Once upon a time, a king carried by his slaves wanted to cross a rope bridge. He called all his slaves and asked, "Is it safe? Someone go ahead and cross."

All but one stared at each other and began to point and say, "Your excellency, send him, he is wisest and can tell you if it is safe." Each poor slave pointed at another, and another. Finally, one said, "Let me go across, sire."

Having crossed the bridge, he cut the rope.

My resume is available. Wikipedia entry on Ryan Lackey is another source of information. I have a short biography for inclusion in program materials. I am probably best known for founding and operating the datahaven HavenCo on Sealand 2000-2002 (see news articles about the beginning and end of the project). I've attended and presented at numerous conferences, and my primary interests are electronic cash, distributed computing, cryptographic protocols, free-market economics, regulatory and economic arbitrage, and private access to space. I have a gallery of some photographs I have taken at flickr, and I have accounts on most of the social networking sites.

I am currently working on several exciting projects, including:

• Blue Iraq: Communications networks in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, including the US DOD and contractor markets. See also the Wired article and longer article about Blue Iraq
• metacolo: Global distributed network infrastructure, agent hosting, server colocation and management
• Global, distributed, anonymous electronic transaction infrastructure using advanced cryptographic techniques and network design