Comment by rdl
11 years ago
I actually moved to Anguilla for the same reason -- outside the USA, I could sit in a room next to a Dutch (non-US) citizen, and I could write/publish (to the Internet, accessible to at least 50 people) an academic paper describing an algorithm. He could download it, implement it in Java, publish it, and I could look over it and give comments. Thus, complying with ITAR.
(This was for anonymous electronic cash, in a better system than bitcoin, invented in the 1980s; there were also RSA patent and Chaum patent considerations at the time, which were also not valid outside the US, and ML/etc. reasons why non-US providers were more likely to adopt it. We ended up getting fucked when a different political party got elected on the island and residence visas were pulled (we'd supported the other one), and then the e-gold federal indictment/prosecution/etc. (they were an investor). Also, living on a Caribbean island is not actually as much fun as you'd think.)
Just out of curiosity, can you go more into detail about "Also, living on a Caribbean island is not actually as much fun as you'd think."?
Is it the boredom and bureaucracy? Or something else?
Boredom when all the tourists are gone (they were only there a couple months out of the year; the locals were either old retired expats, or locals who all knew one another and were related since birth; the 3-5 of us who were western hacker types were totally isolated). Beaches/etc. sucking. I was also not paid enough in cash to eat anything but shitty "goat roti" or other stuff like that, and I didn't really drink (I was 18) which was the main recreational activity on the island. I didn't smoke mj, which was the other recreational activity.
The Internet was maybe 200-300Kbps tops, and kind of unreliable, and sucked a lot since I'd just been at MIT with a "huge" 3x45Mbps connection, working at Media Lab with the SGI Onyxes for anyone, etc.
> anonymous electronic cash, in a better system than bitcoin
Please, please write more about this!
Well, it was "better" on every axis except one -- it was centralized. But anyone could be an issuer of a currency, on his own infrastructure (potentially run by third parties), so while each currency was centralized, you could have an arbitrary number of currencies, and meta-currencies (e.g. a "this is a basket of all USD IOUs from US Fortune 500 companies"). There was no inherently centralized point; open source software, a bunch of loosely connected servers, and using realtime markets for the decentralization.
Being decentralized is a huge advantage for Bitcoin in a lot of scenarios, but where being decentralized doesn't help, Bitcoin has a lot of baggage, is slow, inefficient, not inherently cryptographically secure (i.e. the safety comes from size of network, not for the first participant based on the strength of a public key algorithm). So, IMO, in the ideal world we'll have both something like Bitcoin for when decentralized single currencies are needed, and a bunch of centralized currencies for other purposes.
The closest thing active right now is Chris Odom ("Fellow Traveller")'s Open Transactions (http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page)
I think they have a commercial company in this area: http://monetas.net/ but I know basically nothing about it.
I'm a bit familiar with OT, but even more familiar with Ripple. And as huge of a Bitcoin supporter as I am, even I can admit that Ripple is fundamentally a better, more performant, and probably more secure sytem. Chief cryptographer David Schwartz (JoelKatz) has been doing yeoman's work there. It's too bad the company has been sunk by greed and mismanagement, which in turn gave them a bad rep among Bitcoiners.
I have no idea what your system is, but if it was similar to Ripple (and it sounds a bit like it) then I'm beginning to think this is a sounder approach to cryptocash.
I think this all much better than Bitcoin. Also MORE decentralized, because it is not controlled by a clan of money issuers called "miners", instead it is a real competitive market.
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> Well, it was "better" on every axis except one -- it was centralized.
Back in the 80s, I built a car that was better than Google's self driving car in every way except one -- A person had to drive it.
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FTP is every bit better than BitTorrent, except for that whole centralization thing.
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> Well, it was "better" on every axis except one -- it was centralized.
I can assure you that if Bitcoin wasn't decentralised by design (which is like saying 'if this wooden desk wasn't made of wood'), it'd likely be better than whatever you're talking about by a wide margin.
In fact, half the people in here could build you something better than Bitcoin if you just took away that darn decentralisation aspect.
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