Greg Newby wrote:
If a bunch of crypto anarchists or whoever decide to knock off Bill Gates or Al Gore (who really didn't invent the Internet well enough...), you can bet someone will come looking pretty hard!
Would AP be the main criminal use of robust crypto & Hettinga's pet geodesic market? If there was widespread use of a truly anonymous, untraceable, reliable way of sending large amounts of easily usable cash to people with whom one has no physical connection (I mean every single one of those 7 or 8 qualifiers) what crime would flourish? Murder? But there is plenty of that already. And it involves physical contact Even if most private individuals didn't follow the AP market (were one to develop) you can bet that spooks and insurance companies would (*) & likely victims would becme better defended. Tax evasion? Of course. But in the hypothetical cryptocash future everybody will be doing it. Income tax evasion will cease to be considered a crime. States will move away from transaction taxes back to property taxes (which they probably ought to do anyway, but haven't yet, for obvious reasons). Pornography? Already happening. But, it will probably become effectively free, like all the other software. Not a huge profit to be made in the long run, not when anywone will be able to download as much as they want from anywhere. Kidnapping? At the moment the weak point in a kidnapping is getting the money in. You have to give away your location, and you have to pick up a physical, traceable, object. If ransoms could be paid untraceably, expect kidnappings to increase to Colombian levels world-wide. Of course the kidnappers need to establish a trust that the prisoner will be released if the ransom is paid, but that is the way things are already anyway - which is why reasonably large organisations, or ones with some political credibility, specialise in it. You might not believe a ransom demand from CMOT Dibbler Esquire, of Bread Lane, but you pay attention if it was (digitally certifiably) from ETA or the provisional IRA, or LTTE, or various Colombian herbal suppliers. Ken (not happy with this idea at all...) (*) talking of which, an opinion poll in the UK found that the thing that most worried people about genetic technology was their insurance companies getting hold of data on them. That scored lower down than biological warfare - only 8% or respondents thought tht insurers should have access to such information. I have no idea how slanted the question was.