9 Reader Responses

1. Tim Boucher Says:
   October 24th, 2007 at 11:37 pm

   Strikes me as somehow relevant, the point for point breakdown here:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Communication

2. Crystal Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 2:21 pm

   Isn’t this sort of what Paypal already is?

   And didn’t Paypal skirt some kind of legal action a while back for being an alternate currency? I seem to recall they were on the border of getting in trouble with the U.S. Govt. If I have time, I will try and look it up.

3. Tim Boucher Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 2:36 pm

   No, PayPal is a closed proprietary system. I’m talking about a protocol which can be applied much more broadly than that. Look at FTP programs for examples. RipplePay is the closest thing I’ve seen to that.

4. Svenson Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

   Some wild thoughts before I get on to my work for the day:

   PGP was originally considered so dangerous not because of its IDEA encryption, but because of its peer-to-peer ring authentication model that bypassed the need for a key certificate authority that the NSA could control. (words may be wrong here but idea is right)

   Anyway, googling something related to this I found this:
   www.media-art-online.org/pdf/p2pi2004-trust.pdf
   Which looks like it might have some really interesting ideas though I didn’t have time to look it over.

   Anyway, the sort of big question to me is how you can use peers to establish enough trust to back up the currency and prevent cheating, but it looks like people have already thought about it some…

5. Tim Boucher Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

   Other keywords I got into last night: identity service providers.

   I don’t know exactly how it works, but look into things like OpenID, and keep an eye out for posts on disposable identities in the coming days.

6. Local ISP’s As Banks & Financial Transaction Hubs - Pop Occulture Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 3:19 pm

   […] [Notes] Piggybacking onto the Value Transfer Protocol idea… […]

7. p Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

   Shannon’s paper is one of the clearest, finest bits of technical writing I’ve ever read:
   http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html

   anyone know of an online copy of the paper he wrote with Moore ‘Gedanken-Experiments on Sequential Machines’?

8. Tim Boucher Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

   Can anyone else phrase any of what I’m after here better than me? Am I just hunting after a phantom here or is there some substance beneath it all that unites it?

9. Julia Says:
   October 26th, 2007 at 7:51 pm

   I don’t know what you’re looking for but I know it’s there and I’ll know it when I see it.