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This just in: Recently you pointed to Dylan Tweney's comments on copyright and gave some excerpts. The thinking behind those excerpts reminded me a great deal of some of the thinking going on at erights.org that revolves around the particular notion of Smart Contracts. All of the issues of authentication and fulfillment of obligations with non-repudiation, penalties for non-fulfillment, etc. come up in this context, and much of the work in what's called "capability-based security" deals with these issues. Heady stuff, but well worth the effort to stay on top of. It's also interesting to note that the E programming language's principal designer and implementor has also been retained by the OpenCOLA folks, who seem deadly serious about making real P2P applications that leverage networked intelligence, both machine and human. Good stuff. Anywho, thought you might find at least some of this interesting. Thanks for all the great reporting! This is deep stuff that makes my brain hurt, kinda like algebra did in the seventh grade (and still does, frankly). I'm thinking I have to know this. But it's deep slogging. Take this page on financial instruments, where we take two paragraphs to get from Real world markets started out with direct trade of physical objects. To oversimplify greatly, ownership usually went along with possession and use, and, because of the locality of matter, all three together were exclusive. to Following Nick Szabo [Szabo97], we refer to a partially self-enforcing computational embodiment of a contract as a smart contract. I'm a sucker for this kind of shit, even though Szabo talks about "post unforgeable transaction logs" and "verifiability of abjudicators." Reminds me that I have to catch up with Eric Hughes, the founding cypherpunk for whom this kind of talk is Dick & Jane. How many guys do you know who can toss off lines like "Mechanism design is an outgrowth of game theory," " Anonymity is not about destroying society, it's about restructuring it" and "I find that it's mostly a failure of imagination and analysis which leads to the design of identity-based systems" — all in a chat session, fergoshsake. Eric looks like a prophet when we go revisit this Wired piece from 1996. All the other gurus polled have already been proven wrong. But I'm not gonna let it go to my crotch Monstro says I'm "the cute one." But that's just because Rick Levine doesn't have a blog. Hey, you be the judge. This picture was taken at Rick's house. This one too. A peer into P2P Here's Graeme Thickens on O'Reilly's P2P conference. As usual, it is packed with info and more linky than a vest of chain mail. Man, Graeme rocks at this stuff. I just decided that Graeme is to conferences what Dick Vitale is to college basketball. The giveaway from Graeme's intro: Forthwith, my breathless story, based on the one I first filed to Conferenza.com ....to which my editor, the famed Gary Bolles, reacted by saying he should charge me a dollar for every exclamation point I used in my emails to him. I can't help it, man--I'm hooked! You had to *be* here!!! Power to the people!!! Right on!!!! Groovy!!!! Screw Hollywood!!! Napster rules!!! By the way, I got the Maxtor link for the item below from Graeme. Because business doesn't subtract up Maxtor comes out with a storage system that uses Windows instead of Linux — because (surprise!) Windows does some stuff that Linux doesn't. Also, Microsoft was willing to deal in ways it never would if Linux weren't loose in the world. Meanwhile, Sharp comes out with a Linux-based PDA — because (surprise!) Linux does some stuff that Windows doesn't. Also Linux is improving in ways it never would if Windows weren't loose in the world. Now the easy way for Journalism as Usual to play this is to haul out the war and sports metaphors and tell the story about how Microsoft and Linux are beating the crap out of each other for "shares" of this "market'" or that one. The problem is, both are winning. And not just against each other. Or even against anything. There's still enough growth to accommodate plenty of companies doing original work. Linux and Windows may be platforms, but both are now supported by the Net. Not vice versa. The base platform for everything else that goes by that label is the real world in which all devices live — and that's the Net (whether or not you put a dot in front of it). Many more servers and appliances of all kinds will be running Linux. Same goes for Windows. While the Linux-based devices will probably outnumber those that run Windows (especially among appliances), this doesn't mean Microsoft is "losing" anything. They're both just building material. Open and closed source are both just building methods, and among them are countless distinctions and choices. Just witness the growing list of open source licenses. There's lots of room for choice here, and for the conversations that make markets.
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