<daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> (David Honig) writes:

At 10:48 PM 1/7/98 -0800, Sergey Goldgaber wrote:

...

1 - Anonymity is technically feasable.

2 - This requirement is a legal necessity. Otherwise, the organization may be seen as advocating murder.

Obviously, if the "Death Pool" was fully anonymous, there would be no way to tell if the winner had contributed in any way to the death.

Thus, I think we may be well on our way to Assasination Politics.

- Sergey Goldgaber

I agree, but "contribute to death" needs to be operationalized. Here's a proposal: If a homicide suspect is arrested within N months, they will be isolated from the net and the owner of the winning ID will have to perform a challenge-response. Since the suspect couldn't have replied, they are different; if a pair collaborated, well, when a hit man is caught, his payoff matrix will usually make him turn in the client.

Given strong cryptography and something like my current Eternity DDS almost prototype (a reliable distributed way of selling storage-compute-bandwidth being the relevant part), why couldn't the incarcerated person have left an agent out on the net to handle the challenge for him, and hold the money in anonymous trust for him until he gets out? I can't think of any anonymity-preserving system which contains an "is-a-person" predicate -- even if you asked an AI-hard question, you could blind the question and post it to usenet or CNN or something and quote one of those responses (which would be wise to do anyway for styleometry prevention). The other option is having a non-anonymous system, or one that is anonymous until someone tries to collect the prize, but in that case, it's not all that interesting a problem. Ryan the Nightshifted -- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://mit.edu/rdl/