July 23, 2001
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I've found that in the long run the only thing that satisfies is creation. I like to create things. Creation can be a lot of things. It can be a decently written article or a book. I've gotten a lot of long-run satisfaction from my textbook. Option-pricing models are a creative act. (There has to be a first one which everyone else copies and compares prices to.) I'm not a person who gives cards. In fact I refuse to give cards on any day that society says it is mandatory to do so. But when I do, I usually have the decency to make my own. I try to say something interesting and clever and personal, rather than just signing my name to someone else's crappy platitudes. I don't give many gifts. Perhaps because I don't like receiving them. I hate the expectation that I should show appreciation for being given junk I don't want. Some, of course, would argue that it's the thought that counts. But, you see, that's precisely the problem-thought. Only a craven, vicious, thoughtless person would give you something you didn't want. So when I give someone a gift I spend a lot of time thinking about what they would really appreciate. I try to personalize it both to them and our relationship, and to make it unusual rather than pedestrian. The sense of satisfaction comes not from the act of giving, but from the act of creation. I had a computer art show at a bar in the East Village of Manhattan. A bar crowd is tough. The show had already been created when it started, but there was an additional sense of communication whenever an oblivious patron, after an hour of subconsciously assuming the screen in the usual place was the normally flicking TV, would suddenly stare at it, his mouth would fall open, and he would point for his friends, "Look!" I used to give a yearly party at my apartment on 58th Street in Manhattan. I had observed that most parties I went to were utterly boring. That was mostly because the party sponsors hadn't put any effort into it-they had just invited people and purchased a modicum of booze. So I would carefully plan it all-music, food, drink and the mix of people. Being a good host is exhausting. I had some sense of success after the first one, when Mike-a party animal I had met in the East Village-commented to several people that it was the best party he had ever been to. He wasn't the only one who thought so. My parties became legendary and I never knew more than half the people there. One year I said to myself the following day, with certainty, "I'll never give another party." And I haven't, and probably never will. Perhaps because it had started to feel like a waste of creative energy. Or the sense of satisfaction was somehow missing. On a different level I have done more serious things. Created a newspaper. Created a successful software company. These were not exclusively individual efforts. But there is the same sense of meaning and completion because one's own creative role is crucial. Some people know I now hang around Laissez Faire City at least part of the time. Some of these have assumed I have been working on Laissez Faire City projects generally. But this hasn't been the case. True, I have had some general input, but I've mostly been working on my own project-the Digital Monetary Trust. Someone asked me once, "What are you doing?" "Working on DMT," I replied. "What else are you doing?" they wanted to know. As far as I was concerned, the conversation might as well have gone: "What are you doing?" "Overthrowing the government of Brazil." "Oh, what else are you doing?" As though you overthrow the government of Brazil between 9 and 12 in the morning, then coach soccer in the afternoon, and later at night play in a samba band. Recently the lack of delivery of a number of Laissez Faire City's announced privacy products began to get in the way of completing the DMT system. Clearly something had to be done to remove the obstacles if we were going to create DMT. While a post mortem is not necessary here, the essential reasons for LFC's tardiness was related to insufficient management focus and know-how, along with a lack of certain technical skills relating to computer security (and by computer security I mean just that-cryptography is only one piece of computer security). So, effectively on April 15, 2001, DMT took over the responsibility for the completion and delivery of all of Laissez Faire City's software products, excepting those involving Dodge City (which is separately managed). This date was related to the supposed completion of an alpha version of the new MailVault. Now, we are not naive. We knew we would have to do fixes on MailVault. But we were not quite prepared for what we found. But the first thing we did was attack the network. LFC's network had grown up as a weedy garden of disparate machines in three locations. It was, in fact, two non-communicating subnets. There was an additional problem-big security holes. The latter came from the fact that sections of the network were connected by "wireless" (spread spectrum) broadcast links. Now, the advantage of a wireless link is you don't need a physical connection to jump from point to point. The disadvantage, of course, is that anyone within range of the transmission can access your network. You may have read recently of the computer security expert who took a reporter around San Francisco, and within the space of 2 or 3 hours broke into 80 different corporate networks from his car. For, if done incorrectly, wireless transmission makes things as convenient for the intruder as it does for the network builders. We now have the network reorganized on a rational basis. In the process, we maintained the wireless links (which were pretty much necessary), but removed the security holes by putting Free S/WAN encryption/decryption at each end of the transmission links. That way, any stranger who tunes into the transmission gets an encrypted signal which tells him nothing. Similarly, it is now common to see a Founder or two sitting at the bar in the City Club, happily accessing the Internet through LFC's network-using either a direct cable connection or a wireless card. This service has been organized so it poses no security risk to the network. We also initially took away almost all resources from MailVault, so that we could jump start the (new) ALTA accounts (bank accounts held by LFC Cybercorporations) and LESE (the Laissez Faire City Stock Exchange). Now, the principal way we jump-started ALTA accounts was by embedding them in existing DMT technology. We had to take careful note, however, of the requirement that ALTA accounts may only be held by Cybercorporations in good standing, which required a modification to DMT's completely anonymous system. Next, we needed to make the user interface to ALTA parallel the user interface for other LFC products-namely, standard commercial browsers accessing web pages. And, finally, we wanted the core internal dynamics of ALTA and DMT to be completely interchangeable, so that an ALTA account could make payments to any DMT account, and vice-versa. In getting the ALTA project together, we looked to steal a piece of security code from the "crypto engine" section of MailVault. To our consternation, after inspecting the code details, we found a big security hole built right in it. Later on, when we had more time, we looked over that entire module, and discovered the whole thing was a piece of crap. So we fired the person responsible, and exiled him from the premises, and weren't too damned polite about it either. Sometimes you are done in by your enemies, and sometimes you are done in by well-intentioned people. In this case, the road to hell was paved with good intentions and bad programming. We have since patched the module, but want to rewrite the entire thing at some point soon. This, naturally, has been holding up beta-testing of the new MailVault. The initial phase of LESE is a simple continuous auction mechanism for new stock issues, as well as secondary trading in stocks and warrants. Individuals and corporations chartered by nation-states cannot participate in this market. Only LFC Cybercorporations are allowed. To participate in this market, the cybercorporation must move money or shares (or both) out of its ALTA account and into an escrow account. Then it may buy shares (up to the limit of its escrowed cash) or sell shares (up to the limit of its escrowed shares). Investment bankers, market-makers, and any cybercorporation issuing stock all participate through this same simple mechanism. There are no privileged market participants-except the privileges conveyed by the ownership of cash or stock. By necessity, the beta test of this first stage of LESE will follow the beta test of the ALTA accounts. Working on these projects takes vast swathes of time from working on DMT. But it should save time in the long run, because of various symbiotic relationships. The DMT server network has been up and running for some time. And it's getting more sophisticated as the days go by. However, what I call the "DMT browser"-the piece of software that the client or customer uses to access DMT-has been a problem. I was disappointed with the progress on, and quality of, what was being produced, and had to eventually take the browser away from the person responsible, and turned it over to a team with more in-house skills. It now seems to be progressing very nicely. Of course, there is a lot of heavy machinery going on behind the scenes in these software products. But it's all supposed to stay behind the scenes, and not bother the customer. So far, there has been some problems of communication-programmers are sometimes confused by that heavy machinery, and also by the connections to the simple user interface. Oh well. Like anything, once you've done it once, you can do it better the second time around. We expect to be kicking these products out the door soon. And at any rate we'll keep hacking at them and turn them into bona fide acts of creation, rather than sending you some store-bought cards bearing platitudes written by strangers.
from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 5, No 30, July 23, 2001 |
