Thank you for your reply, Dr. Juels,
Once you read my essay, I think you will understand my concern about the motivation for your research, and its potential consequences. Superficially, and certainly to someone unfamiliar with my idea (Assassination Politics essay), I'm sure it sounds useful and indeed beneficial to try to prevent the construction and operation of "criminal contracts". One problem that I see, as a lifetime libertarian, is that "criminal" may mean no more than "what the government wants to ban" rather than an actual victim crime. Worse, governments are powerfully motivated to prevent developments that will someday likely destroy them.
Further, consider
There is a lot more where this comes from.
Keep in mind that when I wrote the AP essay, technologies such as Tor, Bitcoin, and especially Ethereum and Augur simply did not exist. But today they do, or at least they soon will. And that, I consider to be an extremely good thing.
So perhaps you will understand that I consider that trying to prevent _all_ "criminal contracts" from being formed is a major, and indeed dangerous mistake. While I do not believe that such an effort can ever succeed, I think it would be best not to try.
Jim Bell
From: Ari Juels <juels@cornell.edu>
To: jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com>
Cc: "runting@gmail.com" <runting@gmail.com>; "akosba@cs.umd.edu" <akosba@cs.umd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2015 2:32 PM
Subject: Re: Your paper on criminal contracts
Dear Mr. Bell,
Thank you for your original note and follow-up. We’re indeed planning to read your essay and cite it as appropriate in our next paper revision (slated to come out in January).