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".