[81571] in Cypherpunks
Re: Untraceable Contract Killings
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wei Dai)
Tue Jun 10 21:47:00 1997
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 17:39:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
In-Reply-To: <v03102818afc32f6b5b30@[207.167.93.63]>
Reply-To: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Tim May wrote:
> By the way, this is not really Bell's "assassination politics," this is
> just anonymous contract killings, known about to some of us since Chaum's
> work was first published...cf. my own "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988.
>
> I may sound touchy on this issue, but I'm seeing more and more articles
> here and relayed from outside essentially giving Bell the credit for
> inventing these kinds of markets, when in fact he's a relative latecomer.
I think the novelty of Bell's scheme is that it allows assassination
payments to be pooled from a large number of anonymous payers without
explicit coordination (i.e., the payers do not have to communicate with
each other to work out a contract, etc.). For killing a neighbor it
doesn't improve upon the simple untraceable contract, but it can make a
big difference when the target has many enemies (Bell gave politicians as
an example).
Now in light of the fact that when the target has many enemies the
assassination becomes a non-excludable public good, it is almost certain
that the scheme cannot actually work in practice. All of the potential
payers would rather free-ride and let others pay, so the public good ends
up not being "produced".
