At 11:08 AM -0800 1/6/98, Adam Back wrote:
it looks more like Jim was suggesting that free market forces would tend to prevent deaths of lesser known people. Think about it -- it would be dead easy to get a contract on Barney due to the number of people who know and hate him -- but on an average neighbor, who is completely obscure, you'd easily have to fund the entire bet yourself.
The weakness of Bell's scheme was always that it only worked (so to speak) with well-known people. While there are some who want well-known people dead, most murders-for-hire happen for personal or financial reasons. Given untraceable payment systems, and buttressed with untraceable escrow systems, a much more efficient approach is simply to hire the killers untraceably. And the fluff about "picking the death date" is a side issue, one which merely makes the whole thing more cumbersome. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."