NeoCash Radio and The First Crypto War

NeoCash Radio has put up the short talk we had concerning the "First Crypto War", being, in my opinion, the time period from when Phil Zimmerman wrote PGP, to when the International Trafficking In Arms Regulations on the export of strong encryption were repealed.

I recommend my earlier post, "When The Net Was Young", if you haven't read it.

Spoiler: Geeks vs. NSA, Geeks won the battle, the war continues.

But there are elements to the story that I was not able to get into on the air, so I will spend a little while creating this blog post with links and additional materials concerning my comments in the radio show

The guys over at NeoCash Radio had me on for their show #77, talking about Bitcoin and all the rest of it.

Thank you, Daren and JJ, for the opportunity, and I look forward to our talk on the First Crypto War when that comes out.

Curt-

Doug Engelbart

I just learned that Doug Engelbart died yesterday.

So few people know that the way they work with their computers came to him in a flurry of creation while driving to work one day.

Software Patents and "Rent Seeking"

"Rent Seeking" is a term in economics used to denote the effort of those with "political" power, that is, the ability to leverage the violence of the state, to use that leverage for personal gain.

Inspired by the recent Mises.org article on the subject, I'd like to give my own perspective on the issue.

While most of us think of "rent" only as paying one's landlord for the use of their property, this common use of the term is not as far from the more technical "economic" term as it seems at first. Let it stew for a while, see if it doesn't make sense.