As much respect as I had and have for Tim May, I believe that in this statement he is oversimplifying the situation.
First off, I was unaware of the existence of cypherpunks list as of January 1995, when I thought of the idea that I called assassination politics. I actually knew of Tim may, probably as early as 1979, having known that he discovered the reason for soft errors in dynamic Rams.
But, if somebody had said the name Tim May to me in January 1995, this soft error thing, and the fact that Tim May once worked for Intel, is all that I would have known.
I won't try to claim that I was entirely unaware of the concept of using encryption to pay for anonymous hits on the internet; indeed, I probably vaguely knew of that idea.
However, I think it's appropriate to point out that the idea that Tim May thought of amounted to:
'Anonymous person A anonymously hires anonymous person C to kill person C.'
This, of course, was a fascinating concept, especially for the era of the early 1990s. While I have not read the cypherpunks archives for those years, I have no doubt that this was extensively discussed, and indeed should have been discussed.
Someone who does such reading should critique my idea that, however, what I "brought to the party" extensively and dramatically changed and added to the overall concept.
What I added, first of all, was the idea that the donations were to come not merely from one person, but potentially hundreds, thousands, millions or even billions of people.
Functionally, this is an entirely different system. There are probably very few people who are hated by one other person enough that the other person would be willing to spend the money necessary to hire a hit man to kill him.
But, once a system is set up that allows hundreds or thousands of people to donate to such a fund, there are a great deal of potential targets. Raise that number of donations to millions, and perhaps the amount donated will be millions or tens of millions of dollars, and the system will work in ways and places that I believe Tim May did not anticipate.
The second thing that I added was the concept that the contract would not merely be offered to one willing hitman, but in fact the contract would be offered to everyone in the world. Potentially billions of people.
This makes it an entirely different system imagine you a person who is fearful that he is being donated to death by some other individual, but the contract was limited to only one person. It is probably actually fairly straightforward to identify such a person.
But, if the number of people who might potentially collect that contract rose to 'everyone on Earth', it would become virtually impossible to identify the person who's coming to collect the bounty.
On Sep 9, 2023 2:18 AM, pro2...@yahoo.com.au wrote:
"assassination politics" boils down to be being a minor variant on
a well-established topic: the use of untraceable payments for contract
killings.
Timothy C. May 1996
https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/archive/1996/11/e64f667c278643deb58a45642d0f3ea6b64a01fab294bcc9be681fd5656895f2/
Reposts not deadpools on Paul Wolfowitz made in July 2003 ( see archive )
