From: juan <juan.g71@gmail.com>

>> Entirely unaware of their specific work (but, as I vaguely recall,
>> aware of this general concept; I'd probably heard of it, indirectly,
>> from a third person whose identity I don't recall), I thought of the
>> "Hundreds, or thousands, or millions of 'Person A's', make anonymous
>> contributions to a general offer to potentially any 'Person B' to
>> reward him for 'predicting' the date of death of 'Person C'. Are
>> these two models alike? Kinda-sorta, I suppose.

> Well, the part about a date for a predicted 'accident' or event
> is more original I think (though I certainly haven't researched
> it thoroughly), however the bit about something being funded by
> many people seems more like the standard working of markets and
> so is rather old?

Hey, I didn't claim to have invented the entire concept of markets! <vbg>

Anyway, in 1995 the terms "crowdsourced" and "crowdfunded" didn't exist. AP could be described today quite simply as "crowdfunded assassinations".

>> But I think they
>> would be enormously different in effect, for many reasons I need not
>> go into here. If 'Assassination Markets' were limited to the former
>> model, very few people would be hated, enough, by only one person to
>> obtain a donation sufficient to buy a death. In the latter model, a
>> few million 25-cent donations would get rid of nearly all potential
>> targets. I suggest that I did indeed advance the rhetorical
>> state-of-the-world.

> I think Steve's point about high value targets being hard to
> attack is valid. But on the other hand what would happen if
> 'law enforcement' 'agents' were targeted? The price to get rid
> of lowly anonymous cops would be a lot smaller. Working as a cop
> would stop being appealing. And with no state 'law'
> 'enforcement' there are no state's 'laws' and ultimately no
> state.

I don't disagree that "high value" targets would be more difficult. But not that much. And if they are indeed "high-value", that implies that large numbers of people would be ready and willing to donate to see them gone. And the fact that the AP bounty can be collected by ANYONE makes it hard to defend against. Even a person's bodyguards (and especially them!) would be able to stage an attack, and collect the reward.

>> Rather, my
>> intent was to show that the kind of tools necessary to implement AP
>> are being considered and produced. Just "the kind of tools", not
>> necessarily the tools themselves. TOR should be made stronger, with
>> more hops, more exit nodes, and more transfer nodes, filler traffic,
>> for some examples of improvements.

> Tor is a brand of the tor corporation which in turn means the
> pentagon. It's pretty much a dead end (and that's the way its
> owners intend it to be, obviously)

And that's a real shame. It's still useable, within its limitations.



> Bitcoin needs an upgrade, for
> example to Zerocoin, to provide true anonymity, rather than mere
> pseudonymity.

    Yes...

    (rest of your message is a reply to Steve so I won't comment)

>
> > The betting pool itself would alert

> No, it would not. Unlike the Federal Government's short-lived
> proposal in 2003, PAM "Policy Analysis Markets", (FutureMAP),
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market in which the
> state of the betting itself alerts people to threats, a well-designed
> AP system would carefully avoid alerting the public (or anyone) to
> bets, ideally until later, after the event predicted had materialized
> or failed to materialize. The 'money' for the bet might be inside an
> encryption envelope, without the name of the target or date. Another
> encryption envelope, inside the first one, could contain the target
> and date information. The AP organization could decrypt the first
> (outer) envelope, and be unable to decrypt the inner one, at least
> until the password is sent in by the predictor. The AP organization
> would, however, publish the decrypted contents of the outer envelope,
> so that everyone would know that a prediction with $X of value came
> in on a specific date and time. Nobody, except the predictor, would
> know the identity or date. Eventually, the inner password would be
> sent in, used to decrypt the inner envelope, with the results
> published online. If the AP organization cheats, by <snip> failing to
> perform one of these steps, the predictor could publish the inner
> prediction key himself, disclosing to the public that the
> long-since-published content of the outer encryption envelope was a
> valid prediction, and for some reason (fraud?) the AP organization
> did not play fair. That would destroy the credibility of that
> specific AP organization; others would soon take its place.
>
> > potential targets to take proportional defensive measures, which "at
> > best" would inhibit the social progress promoted by the system.
> The system would adapt. Consider Le Chatlier's
> Principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier%27s_principle
> A working AP system might, for example, authorize spending (for
> concreteness) 10% of donations on defensive contracts: Consider the
> effect of a $250,000 reward on the prosecutor in a case alleging an
> AP action, or $500,000 for a judge. Or perhaps a reward of $100,000
> for each juror who participated in such a trial, and voted for
> acquittal, where the outcome was such that a retrial would be
> impossible, or at least did not occur. Such rewards could become
> very high, in large part because there would rarely be legal cases in
> which they would have to be paid.
>
> > But other than that...\
>
> "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
> Jim Bell
>
>