Re: Future currency

From: maru dubshinki (marudubshinki@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jan 08 2007 - 18:29:56 MST


On 1/8/07, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/9/07, Philip Goetz <philgoetz@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/7/07, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > A good currency needs to be storable, transportable, canonical and
> > > verifiable. Energy, information and computation fail all these
> requirements.
> >
> > How is information not storable, transportable, or verifiable? (Are
> > you sneaking over into my house to read the emails I send you?)
>
> Information isn't storable in the currency sense: it loses value over time.
> It is transportable, granted. It's not verifiable: if I give you a kilogram
> of gold, you can check it's a kilogram of gold; if I give you a hot stock
> market tip, you can't check until too late whether it's for real.
....

I'm not so sure this is true. Public-key cryptography, for example,
relies on it being easier to check that two primes multiply to a given
number than it is to actually obtain the answer by factoring that
given number. Wouldn't zero-knowledge proofs[1] provide a basis for
information as currency? It allows people to verify the authenticity
of information to a desired degree of certainty, but wouldn't let any
of the information leak (which would 'devalue' the possessor's asset).

~maru
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof>



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