Nick Szabo's articles, essays and concise tutorials.

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/

Just finished reading 'Shelling out', one of the best text found online so far I dare say.

This man is a Todd Boyle slot snuggler 'of the first hour' as the Dutch have it (besides all the trouble ungenerousness therewith brings along). But I'll talk of an effectively and literally organizing taskforce protecting and pass partout affording tit for tat strategy including the right for all nations besides the US and Zion to hold and manufacture nukes at least and just as long as they themselves diabolically insist on doing so some other time. (Channeling the lamented Rob Schaap here.

Update --On Time
Why were two technologies from two very different crafts traditions -- the mechanical clock and the sandglass -- invented at the same time and place? ---- 94K
Update -- Scarce Objects
An architecture for usage control (not mere access control) for distributed objects interacting across trust boundaries.
Update -- Shelling Out -- The Origins of Money
The origins, functions and aesthetic, monetary, and security properties of proto-money.
Origins of the Non-Delegation Doctrine
An analysis of the delegation (or lack thereof) of the power to make law from the legislative to the executive branch in the early United States, uncovering some distinctions and factors that may shed light on modern non-delegation cases, and introducing representation distance and the principle of least authority as constitutional doctrines.
I delivered the keynote speech, on smart contracts, at the IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting (WEC), San Diego, California, USA on July 6, 2004. Here are the slides from that talk.

I am no longer receiving mail at brain virus!

New
Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth The Market Translator
Hedging currency risks for multinational small business.
Concise Tutorials
Hermeneutics
The interpretation of traditional texts. Recommended by Yahoo! Directory and Google Directory.
An Introduction to Algorithmic Information Theory
WorldBook Encyclopedia top 10 reference for information theory. Here's a mailing list and other additional information on this topic. Also recommended by Google Directory.

Contracts with Bearer
How blinded digital cash works, and how it more generally provides a protocol for electronic bearer certificates and protecting scarce online resources.


Recent Essays and Papers
A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts
Useful for financial cryptography, risk analysis, and accounting for the value of derivatives, combinations, and other sophsticated contracts.

Unforgeable Costliness A long-neglected area of economics unearthed.

Property Clubs
The once and future institution for protecting private property.

Advances In Distributed Security
The new paradigm of very highly probable, rather than absolutely certain, security has led to a raft of new possibilities for securing distributed applications. For the first time we can implement on the Internet crucial integrity properties and applications -- including synchronized clocks, unforgeable transactions, and censorship-proof publishing.

Rights, Remedies, and Security Models
Legal concepts and terminology can shed light on computer security problems, such as delegation of authority.

Scarce Objects
An architecture for usage control (not mere access control) for distributed objects interacting across trust boundaries.

Patterns of Integrity -- Separation of Duties
A recurring and reusable pattern for controlling dangerous functions.
Measuring Value and the Challenge of Accounting
Confidential Auditing
A better tradeoff between accountability and privacy.
Technological Protection of Rights

Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks
Smart contracts -- embedding rules in technology.

A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts
A computer-readable language for drafting rules and analyzing their consequences, and for embedding rules in technology.
Contracts with Bearer
How blinded digital cash works, and how it more generally provides a protocol for electronic bearer certificates and protecting scarce online resources.
Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority
Secure agreements on name spaces and other property rights.
Shelling Out -- The Origins of Money
The nature and origins of money. Aesthetic, monetary, and security properties of collectibles.
The Playdough Protocols
Tamper evident techology and the protection of commerce.
On Time
The hourglass and mechanical clock -- how and why medieval Europe developed a secure system for specifying the time of events.

Most pieces are well small, far below a hundred K -- the additions below are introduced in the (first?) comment thusly: well well well, so I don't allow anon. comments eh???? whaddaya know? luckily I just posted this over in the tangent thread of hyperstition: .. .nah wait .. .I am gonna append it on the post since I have to log in anyways. .. . . I'll (be bad and beat / change /) remove (D: slecht also means bad) that hurdle soon; money shouldn't but bloggabberitis may be anonevermore



"L. Detweiler" <ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu>Tue, 02 Nov 93 23:52:05 -0700 I have long tracked the Internet debates on identity issues, such asanonymity, with zeal and commitment. Recently I have become very alarmed bythe very serious potential RISKS of a practice I've termed `pseudospoofing'.
In short, there are a few basic categories under which identities may fallunder in Cyberspace. (This is not a comprehensive list.)
`True Name' -- a person sends a message under their legal identity.
`Anonymously' -- features of the message indicate it could be from anyone. Onesuch feature would include origination from an anonymity server, such as thenow-famous Finnish server anon.penet.fi, operated for nearly a year by J.Helsingius.
`Pseudonymously' -- features of the message indicate it was issued under apseudonym other than a True Name. One might build up a reputation underdifferent pseudonyms. In a technical sense, anon.penet.fi aliases arepseudonyms.
.. .. .. . .. .
pseudostitiously quoting detweiler some more
In fact, they might develop an entire mythology, philosophy, even *religion*that promotes pseudospoofing as a liberating capability, and refine andespouse it on their public mailing list. This might include, for example,elevating instances of multiple personality disorder to legendary virtuousstatus. They would consistently talk about famous science fiction by respectedauthors that refers to the blurring of identities, even though it would notreally specifically address the issue of pseudospoofing, and implying that itdid was just another obfuscatory fabrication. The disinformation campaignwould be self-reinforcing: even outsiders, `real people', could themselvesbecome independent proselytizers after being sufficiently converted.
In promoting this philosophy, they would use the techniques of brainwashingand an illusion of peer pressure to manipulate unknowing subscribers. If anysubscriber expressed any doubt, the CryptoAnarchists could wage a concertedcampaign of mental assault on the victim both on the public mailing list andin private email, to the point that real people would feel isolated, alone,and unsupported -- but only because of the perceived consensus of nonexistentidentities.
fuck ain't cernunnos pseudo enough for at least the socalled animal lovers? how come they don't champion a little clandestine dust scrivery and photograph animals grazing down the writ for years to come?

over 5000 hits for "nick szabo"

http://diygames.com/index.php?p=619&more=1 Micropayments in Gaming
Mon, Jul 26 '04 -- intro with refs to Clay Shirky also .. .unsuprisingly enough (I caugth up with him while freshly arguing against micro-payments and I am getting less and less convinced these 2 are as wholistic as they are sharp). Shirky by the way is rather inactive at corante.com/many - this entry is interesting but 'old':
Posted at 09:26 PM Permalink Comments (4) TrackBacks (0) March 22, 2005

allen_on_altruism_and_group_size.php
Interesting speculation over on Life With Alacrity about Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation — Allen disucsses work on an agent-based simulation that suggests a phase transition from cooperating groups to Tragedy of the Commons scenarios at ~15 people, a much
2004/08/15/must_read_the_great_scam.php
.. .I mean .. .the damn idiot calls a game 'transporting' folks to space (bet you'd get a nice fit with the Wintermeter applied to the players) 'terrific' .. .. ???? depressing
no wait. .. he calls the account terrific . .. and a must read .. .. .????? Fuck that, I must not lust after losing the gravity of down to earth dust!!!!!

Blog explosion and insider's club; brothers in cluelessness
is this about my dashed hopes in the likes of Todd Boyle (who does useful work ((informing prospective draftees of the meanness they'd be well bloody 'propagating')) but should he have to if things went toward going well even ever so slightly?.
theiia.org/itaudit/index.cfm?fuseaction=forum&fid=216 God protocol (digital trust and trusty digits) Sources on Monetary History

Shelling Out - The Origins of Money by Nick Szabo. The precursors of money, alongwith language, enabled early modern humans to solve problems of ...www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/other.html - 30k - Cached - Similar pages

etext.org/Politics/Extropy.Institute/szabo.032593
Uploading, Self-Transformation & Sexual Engineering * CopyLeft 1993, by Nick Szabo *

there's a site where both Szabo and Boyle show up in/on succesive items:
financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000500.html June 26, 2005 a post on Nick Szabo's Scarce Objects

financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000501.html June 26, 2005 Ian Grigg - Triple Entry Accounting
It was widely recognised since David Chaum's designs first appeared that the new 'digital certificate' model of money was not aligned or symmetrical with accounting techniques such as double entry book keeping. Many people expected the two to compete and indeed many money systems avoided combining them; this is I believe one of the few efforts to integrate the two and show them as better in combination than apart.

Triple Entry Accounting
The digitally signed receipt, an innovation from financial cryptography, presents a challenge to classical double entry bookkeeping. Rather than compete, the two melded together form a stronger system. Expanding the usage of accounting into the wider domain of digital cash gives 3 local entries for each of 3 roles, the result of which we call triple entry accounting. This system creates bullet proof accounting systems for aggressive uses and users. It not only lowers costs by delivering reliable and supported accounting, it makes much stronger governance possible in a way that positively impacts on the future needs of corporate and public accounting.

Comments below as always!
Posted by iang at June 26, 2005 07:46 PM TrackBack -- Comments

In the history section you refer to the "Greek empire". Is that the Byzantian empire (the eastern part of the Roman empire after the split) or the system of Greek city-states or Alexander's empire from before Roman conquest? An approximate timing (to the precision of a few centuries) would help.
As for the substance: Am I right in the interpretation that if all parties keep the signed receipts and recreate their ledger entries from those when they need them, they are safe? In the ePoint system, this is precisely what we do: the signed receipts are on disk, the assets/liabilities databases are constructed from scratch after starting the issuing server. Same for the client software.During the auditing process, the books are compared using standard accounting techniques, but from a computational point of view, there's no point in archiving anything in addition to the signed receipts, right?
Posted by: Daniel A. Nagy at June 27, 2005 08:02 PM

Regarding triple entry, been there done that.
Posted by: Todd (relevant links)

Iang responds to Daniel: That's it! Do you have any references I can cite to your designs or work as being similar or equivalent? That would help a lot as showing that others have independently arrived at the same conclusions adds a lot of weight.
It looks like you've maybe travelled the same path on a lot of things. We should probably get together and compare these things in more detail and start thinking of merging the good parts?
Posted by: Iang at June 28, 2005 08:43 AM

Some links on Todd's stuff to read:
http://ledgerism.net/GLT-GLR.htm
http://ledgerism.net/fbc.htm
http://www.ledgerism.net/STR.htm
http://ledgerism.net/rootledgerXML.htm
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=485/byt20001103s0001/index.htm

www.open-economy.org was hacked and remains out (after half a million page views in about 2 years time); it featured feeds from some of the nicest sites around, like ijccr, infoanarchy, commondreams, protest.net, interactivist and italy.indymedia -- you may view a google cache of this pleasantly tinted page (which I didn't get to use much due to positioning this stuff too low on my priority list though I did go to northern italy to scope out some community efforts some time before this site's demise ... sad. The sibling program www.socialforge.net is taking over.