Jim, Thanks for your reply. I think I'm beginning to understand some of where you come from. It sounds like you blame our problems on the presence of legal government. I believe government is mostly just expressing the wishes of those with the power to influence votes and laws. I see money as the biggest source of votes and laws, so I don't see things changing too much with the introduction of AP. I believe money also provides greater anonymity and ability to surveil than e.g. Tor provides for the masses. More responses in-line. On 12/11/18, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
I searched, and found a number of messages about "Public Shielded Work Room", but that was all I found in 2018. What was the date you sent the message? Was it to the CP list, or to me directly? You could send it to me again, at my email address.
Sorry, I tried to contact you before I began participating in this list. I submitted a comment to the AP website, but I'm not sure what e-mail address I used, so it's nothing to worry about. I'm happy you got this e-mail here.
As it offers a market, doesn't AP give life-and-death power to those with the most money?
Well, it kinda-sorta gives life-and-death power to just about everyone, in small parts. And superficially, it looks like people who have more money will have more such influence. People who are fixated on the issue of "inequality" will initially find this to be either a fatal flaw or at least a major drawback.
Inequality is relevant here, because in a free market, people try to make the largest profit, and this will be provided by the highest payout. A relatively small price by many people on a leader will be swamped by a price of $40 billion by one wealthy individual on their opposition. The people with exponentially inequal finances can then directly control the political presence of the world.
In the pre-AP world, achieving political change requires speaking out, identifying yourself. That potentially makes such people targets. In the post-AP world, nobody has to speak out publicly. And what speech occurs can probably be made anonymous. How would "the rich" target their "enemies" if they cannot identify them?
I agree that providing for more anonymous dissent is greatly helpful. I worry that focusing on it so strongly here can be misleading, though: "the rich" can hide and hunt exponentially better than the masses can, who are surveilled daily by e.g. spyware controlled by groups more powerful than them, and can't hire people or push legal systems to do things for them. "The rich" could target enemies by (A) targeting the systems that facilitate their discourse, (B) outbidding them, and (C) using their immense resources to hunt them down. Additionally, there are likely tricks to put a ton of pressure on something, like informing to the FBI that an offer was made by a terrorist.
Further, I think it can accurately be said that government is used to maintain inequality, although the means of doing so is normally hidden from public view and awareness. Government provides favors to those who "play" the game. Get rid of government, at least the massive bloated one America (for example) currently has, and how would anybody make money off of it? The current U.S. military budget of over $700 billion is an excellent example of this. Using an AP-type system, why can't the region formerly known as "America" defend itself on a figure 100x smaller than this, or maybe $7 billion dollars? After all, if it costs,say, $10 million to kill a threatening leader, you could kill 700 such threatening leaders with $7 billion dollars. No need to buy tanks, bombers, jet fighters, or any of that expensive military hardware.
What's to stop a major investor in a military weapons corporation putting their profits into AP offers for assassinations of the operators of servers allowing access, until nobody can access it? This would be a profitable move for them, if AP would make their military weapons obsolete.
Wouldn't this provide for the set of people with the most money to bend power more and more towards themselves, eventually producing a situation where a few select people control the many?
If AP can be said to be "biased" in any way, that "bias" is in the direction of tearing down involuntary heirarchical power structures. It isn't clear how AP can be used to build up such power structures, instead. Anybody who exercises power openly will tend to make others his enemies, and they would be able to use AP to counter such a person. That doesn't exclude the possibility of exercising power secretly, but it is a reasonable question how that trick might be accomplished.
AP itself provides a method to exercise power secretly. People with more money can put bigger prices on their opponents' heads. If people start putting a price on them in return, they can look at the media sources resulting in those opinions, and assassinate those people to sway opinion. Additionally, a wealthy person can likely exercise a wide variety of secret power, via e.g. bribes and black markets. I see financial power as a major involuntary hierarchical power structure.
You said, "a few select people control the many?". How would that come about? Who would be "the select few"? (We might suspect that at least initially, they would be "the rich", at least those people who are currently rich.) But how would they "control" the large masses? They would no longer be able to use the structures of government to maintain their positions, I think. They wouldn't be able to identify those in "the many", at least not the relative few that those "in control" would consider their enemies. Taxing them would be a problem. Passing onerous and discriminatory laws shouldn't even be possible, since the governments that would do so, and enforce them, will be dismantled.
Laws are no longer needed. The rich can assassinate not only anybody who publicly disagrees with them, but also anybody facilitating anonymous communication channels that could be used to privately disagree. This could facilitate violent dictatorships.
There should be a free market, ideally a truly free market,, and not the 'crony-capitalism', and 'crony-socialism' we now have in America and Europe. Am I being too optimistic? I won't claim to be unbiased, as I am the person who thought up the AP concept initially. But large numbers of people have been exposed to the AP idea, and I continually do Google-searches for such appearances. (Such as Google "jim bell" "assassination".) Myself, I would greatly welcome further discussion. Yes, these issues ought to be debated. Although, I think that relatively few people who are familiar with AP doubt that there is going to be an actual problem. At least, I haven't seen that.
I found AP so incredibly inspiring when I read some of its marketing. It is additionally so inspiring to see how the strength of blockchain technology can provide for software solutions to make real change in the world. I AP provided a way for people to have logical discourse around decisions, rather than voting with their dollar. Additionally, I worry that focusing on assassination could push away large groups of possible supporters. I imagine a blockchain app focused on permanent storage of 'proposals' with 'reasons', with each reason providing for more reasons that support why it is or is not valid, all accumulated in a decentralized manner by people who have an opinion on a proposal. If analysis of such a graph of discourse could create economically-incentivized change, it could move a lot of things forward in the world.
I believe that implementing an AP system, like I describe, will lead to a truly-free market and individual freedom. It will do so, first, by eliminating governments as we currently know them. I think that should eliminate the method by which many in current society maintain their positions of power, including inequality.
I'm hearing that you directly associate truly free markets with individual freedom. I see a free market as a hierarchical system, where those who start with more money call the shots, as they provide the jobs and can directly change demand with their dollars. I feel governments are great for really rich people, because such people can buy laws, and that governments are hence likely to only be replaced by something more stringent as long as those with more money have more power. I agree with you on debate, though. It sounds like we have really different experience and assumptions. Karl