18.17.1. In several places I've referred to "deep connections" between
things like crypto, money, game theory, evolutionary
ecologies, human motivations, and the nature of law. By this
I mean that there are deeper, unifying principles. Principles
involving locality, identity, and disclosure of knowledge. A
good example: the deep fairness of "cut-and-choose" protocols-
-I've seen mention of this in game theory tesxts, but not
much discussion of other, similar protocols.
18.17.2. For example, below the level of number theory and algorithms
in cryptology lies a level dealing with "identity," "proof,"
"collusion," and other such core concepts, concepts that can
almost be dealt with independent of the acual algorithms
(though the concrete realization of public key methods took
this out of the abstract realm of philosophy and made it
important to analyze). And these abstract concepts are linked
to other fields, such as economics, human psychology, law,
and evolutionary game theory (the study of evolved strategies
in multi-agent systems, e.g., human beings interacting and
trading with each other).
18.17.3. I believe there are important questions about why things work
the way they do at this level. To be concrete, why do threats
of physical coercion create market distortions and what
effects does this have? Or, what is the nature of emergent
behavior in reputation-based systems? (The combinatiion of
crypto and economics is a fertile area, barely touched upon
by the academic cryptology community.) Why is locality is
important, and what does this mean for digital cash? Why does
regulation often produce _more_ crime?
18.17.4. Crypto and the related ideas of reputation, identity, and
webs of trust has introduced a new angle into economic
matters. I suspect there are a couple of Nobel Prizes in
Economics for those who integrate these important concepts.
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind