That "assassination politics" boils down to be being a minor variant on a well-established topic: the use of untraceable payments for contract killings
Peter Fairbrother
peter at tsto.co.uk
Sun Sep 10 05:23:46 PDT 2023
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, jdb10987 at yahoo.com 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, pro2rat at 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 )
>
>
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