That "assassination politics" boils down to be being a minor variant on a well-established topic: the use of untraceable payments for contract killings

[Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many]

On 9/10/23, Peter Fairbrother <peter at tsto.co.uk> wrote:
> 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?

This isn’t addressed on a protocol level in the paper?

What do you see as the fatal flaws with bitcoin, tor, bittorrent?

>
>
> 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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