“The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.”
Neal Stephenson book Cryptonomicon
Source: Cryptonomicon
Quotes from bookCryptonomicon
Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park , and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare.
“Gold is the corpse of value…”
Neal Stephenson book Cryptonomicon
Economics of gold farming, Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons
Source: Cryptonomicon
Context: Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…
