"It got boring," says the 31-year-old about his old job managing Yahoo's Web-based mail system, which he helped create. "Getting the first million users was cool; 10 million users was cool too. But after a while the phone calls at 2 a.m. weren't worth it. I was tired of not doing something revolutionary."

So McCoy went back to his old passions -- cryptography and digital cash -- then struggled to marry them with today's latest craze, peer-to-peer file trading. The result is a company called Autonomous Zone Industries, where McCoy is the CEO, and a piece of software named Mojo Nation.

The company's name plays off the idea of "temporary autonomous zones," a term first used by anarchist Hakim Bey in 1991 to describe the pirate-run utopias of the 18th century. These tended to exist on islands, where criminals, exiles, rapscallions and other outsiders could found their own societies, make their own rules, then flee at the first signs of authority or danger. Bey wanted to found new "zones" in the real world, but when the Net appeared, geeks and libertarians saw the Net as the ideal spot to set up camp -- a present-day uninhabited universe with more than enough room for worlds within worlds.

Mojo Nation doesn't completely realize this dream; with his team of lawyers and his belief that venture capitalists will be on board by the end of the month, McCoy isn't so much avoiding the real world as he is trying to beat it at its own game.

Still, Mojo Nation looks more a like a libertarian dream come true than anything else that's out there. It is nothing short of the first-ever encryption-protected, user-run, open-source, file-sharing marketplace. It essentially takes the decentralized model of other Napster alternatives like Freenet and Gnutella and adds on a layer of laissez-faire experimentation.

Home-brewed currency, or "Mojo," lies at the core of this new world. Users cannot simply take and give as they do with Napster and every other file-sharing service. Rather, those who download the free, open-source new release in November must use Mojo to buy and sell content for prices that they themselves determine.

This is how it works: Download a free Mojo Nation "agent" and set it loose. The 2,000 users who are testing the beta version earn 1 million Mojo just for signing up, but new members can earn currency only by sharing what they already have -- unused computer power on their desktop. Mojo Nation will pay users Mojo for letting the network "rent" their computer's disk space, processing power or whatever else the system needs. The prices change according to the rules of supply and demand: The more people want of what you've got, the more you can expect to earn.

The same goes for buying. Once you've earned enough Mojo, you can then use the agent to search the network and buy the files that you want, agreeing on prices -- for porn, MP3s or other files -- that are determined by market forces.

The agent also lets you upload content of your own. It even breaks the file into tiny pieces, encrypts it and spreads it out to other users on the network so that bandwidth pipes won't get clogged. But don't go thinking you'll get rich by offering all those Beatles songs you've downloaded from the Net: Mojo Nation's market is based on the action of distribution, not the object itself, so sending and receiving have value but content itself does not. You can get paid for sending the file out, but not for the file itself.

And the artist or creator of the file? He or she gets nothing. Nothing, that is, unless you decide that he or she deserves something. Mojo Nation's final interesting twist is that it allows users to tip creators for their content. How much you want to tip is up to you.

McCoy believes that content creators will get what they deserve via Mojo Nation. He and his 10 employees -- who work out of a Mountain View, Calif., home and call themselves "evil geniuses for a better tomorrow" -- are convinced not only that the program's economic incentives will encourage people to share but that Mojo Nation will forever alter how the Internet runs.

Like all file-sharing endeavors, however, Mojo Nation faces several hurdles. Legally, the quasi-commercial nature of Mojo Nation's distribution network may mean that it will be hard for the service to claim it is merely engaged in "noncommercial" file sharing -- the tactic employed by outfits such as Scour and Freenet. An even more challenging aspect may be the complexity of the project. Hardcore geeks think Mojo Nation is the coolest thing since packet switching itself gave birth to the Net, but the average user may be a bit confused by all the price setting, agent-led "content tracking" and Mojo-ish compensating.

Nevertheless, as McCoy says, it sure sounds like a more interesting project than working on Yahoo Mail.

The Free Software Project
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