Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open (1994)

nytimes.com

32 pointsmarban20 comments

> Digital cash, Mr. Zimmermann explained, is "a combination of cryptographic protocols that behave the way real dollars behave but are untraceable."

> In other words, they are packets of worth that have value in cyberspace, the same way dollars have value in the real world, except that they have the properties of anonymity, privacy and untraceability. Many details remain to be worked out, Mr. Zimmermann said.

Very cool how people were predicting cryptocurrencies from the beginning!

> Many details remain to be worked out, Mr. Zimmermann said.

And surprising how little some things have changed in 25 years as well.

Cool, yes. But "predicting" isn't how I see it.

We wanted anonymous, private and untraceable digital cash. Many people worked on it. There were several ~centralized electronic currencies, and they all got taken down, sooner or later. Because of FinCEN "know your customer" requirements. E-gold lasted until 2009. Liberty Reserve lasted until 2013, and the founder went to jail. Pecunix still sort of exists in a weird stunted way.

So anyway, Bitcoin was developed as a non-centralized electronic currency. Which would be far harder to take down.

E-Gold and Liberty Reserve were, like BTC is now, rife with scams, Ponzis and other fraud.

It's not really a surprise that the Quadriga CX founders have history in those arenas.

Last I checked, dollars are "rife with scams, Ponzis and other fraud". Bernie Madoff, for example.

Not in the same way, not as their primary use or as such a large proportion of their use.

This is a really disingenuous argument.

Mostly, for me, it's "so what?".

It's entirely predictable that any system that's truly private, anonymous and untraceable will be abused. That's simply because some people are wont to abuse others.

But that doesn't require that we eliminate privacy and anonymity, and make everything traceable. Personally, that would be intolerable. And unless people became hugely more tolerant, it would tend to enforce conformity, and inhibit dissent.

Also, perhaps ironically, "scams, Ponzis and other fraud" are reliable indicators that systems are truly private, anonymous and untraceable. Canaries, one might say.

>But that doesn't require that we eliminate privacy and anonymity

But it seriously limits any sort of appeal it may have to regular folk who don't really care about that anonymity.

In the case of Liberty Reserve and e-gold, just their mention becomes a huge red flag for any legitimate activity. Cryptocurrency is basically there too, particularly as it's a worse system in pretty much every other way.

Well, Liberty Reserve allowed me to pay anonymously for VPN services and servers. And now, Bitcoin does. That's all that matters to me.

They weren't predicting cryptocurrencies in 1994... viable digital cash enabled by cryptography had already been developed, and had a level of "anonymity, privacy and untraceability" that make Bitcoin look like a joke. Even the likes of Microsoft bought-in.

The reason none of them succeeded is that they were generally all built around a central banking model, where an existing financial institution had to act as gatekeeper and point of exchange. Government then, and especially corporations today, really don't want you to have anonymity, privacy or untraceable transactions. Until they can tax it, you're not getting it.

Bitcoin solved this, and only this, problem. Like the electric car, really ubiquitous digital currency, with nice properties, is probably going to take the kind of societal change that could another 100 years.

"Even if the N.S.A. was listening in, they couldn't get his credit card number" -- what a prescient quote for 1994, pre-Patriot Act, pre-Snowden.

TBH, I didn't even know they existed back then.

Not really; it has been publicly known since the late 80s, with reports like Duncan Campbell's Somebody's Listening (1988)[1]. In 2001, even the European Parliament was telling people to use encryption to avoid the widespread NSA private and economic espionage.

Snowden gave us the details, but it's been generally known for a long time.

[1] http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/n...

I remember ECHELON [1] being the talk pre-Snowden, in the 90s and prior.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

Here are a couple examples from 1972 and 1988.

Since the 70s journalism has surfaced the idea about “The Concealment of the State”, pieces touching on covert and surveillance aspects of the national security establishment in developed countries, how the deep state draws power from the national security and intelligence communities, and the idea of “mass secrecy” as a source of power.

I can’t find the reference right now, but seems like this idea was even showing up in Tom Clancy’s popular page turners.

Examples on listening to communications:

Q. So far we've been talking about various kinds of sophisticated electronic intelligence gathering. What about tapping of ground communications?

A. Of course all trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific telephone calls to or from the U.S. are tapped. Every conversation, personal, commercial, whatever, is automatically intercepted and recorded on tapes. Most of them no one ever listens to, and after being held available for a few weeks, are erased. They'll run a random sort through all the tapes, listening to a certain number to determine if there is anything in them of interest to our government worth holding on to and transcribing. Also, certain telephone conversations are routinely listened to as soon as possible. These will be the ones that are made by people doing an inordinate amount of calling overseas, or are otherwise tapped for special interest.

— David Horowitz (August 1972). "U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir". Ramparts, 11.

// via http://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-elint.htm

Somebody's listening . . .

and they don't give a damn about personal privacy or commercial confidence. Project 415 is a top-secret new global surveillance system. It can tap into a billion calls a year in the UK alone.

They've got it taped

In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time.

— Duncan Campbell (12 August 1988). “Somebody’s Listening”. New Statesman, Cover pp. 10 - 12

// via http://cryptome.org/jya/echelon-dc.htm

FYI, I'm not remotely as confident about that claim as I was 25 years ago. (I'm the one quoted.) Specifically, I use Signal today and suspect that it's secure against mass surveillance.

But if I were ever targeted individually by a nation-state actor, I presume it would be game over.

Here's an internet store I wrote around that time (1994-1996):

https://github.com/steveclarke/vintage-online-store

I wrote it just on a whim for the computer sales company I was working for at the time. I had the store fully working and taking orders -- it just needed to be kept up to date. The feedback I got back from the owners at the time was, "Why are you making this? It's just a fad. Nobody will ever put their credit card number into the Internet." So the online store died on the vine.

For anyone curious, I looked up Daniel Kohn, the founder of the company that sold the CD. Turns out now he's the president of the CNCF!

And a regular HN poster. Feel free to ask me anything.

Here is to 25 years of Cyberspace shopping!

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