Like most cypherpunk ideas - bitcoin, TOR, bittorent - it has a fatal
flaw - it doesn't actually work as advertised.
Suppose I am an assassin. I kill the target. How am m I going to get
paid? I don't mean some pseudoanonymous mechanism of payment, but who
decides I get paid?
Who do I complain to if I don't get paid?
Peter F
On 10/09/2023 03:23, [email protected] wrote:
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, [email protected] 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 )
