A Visitor Writes:
A million monkeys operating under the pseudonym "Steve Schear <azur@netcom.com>" typed:
May I suggest that we abandon the term AP, as being too narrowly focused, and use something more academic (looks better in FC's proceedings, anyway) such as Anonymous Betting Pools, or some such?
I've always been fond of the term "Non-Traditional Wagering" myself. :)
Um, as soon as you broaden AP from libertarian fantasy into rigorous hypothesis, it turns out that it _isn't_ _anything_ but Idea Futures/insurance/ABPs/(payee-anonymous) contract markets plus the murderous daydream junk.
How are Idea Futures doing these days? Have they upgraded to real money yet? I recall they used to have a few interesting things in there, like the first explicit frontal nudity on American television, and a good algorithm for solving Max 2-SAT.
TCMay has mentioned before that AP is nothing new...
AP brings to anonymous contract assassinations the ability of a very large number of people to contribute small amounts of money to a pool without explicit collaboration. As you have said, this is Idea Futures in a nutshell. Of course, I suspect the Idea Futures folk would balk at writing options on the lives of Clinton, Reno, Freeh, or Potts. Then again, if armed Federal Agents shot their families, maybe not. :) We do really need to put something together on Jim Bell soon. People have been asking about my .sig and I am getting tired of relating the long tale to each and every one of them. Could someone take responsibility for getting all the publicly released documents together in one place and perhaps posting a "Jim Bell Home Page" to Eternity? -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ enoch@zipcon.com $ via Finger $ {Free Cypherpunk Political Prisoner Jim Bell}