, a thousand electronic networks have blossomed
into one highly decentralized network of networks. A network is a distributed thing without
a center of control, and with few clear boundaries. How do you secure something
without boundaries? Certain types of encryption, it turns out, are an ideal way to bring
security to a decentralized system while keeping the system flexible. Rather than trying
to seal out trouble with a rigid wall of security, networks can tolerate all kinds of crap if
a large portion of its members use peer-to-peer encryption.
Suddenly, encryption has become incredibly useful to ordinary people who have
“nothing to hide” but their privacy. Peer-to-peer encryption, sown into the Net, linked
with electronic payments, tied into everyday business deals, becomes just another business
tool like fax machines or credit cards.
Just as suddenly, tax-paying citizens—whose dollars funded the military ownership
of this technology—want the technology back.
But the government (at least the U.S. government) may not give encryption back 
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to the people for a number of antiquated reasons. So, in the summer of 1992, a loose
federation of creative math hackers, civil libertarians, free-market advocates, genius
programmers, renegade cryptologists, and sundry other frontier folk, began creating,
assembling, or appropriating encryption technology to plug into the Net. They called
themselves “cypherpunks.”
On a couple of Saturdays in the fall of 1992, I joined Tim May and about 15 other
crypto-rebels for their monthly cypherpunk meeting held near Palo Alto, California. The
group meets in a typically nondescript office complex full of small hi-tech start-up companies.
It could be anywhere in Silicon Valley. The room has corporate gray carpeting
and a conference table. The moderator for this meeting, Eric Hughes, tries to quiet the
cacophony of loud, opinionated voices. Hughes, with sandy hair halfway down his back,
grabs a marker and scribbles the agenda on a whiteboard. The items he writes down
echo Tim May’s digital card: reputations, PGP encryption, anonymous re-mailer update,
and the Diffie-Hellmann key exchange paper.
After a bit of gossip the group gets down to business. It’s class time. One member,
Dean Tribble, stands up front to report on his research on digital reputations. If you are
trying to do business with someone you know only as a name introducing some e-mail,
how can you be sure they are legit? Tribble suggests that you can buy a reputation from
a “trust escrow”—a company similar to a title or bond company that would guarantee
someone for a fee. He explains the lesson from game theory concerning iterated negotiation
games, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma; how payoffs shift when playing the game over
and over instead of just once, and how important reputations become in iterated relationships.
The potential problems of buying and selling reputations online are chewed
on, and suggestions of new directions for research are made, before Tribble sits down
and another member stands to give a brief talk. Round the table it goes.
Arthur Abraham, dressed in heavy studded black leather, reviews a recent technical
paper on encryption. Abraham flicks on an overhead projector, whips out some transparencies
painted with equations, and walks the group through the mathematical proof.
It is clear that the math is not easy for most. Sitting around the table are programmers
(many self-taught), engineers, consultants—all very smart—but only a single member
is equipped with a background in mathematics. “What do you mean by that?” questions
one quiet fellow as Abraham talks. “Oh, I see, you forgot the modulus,” chimes in
another guy. “Is that ‘a to the x’ or ‘a to the y’? The amateur crypto-hackers challenge
each statement, asking for clarification, mulling it over until each understands. The
hacker mind, the programmer’s drive to whittle things down to an elegant minimum,
to seek short cuts, confronts the academic stance of the paper. Pointing to a large hunk
of one equation, Dean asks, “Why not just scrap all this?” A voice from back: “That’s a
great question, and I think I know why not.” So the voice explains. Dean nods. Arthur
looks around to be sure everyone got it. Then he goes on to the next line in the paper;
those who understand help out those who don’t. Soon the room is full of people saying,
“Oh, that means you can serve this up on a network configuration! Hey, cool!” And
another tool for distributed computing is born; another component is transferred from
the shroud of military secrecy to the open web of the Net; and another brick is set into
the foundation of network culture.
The main thrust of the group’s efforts takes place in the virtual online space of the
Cypherpunk electronic mailing list. A growing crowd of crypto-hip folks from around
the world interact daily via an Internet “mailing list.” Here they pass around code-inprogress
as they attempt to implement ideas on the cheap (such as digital signatures), or
discuss the ethical and political implications of what they are doing. Some anonymous
subset of them has launched the Information Liberation Front. The ILF locates schol-
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arly papers on cryptology appearing in very expensive (and very hard-to-find) journals,
scans them in by computer, and “liberates” them from their copyright restrictions by
posting the articles anonymously to the Net.
Posting anything anonymously to the Net is quite hard: the nature of the Net is to
track everything infallibly, and to duplicate items promiscuously. It is theoretically trivial
to monitor transmission nodes in order to backtrack a message to its source. In such a
climate of potential omniscience, the crypto-rebels yearn for true anonymity.
I confess my misgivings about the potential market for anonymity to Tim: “Seems
like the perfect thing for ransom notes, extortion threats, bribes, blackmail, insider
trading, and terrorism.” “Well,” Tim answers, “what about selling information that
isn’t viewed as legal, say about pot growing, do-it-yourself abortion, cryonics, or even
peddling alternative medical information without a license? What about the anonymity
wanted for whistleblowers, confessionals, and dating personals?”
Digital anonymity is needed, the crypto-rebels feel, because anonymity is as important
a civil tool as authentic identification is. Pretty good anonymity is offered by
the post office; you don’t need to give a return address and the post office doesn’t verify
it if you do. Telephones (without caller ID) and telegrams are likewise anonymous to
a rough degree. And everyone has a right (upheld by the Supreme Court) to distribute
anonymous handbills and pamphlets. Anonymity stirs the most fervor among those who
spend hours each day in networked communications. Ted Kaehler, a programmer at
Apple Computer, believes that “our society is in the midst of a privacy crisis.” He sees
encryption as an extension of such all-American institutions as the Post Office: “We have
always valued the privacy of the mails. Now for the first time, we don’t have to trust in it;
we can enforce it.” John Gilmore, a crypto-freak who sits on the board of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, says, “We clearly have a societal need for anonymity in our basic
communications media.”
A pretty good society needs more than just anonymity. An online civilization requires
online anonymity, online identification, online authentication, online reputations,
online trust holders, online signatures, online privacy, and online access. All are essential
ingredients of any open society. The cypherpunk’s agenda is to build the tools that provide
digital equivalents to the interpersonal conventions we have in face-to-face society,
and hand them out for free. By the time they are done, the cypherpunks hope to have
given away free digital signatures, as well as the opportunity for online anonymity.
To create digital anonymity, the cypherpunks have developed about 15 prototype
versions of an anonymous re-mailer that would, when fully implemented, make it impossible
to determine the source of an e-mail message, even under intensive monitoring of
communication lines. One stage of the re-mailer works today. When you use it to mail
to Alice, she gets a message from you that says it is from “nobody.” Unraveling where it
came from is trivial for any computer capable of monitoring the entire network—a feat
few can afford. But to be mathematically untraceable, the re-mailers have to work in a
relay of at least two (more is better)—one re-mailer handing off a message to the next
re-mailer, diluting information about its source to nothing as it is passed along.
Eric Hughes sees a role for digital pseudonymity—your identity is known by some
but not by others. When cloaked pseudonymously “you could join a collective to purchase
some information and decrease your actual cost by orders of magnitude—that is,
until it is almost free.” A digital co-op could form a private online library and collectively
purchase digital movies, albums, software, and expensive newsletters, which they would
“lend” to each other over the net. The vendor selling the information would have absolutely
no way of determining whether he was selling to one person or 500. Hughes sees
these kinds of arrangements peppering an information-rich society as “increasing the 
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margins where the poor can survive.”
“One thing for sure,” Tim says, “long-term, this stuff nukes tax collection.” I
venture the rather lame observation that this may be one reason the government isn’t
handing the technology back. I also offer the speculation that an escalating arms race
with a digital IRS might evolve. For every new avenue the digital underground invents to
disguise transactions, the digital IRS will counter with a surveillance method. Tim poohpoohs
the notion. “Without a doubt, this stuff is unbreakable. Encryption always wins.”
John Gilmore shows of document secured under a Freedom of Information Act request.
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And this is scary because pervasive encryption removes economic activity—one
driving force of our society—from any hope of central control. Encryption breeds outof-controllness.
 The fax effect and the law of increasing returns
Encryption always wins because it follows the logic of the Net. A given public-key
encryption key can eventually be cracked by a supercomputer working on the problem
long enough. Those who have codes they don’t want cracked try to stay ahead of the
supercomputers by increasing the length of their keys (the longer a key, the harder it is to
crack)—but at the cost of making the safeguard more unwieldy and slow to use. However,
any code can be deciphered given enough time or money. As Eric Hughes often
reminds fellow cypherpunks, “Encryption is economics. Encryption is always possible,
just expensive.” It took Adi Shamir a year to break a 120-digit key using a network of
distributed Sun workstations working part-time. A person could use a key so long that
no supercomputer could crack it for the foreseeable future, but it would be awkward to
use in daily life. A building-full of NSA’s specially hot-rodded supercomputers might take
a day to crack a 140-digit code today. But that is a full day of big iron to open just one
lousy key!
Cypherpunks intend to level the playing field against centralized computer resources
with the Fax Effect. If you have the only fax machine in the world it is worth nothing.
But for every other fax installed in the world, your fax machine increases in value. In
fact, the more faxes in the world, the more valuable everybody’s fax becomes. This is the
logic of the Net, also known as the law of increasing returns. It goes contrary to classical
economic theories of wealth based on equilibratory tradeoff. These state that you
can’t get something from nothing. The truth is, you can. (Only now are a few radical
economics professors formalizing this notion.) Hackers, cypherpunks, and many hi-tech
entrepreneurs already know that. In network economics, more brings more. This is why
giving things away so often works, and why the cypherpunks want to pass out their tools
gratis. It has less to do with charity than with the clear intuition that network economics
reward the more and not the less—and you can seed the “more” at the start by giving
the tools away. (The cypherpunks also talk about using the economics of the Net for the
reverse side of encryption: to crack codes. They could assemble a people’s supercomputer
by networking together a million Macintoshes, each one computing a coordinated
little part of a huge, distributed decryption program. In theory, such a decentralized parallel
computer would in sum be the most powerful computer we can now imagine—far
greater than the centralized NSA’s.)
The idea of choking Big Brother with a deluge of petty, heavily encrypted messages
so tickles the imagination of crypto-rebels that one of them came up with a freeware
version of a highly regarded public-key encryption scheme. The software is called PGP,
for Pretty Good Privacy. The code has been passed out on the nets for free and made
available on disks. In certain parts of the Net it is quite common to see messages encrypted
with PGP, with a note that the sender’s public-key is “available upon request.”
PGP is not the only encryption freeware. On the Net, cypherpunks can grab
RIPEM, an application for privacy-enhanced mail. Both PGP and RIPEM are based
on RSA, a patented implementation of encryption algorithms. But while RIPEM is
distributed as public domain software by the RSA company itself, Pretty Good Privacy 
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software is home-brew code concocted by a crypto-rebel named Philip Zimmermann.
Because Pretty Good Privacy uses RSA’s patented math, it’s outlaw-ware.
RSA was developed at MIT—partly with federal funds—but was later licensed to
the academic researchers who invented it. The researchers published their crypto-methods
before they filed for patents out of fear that the NSA would hold up the patents
or even prevent the civilian use of their system. In the US, inventors have a year after
publication to file patents. But the rest of the world requires patents before publication,
so RSA could secure only U.S. patents on its system. PGP’s use of RSA’s patented
mathematics is legitimate overseas. But PGP is commonly exchanged in the no-place
of the Net (what country’s jurisdiction prevails in cyberspace?) where the law on intellectual
property is still a bit murky and close to the beginnings of crypto anarchy. Pretty
Good Privacy deals with this legal tar baby by notifying its American users that it is their
responsibility to secure from RSA a license for use of PGP’s underlying algorithm. (Sure.
Right.)
Zimmermann claims he released the quasi-legal PGP into the world because he
was concerned that the government would reclaim all public-key encryption technology,
including RSA’s. RSA can’t stop distribution of existing versions of PGP because
once something goes onto the Net, it never comes back. But it’s hard for RSA to argue
damages. Both the outlawed PGP and the officially sanctioned RIPEM infect the Net to
produce the Fax Effect. PGP encourages consumer use of encryption—the more use, the
better for everyone in the business. Pretty Good Privacy is freeware; like most freeware,
its users will sooner or later graduate to commercially supported stuff. Only RSA offers
the license for that at the moment. Economically, what could be better for a patent
holder than to have a million people use the buddy system to teach themselves about the
intricacies and virtues of your product (as pirated and distributed by others), and then
wait in line to buy your stuff when they want the best?
The Fax Effect, the rule of freeware upgrade, and the power of distributed intelligence
are all part of an emerging network economics. Politics in a network economy will
also definitely require the kind of tools the cypherpunks are playing with. Glenn Tenney,
chairman of the annual Hackers’ Conference, ran for public office in California last
year using the computer networks for campaigning, and came away with a realistic grasp
of how they will shape politics. He notes that digital techniques for establishing trust
are needed for electronic democracy. He writes online, “Imagine if a Senator responds
to some e-mail, but someone alters the response and then sends it on to the NY Times?
Authentication, digital signatures, etc., are essential for protection of all sides.” Encryption
and digital signatures are techniques to expand the dynamics of trust into a new
territory. Encryption cultivates a “web of trust,” says Phil Zimmermann, the very web
that is the heart of any society or human network. The short form of the cypherpunk’s
obsession with encryption can be summarized as: Pretty good privacy means pretty good
society.
One of the consequences of network economics, as facilitated by ciphers and digital
technology, is the transformation of what we mean by pretty good privacy. Networks
shift privacy from the realm of morals to the marketplace; privacy becomes a commodity.
A telephone directory has value because of the energy it saves a caller in finding a
particular phone number. When telephones were new, having an individual number to
list in a directory was valuable to the lister and to all other telephone users. But today,
in a world full of easily obtained telephone numbers, an unlisted phone number is more
valuable to the unlisted (who pay more) and to the phone company (who charge more).
Privacy is a commodity to be priced and sold.
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Most privacy transactions will soon take place in the marketplace rather than in
government offices because a centralized government is handicapped in a distributed,
open-weave network, and can no longer guarantee how things are connected or not connected.
Hundreds of privacy vendors will sell bits of privacy at market rates. You hire
Little Brother, Inc., to demand maximum payment from junk mail and direct marketers
when you sell your name, and to monitor uses of that information as it tends to escape
into the Net. On your behalf, Little Brother, Inc., negotiates with other privacy vendors
for hired services such as personal encrypters, absolutely unlisted numbers, bozo filters
(to hide the messages from known “bozos”), stranger ID screeners (such as caller ID on
phones that only accept calls from certain numbers), and hired mechanical agents (called
network “knowbots”) to trace addresses, and counter-knowbots that unravel traces of
your own activities.
Privacy is a type of information that has its polarity reversed; I imagine it as anti-information.
The removal of a bit of information from a system can be seen as the reproduction
of a corresponding bit of anti-information. In a world flooded with information
ceaselessly replicating itself to the edges of the Net, the absence or vaporization of a bit
of information becomes very valuable, especially if that absence can be maintained. In a
world where everything is connected to everything—where connection and information
and knowledge are dirt cheap—then disconnection and anti-information and no-knowledge
become expensive. When bandwidth becomes free and entire gigabytes of information
are swapped around the clock, what you don’t want to communicate becomes the
most difficult chore. Encryption systems and their ilk are technologies of disconnection.
They somewhat tame the network’s innate tendency to connect and inform without
discrimination.
 Superdistribution
We manage the disconnection of domestic utilities, such as water or electricity,
through metering. But metering is neither obvious nor easy. Thomas Edison’s dazzling
electrical gizmos were of little use to anyone until people had easy access to electricity in
their factories and homes. So at the peak of his career Edison diverted his attention away
from designing electrical devices to focus on the electrical delivery network itself. At first,
very little was settled about how electricity should be created (DC or AC?), carried, or
billed. For billing, Edison favored the approach that most information providers today
favor: charge a flat fee. Readers pay the same for a newspaper no matter how much of it
they read. Ditto for cable TV, books and computer software. All are priced flat for all you
can use.
Edison pushed a flat fee for electricity—a fixed amount if you are connected,
nothing if you aren’t—because he felt that the costs of accounting for differential usage
would exceed the cost of variances in electricity usage. But mostly Edison was stymied
about how to meter electricity. For the first six months of his General Electric Lighting
Company in New York City, customers paid a flat fee. To Edison’s chagrin, that didn’t
work out economically. Edison was forced to come up with a stop-gap solution. His
remedy, an electrolytic meter, was erratic and impractical. It froze in winter, it sometimes
ran backwards, and customers couldn’t read it (nor did they trust the company’s meter
readers). It wasn’t until a decade after municipal electrical networks were up and running
that another inventor came up with a reliable watt-hour meter. Now we can hardly 
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imagine buying electricity any other way.
A hundred years later the information industry still lacks an information meter.
George Gilder, hi-tech gadfly, puts the problem this way: “Rather than having to pay for
the whole reservoir every time you are thirsty, what you want is to only pay for a glass of
water.”
Indeed, why buy an ocean of information when all you want is a drink? No reason
at all, if you have an information meter. Entrepreneur Peter Sprague believes he has just
invented one. “We use encryption to force the metering of information,” says Sprague.
His spigot is a microchip that doles out small bits of information from a huge pile of
encrypted data. Instead of selling a CD-ROM crammed with a hundred thousand pages
of legal documents for $2,000, Sprague invented a ciphering device that would dispense
the documents off the CD-ROM at $1 per page. A user only pays for what she uses and
can use only what she pays for.
Sprague’s way of selling information per page is to make each page unreadable until
decrypted. Working from a catalog of contents, a user selects a range of information
to browse. She reads the abstracts or summaries and is charged a minuscule amount.
Then she selects a full text, which is decrypted by her dispenser. Each act of decryption
rings up a small charge (maybe 50 cents). The charge is tallied by a metering chip in her
dispenser that deducts the amount from a prepaid account (also stored on the metering
chip), much as a postage meter deducts credit while dispensing postage tapes. When the
CD-ROM credit runs out, she calls a central office, which replenishes her account via
an encrypted message sent on a modem line running into her computer’s metering chip.
Her dispenser now has $300 credit to spend on information by the page, by the paragraph,
or by the stock price, depending on how fine the vendor is cutting it.
What Sprague’s encryption metering device does is decouple information’s fabulous
ease in being copied from its owner’s need to have it selectively disconnected. It lets
information flow freely and ubiquitously—like water through a town’s plumbing—by
metering it out in usable chunks. Metering converts information into a utility.
The cypherpunks note, quite correctly, that this will not stop hackers from siphoning
off free information. The Videocipher encryption system, used to meter satellite-delivered
TV programs such as HBO and Showtime, was compromised within weeks of its
introduction. Despite claims by the meter’s manufacturer that the encrypto-metering
chip was unhackable, big moneymaking scams capitalized on hacks around the codes.
(The scams were set up on Indian reservations—but that’s a whole ’nother story). Pirates
would find a descrambler box with a valid subscription—in a hotel room, for instance—
and then clone the identity into other chips. A consumer would send their box to the
reservation for “repairs” and it would come back with a new chip cloned with the identity
of the hotel box. The broadcasting system couldn’t perceive clones in the audience.
In short, the system was hacked not by cracking the code but by subverting places where
the code tied into the other parts of the system.
No system is hack-proof. But disruptions of an encrypted system require deliberate
creative energy. Information meters can’t stop thievery or hacking, but meters can counteract
the effects of lazy mooching and the natural human desire to share. The Videocipher
satellite TV system eliminates user piracy on a mass scale—the type of piracy that
plagued the satellite TV outback before scrambling and that still plagues the lands of
software and photocopying. Encryption makes pirating a chore and not something that
any slouch with a blank disk can do. Satellite encryption works overall because encryption
always wins.
Peter Sprague’s crypto-meter permits Alice to make as many copies of the encrypted
CD-ROMs as she likes, since she pays for only what she uses. Crypto-metering, in 
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essence, disengages the process of payment from the process of duplication.
Using encryption to force the metering of information works because it does not
constrain information’s desire to reproduce. All things being equal, a bit of information
will replicate through an available network until it fills that network. With an animate
drive, every fact naturally proliferates as many times as possible. The more fit—the more
interesting or useful—a fact is, the wider it spreads. A pretty metaphor compares the
spread of genes through a population with the similar spread of ideas, or memes, in a
population. Both genes and memes depend on a network of replicating machines—cells
or brains or computer terminals. A network in this general sense is a swarm of flexibly
interconnected nodes each of which can copy (either exactly or with variation) a message
taken from another node. A population of butterflies and a flurry of e-mail messages
have the same mandate: replicate or die. Information wants to be copied.
Our digital society has built a supernetwork of copiers out of hundreds of millions
of personal faxes, library photocopiers, and desktop hard disks. It is as if our information
society is one huge aggregate copying machine. But we won’t let this supermachine copy.
Much to everyone’s surprise, information created in one corner finds its way into all the
other corners rather quickly. Because our previous economy was built upon scarcity of
goods, we have so far fought the natural fecundity of information by trying to control
every act of replication as it occurs. We take a massively parallel copy machine and try
to stifle most acts of reproduction. As in other puritanical regimes, this doesn’t work.
Information wants to be copied.
“Free the bits!” shouts Tim May. This sense of the word “free” shifts Stewart
Brand’s oft-quoted maxim, “Information wants to be free”—as in “without cost”—to the
more subtle “without chains or imprisonment.” Information wants to be free to wander
and reproduce. Success, in a networked world of decentralized nodes, belongs to those
plans that do not resist either the replication or roaming urges of information.
Sprague’s encrypted meter capitalizes on the distinction between pay and copy. “It
is easy to make software count how many times it has been invoked, but hard to make
it count how many times it has been copied,” says software architect Brad Cox. In a message
broadcast on the Internet, Cox writes:
Software objects differ from tangible objects in being fundamentally unable to monitor
their copying but trivially able to monitor their use....So why not build an information
age market economy around this difference between manufacturing-age and information-age
goods? If revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software
inside a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether.
Cox is a software developer specializing in object-oriented programming. In addition
to the previously mentioned virtue of reduced bugs which OOP delivers, it offers
two other magnificent improvements over conventional software. First, OOP provides
the user with applications that are more fluid, more interoperable with various tasks—
sort of like a house with movable “object” furniture instead of house saddled with
built-in furniture. Second, OOP provides software developers the ability to “reuse” modules
of software, whether they wrote the modules themselves or purchased them from
someone else. To build a database, an OOP designer like Cox takes a sort routine, a field
manager, a form generator, an icon handler, etc., and assembles the program instead of
rewriting a working whole from scratch. Cox developed a set of cool OOP objects that
he sold to Steve Jobs to use in his Next machine, but selling small bits of modular code as
a regular business has been slow. It is similar to trying to peddle limericks one by one. To
recoup the great cost of writing an individual object by selling it outright would garner
too few sales, but selling it by copy is too hard to monitor or control. But if objects could
generate revenue each time a user activated one, then an author could make a living 
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creating them.
While contemplating the possible market for OOP objects that were sold on a “per
use” plan, Cox uncovered the natural grain in networked intelligence: Let the copies
flow, and pay per use. He says, “The premise is that copy protection is exactly the wrong
idea for intangible, easily copied goods such as software. You want information-age
goods to be freely distributed and freely acquired via whatever distribution means you
want. You are positively encouraged to download software from networks, give copies to
your friends, or send it as junk mail to people you’ve never met. Broadcast my software
from satellites. Please!”
Cox adds (in echo of Peter Sprague, although surprisingly the two are unfamiliar
with each other’s work), “This generosity is possible because the software is actually
‘meterware.’ It has strings attached that make revenue collection independent of how
the software was distributed.”
“The approach is called superdistribution,” Cox says, using a term given by Japanese
researchers to a similar method they devised to track the flow of software through a
network. Cox: “Like superconductivity, it lets information flow freely, without resistance
from copy protection or piracy.”
The model is the successful balance of copyright and use rights worked out by the
music and radio industries. Musicians earn money not only by selling customers a copy
of their work but by selling broadcast stations a “use” of their music. The copies are supplied
free, sent to radio stations in a great unmonitored flood by the musicians’ agents.
The stations sort through this tide of free music, paying royalties only for the music they
broadcast, as metered (statistically) by two agencies representing musicians, ASCAP and
BMI.
JEIDA, a Japanese consortium of computer manufacturers, developed a chip and
a protocol that allows each Macintosh on a network to freely replicate software while
metering use rights. According to Ryoichi Mori, the head of JEIDA, “Each computer is
thought of as a station that broadcasts, not the software itself, but the use of the software,
to an audience of a single ‘listener.’” Each time your Mac “plays” a piece of software
or a software component from among thousands freely available, it triggers a royalty.
Commercial radio and TV provide an “existence proof ” of a working superdistribution
system in which the copies are disseminated free and the stations only pay for what they
use. Musicians would be quite happy if one radio station made copies of their tapes and
distributed them to other stations (“Free the bits!”) because it increases the likelihood of
some station using their music.
JEIDA envisions software percolating through large computer networks unencumbered
by restrictions on copying or mobility. Like Cox, Sprague, and the cypherpunks,
JEIDA counts on public-key encryption to keep these counts private and untampered as
they are transmitted to the credit center. Peter Sprague says plainly, “Encrypted metering
is an ASCAP for intellectual property.”
Cox’s electronically disseminated pamphlet on superdistribution sums up the virtues
very nicely:
Whereas software’s ease of replication is a liability today, superdistribution makes it an
asset. Whereas software vendors must spend heavily to overcome software’s invisibility,
superdistribution thrusts software out into the world to serve as its own advertisement.
A hoary ogre known as the Pay-Per-View Problem haunts the information economy.
In the past this monster ate billions of dollars in failed corporate attempts to sell movies,
databases, or music recordings on a per view or per use basis. The ogre still lives. The
problem is, people are reluctant to pay in advance for information they haven’t seen
because of their hunch that they might not find it useful. They are equally unwilling to 
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pay after they have seen it because their hunch usually proves correct: they could have
lived without it. Can you imagine being asked to pay after you’ve seen a movie? Medical
knowledge is the only type of information that can be easily sold sight unseen because
the buyers believe they can’t live without it.
The ogre is usually slain with sampling. Moviegoers are persuaded to pay beforehand
by lapel-grabbing trailers. Software is loaned among friends for trial; books and
magazines are browsed in the bookstore.
The other way to slay the problem is by lowering the price of admission. Newspapers
are cheap; we pay before looking. The ingenious thing about information metering
is that it delivers two solutions: it provides a spigot to record how much data is used, and
it provides a spigot that can be turned down to a cheap trickle. Encryption-metering
chops big expensive data hunks into small inexpensive doses of data. People will readily
pay for bits of cheap information before viewing, particularly if the payment invisibly
deducts itself from an account.
The fine granularity of information-metering gets Peter Sprague excited. When
asked for an example of how fine it could get, he volunteers one so fast it’s obvious that
he has been giving it some thought: “Say you want to write obscene limericks from your
house in Telluride, Colorado. If you could write one obscene limerick a day, we can
probably find 10,000 people in the world who want to pay 10 cents a day to get it. We’ll
collect $365,000 per year and pay you $120,000, and then you can ski for the rest of
your life.” In no other kind of marketplace would one measly limerick, no matter how
bawdy and clever, be worth selling on its own. Maybe a book of them—an ocean of limericks—but
not one. Yet in an electronic marketplace, a single limerick—the information
equivalent of a stick of gum—is worth producing and offering for sale.
Sprague ticks off a list of other fine-grained items that might be traded in such a
marketplace. He catalogs what he’d pay for right now: “I want the weather in Prague for
25 cents per month, I want my stocks updated for 50 cents a stock, I want the Dines Letter
for $12 a week, I want the congestion report from O’Hare Airport updated continuously
because I’m always getting stuck in Chicago, so I’ll pay a buck per month for that, and I
want ‘Hagar the Horrible’ cartoon for a nickel a day.” Each of these products is currently
either given away scattershot or peddled in the aggregate very expensively. Sprague’s
electronically mediated marketplace would “unbundle” the data and deliver a narrowly
selected piece of information to your desktop or mobile palmtop for a reasonable price.
Encryption would meter it out, preventing you from filching other tiny bits of data that
would hardly be worth protecting (or selling) in other ways. In essence, the ocean of
information flows through you, but you only pay for what you drink.
At the moment, this particular technology of disconnection exists as a $95 circuit
board that can slide into a personal computer and plug into a phone line. To encourage
established computer manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard to hardwire a similar
board into units coming off their assembly line, Sprague’s company, Waves, Inc., offers
manufacturers a percentage of the revenue the encryption system generates. Their first
market is lawyers, “because,” he says, “lawyers spend $400 a month on information
searches.” Sprague’s next step is to compress the encrypto-metering circuits and the
modem down into a single $20 microchip that can be tucked into beepers, video recorders,
phones, radios, and anything else that dispenses information. Ordinarily, this vision
might be dismissed as the pipe dream of a starry-eyed junior inventor, but Peter Sprague
is chairman and founder of National Semiconductor, one of the major semiconducter
manufacturers in the world. He is sort of a Henry Ford of silicon chips. A cypherpunk,
not. If anyone knows how to squeeze a revolutionary economy onto the head of a pin, it
might be him.
Anything holding an electric charge w ill hold a fiscal charge
This anticipated information economy and network culture still lacks one vital
component—an ingredient that, once again, is enabled by encryption, and a key element
that, once again, only long-haired crypto-rebels are experimenting with: electronic cash.
We already have electronic money. It flows daily in great invisible rivers from bank
vault to bank vault, from broker to broker, from country to country, from your employer
to your bank account. One institution alone, the Clearing House Interbank Payment
System, currently moves an average of a trillion dollars (a million millions) each day via
wire and satellite.
But that river of numbers is institutional electronic money, as remote from electronic
cash as mainframes are from PCs. When pocket cash goes digital—demassified into data
in the same transformation that institutional money underwent—we’ll experience the
deepest consequences of an information economy. Just as computing machines did not
reorganize society until individuals plugged into them outside of institutions, the full
effects of an electronic economy will have to wait until everyday petty cash (and check)
transactions of individuals go digital.
We have a hint of digital cash in credit cards and ATMs. Like most of my generation,
I get the little cash I use at an ATM, not having been inside a bank in years. On
average, I use less cash every month. High-octane executives fly around the country
purchasing everything on the go—meals, rooms, cabs, supplies, presents—carrying no
more than $50 in their wallets. Already, the cashless society is real for some.
Today in the U.S., credit card purchases are used for one-tenth of all consumer
payments. Credit card companies salivate while envisioning a near future where people
routinely use their cards for “virtually every kind of transaction.” Visa U.S.A. is experimenting
with card-based electronic money terminals (no slip to sign) at fast-food shops
and grocery stores. Since 1975, Visa has issued over 20 million debit cards that deduct
money from one’s bank account. In essence, Visa moved ATMs off of bank walls and
onto the front counters of stores.
The conventional view of cashless money thus touted by banks and most futurists is
not much more than a pervasive extension of the generic credit card system now operating.
Alice has an account at National Trust Me Bank. The bank issues her one of their
handy-dandy smart cards. She goes to an ATM and loads the wallet-size debit card with
$300 cash deducted from her checking account. She can spend her $300 from the card
at any store, gas station, ticket counter, or phone booth that has a Trust Me smart-card
slot.
What’s wrong with this picture? Most folks would prefer this system over passing
around portraits of dead presidents. Or over indebtedness to Visa or MasterCard. But
this version of the cashless concept slights both user and merchant; therefore it has slept
on the drawing boards for years, and will probably die there.
Foremost among the debit (or credit) card’s weaknesses is its nasty habit of leaving
every merchant Alice buys from—newsstand to nursery—with a personalized history
of her purchases. The record of a single store is not worrisome. But each store’s file of
Alice’s spending is indexed with her bank account number or Social Security number.
That makes it all too easy, and inevitable, for her spending histories to be combined,
store to store, into an exact, extremely desirable marketing profile of her. Such a mon-
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etary dossier holds valuable information (not to mention private data) about her. She has
no control over this information and derives no compensation for it.
Second, the bank is obliged to hand out whiz-bang smart cards. Banks being the legendary
cheapskates they are, you know who is going to pay for them, at bank rates. Alice
will also have to pay the bank for the transaction costs of using the money card.
Third, merchants pay the system a small percentage whenever a debit card is used.
This eats into their already small profits and discourages vendors from soliciting the
card’s use for small purchases.
Fourth, Alice can only use her money at establishments equipped with slots that
accept Trust Me’s proprietary technology. This hardware quarantine has been a prime
factor in the nonhappening of this future. It also eliminates person-to-person payments
(unless you want to carry a slot around for others to poke into). Furthermore, Alice can
only refill her card (essentially purchase money) at an official Trust Me ATM branch.
This obstacle could be surmounted by a cooperative network of banks using a universal
slot linked into an internet of all banks; a hint of such a network already exists.
The alternative to debit card cash is true digital cash. Digital cash has none of the
debit or credit card’s drawbacks. True digital cash is real money with the nimbleness of
electricity and the privacy of cash. Payments are accountable but unlinkable. The cash
does not demand proprietary hardware or software. Therefore, money can be received
or transferred from and to anywhere, including to and from other individuals. You don’t
need to be a store or institution to get paid in nonpaper money. Anyone connected can
collect. And any company with the right reputation can “sell” electronic money refills, so
the costs are at market rates. Banks are only peripherally involved. You use digital cash to
order a pizza, pay for a bridge toll, or reimburse a friend, as well as to pay the mortgage,
if you want. It is different from plain old electronic money in that it can be anonymous
and untraceable except by the payer. It is fueled by encryption.
The method, technically known as blinded digital signatures, is based on a variant
of a proven technology called public-key encryption. Here’s how it works at the consumer
level. You use a digicash card to pay Joe’s Meat Market for a prime roast. The
merchant can verify (by examining the digital signature of the bank issuing the money)
that he was paid with money that had not been “spent” before. Yet, he’ll have no record
of who paid him. After the transaction, the bank has a verifiable account that you spent
$7, and spent it only once, and that Joe’s Meat Market did indeed receive $7. But those
two sides of the transaction are not linked and cannot be reconstructed unless you the
payer enable them to be. It seems illogical at first that such blind but verifiable transactions
can occur, but the integrity of their “disconnection” is pretty watertight.
Digital cash can replace every use of pocket cash except flipping a coin. You have
a complete record of all your payments and to whom they were made. “They” have a
record of being paid but not by whom they were made. The reliability of both impeccably
accurate accounting and 100 percent anonymity is ranked mathematically “unconditional”—without
exceptions.
The privacy and agility of digital cash stems from a simple and clever technology.
When I ask a digicash card entrepreneur if I could see one of his smart cards, he says
that he is sorry. He thought he had put one in his wallet but can’t find it. It looks like a
regular credit card, he says, showing me his very small collection of them. It looks like...
why, here it is! He slips out a blank, very thin, flexible card. The plastic rectangle holds
math money. In one corner is a small gold square the size of a thumbnail. This is a computer.
The CPU, no larger than a soggy cornflake, contains a limited amount of cash,
say, $500 or 100 transactions, whichever comes first. This one, made by Cylink, contains
a coprocessor specifically designed to handle public-key encryption mathematics. On 
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the tiny computer’s gold square are six very minute surface contacts which connect to an
online computer when the card is inserted into a slot.
Less smart cards (they don’t do encryption) are big in Europe and Japan, where 61
million of them are already in use. Japan is afloat in a primitive type of electronic currency—prepaid
magnetic phone cards. The Japanese national phone company, NTT,
has so far sold 330 million (some 10 million per month) of them. Forty percent of the
French carry smart cards in their wallets today to make phone calls. New York City
recently introduced a cashless phone card for a few of its 58,000 public phone booths.
New York is motivated not by futurism but by thieves. According to The New York Times,
“Every three minutes, a thief, a vandal, or some other telephone thug breaks into a coin
box or yanks a handset from a socket. That’s more than 175,000 times a year,” and costs
the city $10 million annually for repairs. The disposable phone card New York uses is
not very smart, but it’s adequate. It employs an infrared optical memory, common in
European phone cards, which is hard to counterfeit in small quantities but cheap to
manufacture in large numbers.
In Denmark, smart cards substitute for the credit cards the Danes never got. So
everyone who would tote a credit card in America, packs a smart debit card in Denmark.
Danish law demanded two significant restrictions: (1) that there be no minimum purchase
amount; (2) that there be no surcharge for the card’s use. The immediate effect was
that the cards began to replace cash in everyday use even more than checks and credit
cards have replaced cash in the States. The popularity of these cards is their undoing
because unlike cheap, decentralized phone cards, these cards rely on real-time interactions
with banks. They are overloading the Danish banking system, hogging phone lines
as the sale of each piece of candy is transmitted to the central bank, flooding the system
with transactions that cost more than they are worth.
David Chaum, a Berkeley cryptographer now living in Holland, has a solution.
Chaum, head of the cryptography group at the center for Mathematics and Computer
Science in Amsterdam, has proposed a mathematical code for a distributed, true digital
cash system. In his solution, everyone carries around a refillable smart card that packs
anonymous cash. This digicash seamlessly intermingles with electronic cash from home,
company, or government. And it works offline, freeing the phone system.
Chaum looks like a Berkeley stereotype: gray beard, full mane of hair tied back in
a professional ponytail, tweed jacket, sandals. As a grad student, Chaum got interested
in the prospects and problems of electronic voting. For his thesis he worked on the idea
of a digital signature that could not be faked, an essential tool for fraud-proof electronic
elections. From there his interest drifted to the similar problem in computer network
communications: how can you be sure a document is really from whom it claims to be
from? At the same time he wondered: how can you keep certain information private and
untraceable? Both directions—security and privacy—led to cryptography and a Ph.D. in
that subject.
Sometime in 1978, Chaum says, “I had this flash of inspiration that it was possible
to make a database of people so that someone could not link them all together, yet you
could prove everything about them was correct. At the time, I was trying to convince
myself that it was not possible, but I saw a loophole, how you might do it and I thought,
gee....But it wasn’t until 1984 or ’85 that I figured out how to actually do that. ”
“Unconditional untraceability” is what Chaum calls his innovation. When this
code is integrated with the “practically unbreakable security” of a standard public-key
encryption code, the combined encryption scheme can provide anonymous electronic
money, among other things. Chaum’s encrypted cash (to date none of the other systems
anywhere are encrypted) offers several important practical improvements in a card-based 
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electronic currency.
First, it offers the bonafide privacy of material cash. In the past, if you bought a
subversive pamphlet from a merchant for a dollar, he had a dollar that was definitely
a dollar and could be paid to anyone else; but he had no record of who gave him that
dollar or any way to provably reconstruct who gave it to him. In Chaum’s digital cash,
the merchant likewise gets a digital dollar transferred from your card (or from an online
account), and the bank can prove that indeed he definitely has one dollar there and no
more and no less, but no one (except you if you want) can prove where that dollar came
from.
One minor caveat: the smart-card versions of cash implemented so far are, alas, as
vulnerable and valuable as cash if lost or stolen. However, encrypting them with a PIN
password would make them substantially more secure, though also slightly more hassle
to use. Chaum predicts that users of digicash will use short (4-digit) PINs (or none at all)
for minor transactions and longer passwords for major ones. Speculating a bit, Chaum
David Chaum in his Berkeley home.
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says, “To protect herself from a robber who might force her to give up her passwords at
gunpoint, Alice could use a ‘duress code’ that would cause the card to appear to operate
normally, while hiding its more valuable assets.”
Second, Chaum’s card-based system works offline. It does not require instant verification
via phone lines as credit cards do, so the costs are minimal and perfect for the
numerous small-time cash transactions people want them for—parking meters, restaurant
meals, bus rides, phone calls, groceries. Transaction records are ganged together
and zapped once a day, say, to the central accountant computer.
During this day’s delay, it would theoretically be possible to cheat. Electronic money
systems dealing in larger amounts, running online in almost real time, have a smaller
window for cheating—the instant between sending and receiving—but the minute opportunity
is still there. While it is not theoretically possible to break the privacy aspect
of digital cash (who paid whom) if you were desperate enough for small cash, you could
break the security aspect—has this money been spent?—with supercomputers. By breaking
the RSA public-key code, you could use the compromised key to spend money more
than once. That is, until the data was submitted to the bank and they caught you. For
in a delicious quirk, Chaum’s digital cash is untraceable except if you try to cheat by
spending money more than once. When that happens, the extra bit of information the
twice-spent money now carries is enough to trace the payer. So electronic money is as
anonymous as cash, except for cheaters!
Because of its cheaper costs, the Danish government is making plans to switch from
the Dencard to the Dencoin, an offline system suited to small change. The computational
overhead needed to run a system like this is nano-small. Each encrypted transaction
on a smart card consumes only 64 bytes. (The previous sentence contains 67 bytes.) A
household’s yearly financial record of all income and all expenditure would easily fit on
one hi-density floppy disk. Chaum calculates that the existing mainframe computers in
banks would have more-than-adequate computational horsepower to handle digital cash.
The encryption safeguards of an offline system would reduce much of the transactional
computation that occurs online over phone lines (for ATMs and credit card checks),
enabling the same banking computers to cover the increase in electronic cash. Even if
we assume that Chaum guessed wrong about the computational demands of a scaled-up
system, and he is off by a factor of ten, computer speed is accelerating so fast that this
defers the feasibility of using existing bank power by only a few years.
In variations on Chaum’s basic design, people may also have computer appliances
at home, loaded with digital cash software, which allow them to pay other individuals,
and get paid, over phone lines. This would be e-money on the networks. Attached to
your e-mail message to your daughter is an electronic $100 bill. She may use that cash
to purchase via e-mail an airplane ticket home. The airline sends the cash to one of
their vendors, the flight’s meal caterer. In Chaum’s system nobody has any trace of the
money’s path. E-mail and digital cash are a match made in heaven. Digital cash could
fail in real life, but it is almost certain to flourish in the nascent network culture.
I asked Chaum what banks think of digital cash. His company has visited or been
visited by most of the big players. Do they say, gee, this threatens our business? Or do
they say, hmm, this strengthens us, makes us more efficient? Chaum: “Well, it ranges. I
find the corporate planners in $1,000 suits and private dining halls are more interested
in it than the lower-level systems guys because the planners’ job is to look to the future.
Banks don’t go about building stuff themselves. They have their systems guys buy stuff
from vendors. My company is the first vendor of electronic money. I have a very extensive
portfolio of patents on electronic money, in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere.” Some
of Chaum’s crypto-anarcho friends still give him a hard time about taking out patents on 
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this work. Chaum tells me in defense, “It turns out that I was in the field very early so I
wiped out all the basic problems. So most of the new work now [in encrypted electronic
money] are extensions and applications of the basic work I did. The thing is, banks don’t
want to invest into something that is unprotected. Patents are very helpful in making
electronic money happen.”
Chaum is an idealist. He sees security and privacy as a tradeoff. His larger agenda
is providing tools for privacy in a networked world so that privacy can be balanced with
security. In the economics of networks, costs are disproportionately dependent on the
number of other users. To get the Fax Effect going, you need a critical mass of early
adopters. Once beyond the threshold, the event is unstoppable because it is self-reinforcing.
Electronic cash shows all the signs of having a lower critical mass threshold than
other implementations of data privacy. Chaum is betting that an electronic cash system
inside an e-mail network, or a card-based electronic cash for a local public transportation
network, has the lowest critical mass of all.
The most eager current customers for digital cash are European city officials. They
see card-based digital cash as the next step beyond magnetic fast-passes now issued regularly
by most cities’ bus and subway departments. One card is filled with as much bus
money as you want. But there are added advantages: the same card could fit into parking
meters when you did drive or be used on trains for longer-distance travel.
Urban planners love the idea of automatic tolls charging vehicles for downtown
entry or crossing a bridge without having the car stop or slow down. Bar-code lasers can
identify moving cars on the road, and drivers will accept purchasing vouchers. What’s
holding up a finer-grain toll system is the Orwellian fear that “they will have a record of
my car’s travels.” Despite that fear, automatic tolls that record car identities are already
operating in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas. Three states in the busy Northeast
have agreed to install one compatible system starting with experimental setups on two
Manhattan/New Jersey bridges. In this system, a tiny card-size radio taped to the car
windshield transmits signals to the toll gate which deducts the toll from your account at
the gate (not from the card). Similar equipment running on the Texas turnpike system
is 99.99 percent reliable. These proven toll mechanisms could easily be modified to
Chaum’s untraceable encrypted payments, and true electronic cash, if people wanted.
In this way the same cash card that pays for public transportation can also be used
to cover fees for private transportation. Chaum relates that in his experience with European
cities, the Fax Effect—the more people online, the more incentive to join—takes
hold, quickly drawing other uses. Officials from the phone company get wind of what’s
up and make it known that they would like to use the card to rid themselves of a nasty
plague called “coins” that bog public phones down. Newspaper vendors call to inquire if
they can use the card.... Soon the economics of networks begin to take over.
Ubiquitous digital cash dovetails well with massive electronic networks. It’s a pretty
sound bet that the Internet will be the first place that e-money will infiltrate deeply. Money
is another type of information, a compact type of control. As the Net expands, money
expands. Wherever information goes, money is sure to follow. By its decentralized,
distributed nature, encrypted e-money has the same potential for transforming economic
structure as personal computers did for overhauling management and communication
structure. Most importantly, the privacy/security innovations needed for e-money are
instrumental in developing the next level of adaptive complexity in an information-based
society. I’d go so far as to say that truly digital money—or, more accurately, the economic
mechanics needed for truly digital cash—will rewire the nature of our economy, communications,
and knowledge. 
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 Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks
The consequential effects of digital money upon the hive mind of our network
economy are already underway. Five we can expect are:
• Increased velocity. When money is disembodied—removed from any material basis at
all—it speeds up. It travels farther, faster. Circulating money faster has an effect similar
to circulating more money. When satellites went up, enabling near-the-speed-of-light,
round-the-clock world stock trade, they expanded the amount of global money by 5 percent.
Digital cash used on a large scale will further accelerate money’s velocity.
• Continuity. Money that is composed of gold, precious materials, or paper comes in
fixed units that are paid at fixed times. The ATM spits out $20 bills; that’s it. You pay the
phone company once a month even though you use the phone everyday. This is batchmode
money. Electronic money is continuous-flow. It allows recurring expenses to be
paid, in Alvin Toffler’s phrase, by “bleeding electronically from one’s bank account in
tiny droplets, on a minute-by-minute basis.” Your e-money account pays for each phone
call as soon as you hang up, or—how about this?—as you are talking. Payment coincides
with use. Together with its higher velocity, continuous electronic money can approach
near instantaneity. This puts a crimp on banks which derive a lot of their current profit
on the “float”—which instantaneity erases.
• Unlimited fungibility. Finally, really plastic money. Once completely disembodied, digitized
money escapes from a single transmission form and merrily migrates to whatever
medium is handiest. Separate billing fades away. Accounts can be interleaved with the
object or service itself. The bill for a video comes incorporated into the video. Invoices
reside alongside of bar codes and can be paid with the zap of a laser. Anything that can
hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge. Foreign currencies become a matter
of changing a symbol. Money is as malleable as digitized information. This makes it all
the easier to monetize exchanges and interactions that were never part of an economy
before. It opens the floodgates of commerce onto the Net.
• Accessibility. Until now, sophisticated manipulations of money have been the private
domain of professional financial institutions—a financial priesthood. But just as a million
Macs broke the monopoly of the high priests guarding access to mainframe computers,
so e-money will break the monopoly of financial Brahmins. Imagine if you could charge
(and get) interest on any money due you by dragging an icon over that electronic invoice.
Imagine if you could factor in the “interest due” icon and give it variable interest, ballooning
as it aged. Or maybe you would charge interest by the minute if you sent a
payment in early. Or program your personal computer to differentially pay bills depending
on the prime rate—programmed bill-trading for amateurs. Or perhaps you would
engineer your computer to play with exchange rates, paying bills in whatever currency
is least valuable at the time. All manner of clever financial instruments will surface once
the masses can drink from the same river of electronic money as the pros. To the list of
things to hack, we may now add finance. We are headed toward programmed capitalism.
• Privatization. The ease with which e-money is caught, flung, and shaped makes it
ideal for private currencies. The 214 billion yen tied up by Japan’s NTT’s phone cards
is one limited type of private currency. The law of the Net is: he who owns a computer
not only owns a printing press, but also a mint, when that computer is linked to e-money.
Para-currencies can pop up anywhere there is trust (and fail there, too).
196
Historically, most modern barter networks rapidly slide into exchanges of real currency;
one could expect the same in electronic barter clubs, but the blinding efficiency
of an e-money system may not tend that way. The $350 billion tax question is whether
para-currency networks would ever rise above unofficial status.
The minting and issuing of currency has been one of the few remaining functions
of government that the private sector has not encroached upon. E-money will lower
this formidable barrier. By doing so it will provide a powerful tool to private governance
systems, such as might be established by renegade ethnic groups, or the “edge cities”
proliferating near the world’s megacities. The use of institutional electronic money transfers
to launder money on a global scale is already out of anyone’s control.
 Fear of underwire economies
The nature of e-money —invisible, lightning quick, cheap, globally penetrating—is
likely to produce indelible underground economies, a worry way beyond mere laundering
of drug money. In the net-world, where a global economy is rooted in distributed
knowledge and decentralized control, e-money is not an option but a necessity. Paracurrencies
will flourish as the network culture flourishes. An electronic matrix is destined
to be an outback of hardy underwire economies. The Net is so amicable to electronic cash
that once established interstitially in the Net’s links, e-money is probably ineradicable.
In fact, the legality of anonymous digital cash is in limbo from the start. There are
now strict limits to the size of transactions U.S. citizens can make with physical cash;
try depositing $10,000 in greenbacks in a bank. At what amount will the government
limit anonymous digital cash? The drift of all governments is to demand fuller and fuller
disclosures of financial transactions (to make sure they get their cut of tax) and to halt
unlawful transactions (as in the War on Drugs). The prospect of allowing untraceable
commerce to bloom on a federally subsidized network would probably have the U.S.
government seriously worried if they were thinking about it. But they aren’t. A cashless
society smells like stale science-fiction, and the notion reminds every bureaucrat drowning
in paper of the unfulfilled predictions of a paperless society. Eric Hughes, maintainer
of the cypherpunks’ mailing list, says, “The Really Big Question is, how large can the
flow of money on the nets get before the government requires reporting of every small
transaction? Because if the flows can get large enough, past some threshold, then there
might be enough aggregate money to provide an economic incentive for a transnational
service to issue money, and it wouldn’t matter what one government does.”
Hughes envisions multiple outlets for electronic money springing up all over the
global net. The vendors would act like traveler’s check companies. They would issue
e-money for, say, a 1 percent surcharge. You could then spend Internet Express Checks
wherever anyone accepts them. But somewhere on the global Net, underwire economies
would dawn, perhaps sponsored by the governments of struggling developing countries.
Like the Swiss banks of old, these digital banks would offer unreported transactions.
Paying in online Nigerian nairas from a house in Connecticut would be no more difficult
than using U.S. dollars. “The interesting market experiment,” Hughes says, “is to see
what the difference in the charge for anonymous money is, once the market equalizes. I
bet it’ll be on the order of 1–3 percent higher, with an upper limit of about 10 percent.
That amount will be the first real measure of what financial privacy is worth. It might
also be the case that anonymous money will be the only kind of money. ”
197
Usable electronic money may be the most important outcome of a sudden grassroots
takeover of the formerly esoteric and forbidden field of codes and ciphers. Everyday
e-money is one novel use for encryption that never would have occurred to the military.
There are certainly many potential uses of encryption that the cypherpunks’ own
ideological leanings blind them to, and that will have to wait until encryption technology
enters the mainstream—as it certainly will.
To date encryption has birthed the following: digital signatures, blind credentials
(you have a diploma that says, yes, you have a Ph.D., yet no one can link that diploma
with the other diploma in your name from traffic school), anonymous e-mail, and electronic
money. These species of disconnection thrive as networks thrive.
Encryption wins because it is the necessary counterforce to the Net’s runaway
tendency to link. Left to itself, the Net will connect everyone to everyone, everything to
everything. The Net says, “Just connect.” The cipher, in contrast, says, “Disconnect.”
Without some force of disconnection, the world would freeze up in an overloaded tangle
of unprivate connections and unfiltered information.
I’m listening to the cypherpunks not because I think that anarchy is a solution to
anything but because it seems to me that encryption technology civilizes the grid-locking
avalanche of knowledge and data that networked systems generate. Without this taming
spirit, the Net becomes a web that snares its own life. It strangles itself by its own prolific
connections. A cipher is the yin for the network’s yang, a tiny hidden force that is able to
tame the explosive interconnections born of decentralized, distributed systems.
Encryption permits the requisite out-of-controllness that a hive culture demands in
order to keep nimble and quick as it evolves into a deepening tangle.