Posted by kjok 1 day ago
A facilitator was found, a deal was negotiated, and then the lawyers got involved and went "no way in hell will we let the company's primary domain renewal rely on someone walking a money order into an office in Trinidad". C'est la vie
https://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990125094806/http://www.direct...
While I too would prefer it, I realize it is an idealist fantasy at this point.
Semi related to this - Ian Goldberg famously had the email address n@ai (Ian backwards if you missed it) - which caused problems for many mail clients and validators. I’d imagine cypherpunks.ca is easier to use. I saw similar things with one of the Balkans in 1998 - I think it was Croatia, where some government officials had name@hr email addresses.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2002-January/...
Now it looks like restaurant adverts. Maybe not much happens there any longer.
Didn't some of the cypherpunks move out to anguila to avoid the crypto export bans during the first crypto wars?
Vince Cate moved there to work on export-banned crypto, renouncing his citizenship and would start an ISP on the island after the banks rejected his electronic money ideas. This could have been PayPal in another timeline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Cate
the e-Gold people met there on an occasion, and Robert Hettinga and MIT researcher Rafael Hirschfield started the International Conference on Financial Cryptography in Anguila. https://news.ai/ref/crypto98.html
So not in droves but it was a place, as it were.
Nathan Barley is a great watch. It also has one of my favourite terms for a mobile phone “hand held twit machine” (pre smartphones)