All of these papers are in very rough work-in-progress form. You should reference them as working drafts; please consult with the author as to current status. Comments are welcome as are suggestions for publication!
Sorted roughly by most recent first.
Abstract. This paper presents an inversion of conventional academic publishing. Authors grant free rights to read and share their work, but require a paid licence to cite it. The licence is obtained by sending a modest fee (for example, early-bird discount equivalent to $1; standard price $10) to a blockchain address using a triple-entry accounting system. The resulting immutable receipt constitutes verifiable proof of the acquired right to cite and is referenced in the citing paper’s bibliography. The original authors receive direct compensation for each citation. Citing authors thereby fairly remunerates the creators of the ideas they build upon. No middleman or journal is required. Academic publishing has traditionally rewarded authors through reputation and career advancement while journals capture nearly all monetary value through high article processing charges and subscriptions. By converting citation into a licensed transaction proven by a cryptographic receipt, this model augments the symbolic signal of a citation with a direct monetary fact, improves auditability of academic reputation, and returns a share of the value created to the authors who produce the work.
Know Your Agentic Intelligence
Abstract. We have already passed the point where substantial AI produced content has flooded the net, making all content suspect. This historical trapdoor has only happened a few times; by way of example, precise Geiger Counters can be constructed with pre-1945 steel from sunken warships to avoid the contamination caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Where do we find the unradiated AI Steel?
Artificial intelligence loses cohesion if trained repeatedly on content produced by AI, in an echo of mad cow disease of the 1990s, when bovines were fed their own brain cells. This leads to a requirement to know whether writings found on the net are of human or AI origin, to assess their suitability as potential training content for AIs.
Yet, to usefully label content as AI or not, we need a sense of identity or of legal personality - the very statement that some content is produced by AI or not is unfounded unless stated by a person. This leads to a need for the AI to be identified. Either the AI is under the direct supervision of a person, which is too inefficient to be contemplated, or, the AI itself must certify its own content.
From which logic, the AI must have its own legal personality. This paper explores what it means to create a legal personality for an AI.
You’re all wrong - money is an accounting system
Abstract. Jevons apocryphally said that “Money’s a matter of functions four, A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store (Selgin 2021).” Arguments raged for a century over which of those functions were important and which not, and today, the general economics consensus is that money is a function of a medium, a measure, and a store.
What all missed is that these are functions or capabilities or features of money. They are measurands of the money, not the money itself. This is the elephant in the room of the blind men - one man feels the trunk, one the leg, another the tail - all have a view as to the elephant, and none know the elephant.
What then is money? I define money as an accounting system that accounts for the relative inputs and outputs by the persons in the economy. This is a systems view as opposed to a capabilities view - we are not saying that because it has a trunk, it might be an elephant, we are saying that an elephant is an elephant, first and foremost, and elephants tend to have trunks, tails, and legs.
How to build an unbreakable exchange
Abstract.
Analysis of the architecture and message flows of Instant Messaging and Payments systems reveal that they are very similar; more so than would be expected for applications that are nominally separated in the user's minds.
This paper examines merging payments and messaging for the Internet.
In terms of Financial Cryptography, this paper presents a core result based on merging payments and messaging. The system has been built and it works. The results indicate that much of the last two decades work in automated systems in trade may have been unbalanced at minimum, and likely impractical.
Also see the FC rant, for more on what I was trying to say in this wip.
Abstract.
Open Governance is a form of security whereby a business engages partners and the user public in protecting assets under management. Open governance arose in the unregulated environment of Internet Payment Systems.
Yet the techniques developed are universally applicable, and in some cases have decided advantages, even when applied to the regulated or non-payment sectors. Use of these techniques and the overall philosophy, in concert with conventional techniques, can reduce dramatically internal risks and costs.
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has now passed its first decade of activity on the Internet, but has yet to break out of pathetically small revenues. Reasons and factors contributing to the failure are many and varied. Is it that the PKI is a solution looking for a problem? That it doesn't solve the problems that it claims? Or that it is too expensive? Perhaps the military objectives failed to cross-over to the commercial sector?
This review attempts to list all of the issues that are unresolved, contentious, or questionable, at least as they are known to this author.
I've been collecting information on the flaws in PKI - public key infrastructure - for many a year now. Many researchers have written quite strong papers on single aspects, but nobody that I know of has dared to collate and integrate these criticisms. At some point, this list should be edited and cleaned out of its skeptical personality, and submitted for publication as a review.
Abstract.
What is security?
Collected random thoughts and models.
Note that the bulk of the content was moved into The Market for Silver Bullets at revision 1.17.
See also Pareto-secure and The Market for Silver Bullets.
Abstract. The patterns paradigm has arisen in the object oriented world to document those coding tasks that seem to repeat frequently enough to need common names and common architectures. Patterns, once documented, assist communication, and provide shortcuts to existing code.
Cryptographic coding is a small subset of coding. It includes many tasks of a very varied nature, in part because the demands of the higher level application are so varied, and so divergent from the nature of cryptography. Yet, patterns emerge.
This draft note is a first cut attempt to list those patterns, with some brief explanation of each.
Abstract.
Opportunistic Cryptography can be used to protect a wide variety of applications. It has come to the fore with successful applications such as SSH and OpenPGP. It stands in contrast to more statically minded, no-risk approaches such as SSL, which has been deployed only at unacceptable expense.
We introduce a framework to compare different approaches and levels to opportunistic distribution of keys We call this SPOCK ratings, as a catchy acronym. Each increasing number indicates a better and more intelligent protection for the application.
SPOCK is Self-Protection using Opportunistic Keys. It was knocked out on the basis of there being a layered set of advances in key use, but whether it hangs together is an open question.