That "assassination politics" boils down to be being a minor variant on a well-established topic: the use of untraceable payments for contract killings

[Peter Fairbrother]

Like most cypherpunk ideas - bitcoin, TOR, bittorent - it has a fatal 
flaw - it doesn't actually work as advertised.

Suppose I am an assassin. I kill the target. How am m I going to get 
paid?  I don't mean some pseudoanonymous mechanism of payment, but who 
decides I get paid?

Who do I complain to if I don't get paid?


Peter F


On 10/09/2023 03:23, jdb10987 at yahoo.com wrote:
> As much respect as I had and have for Tim May, I believe that in this 
> statement he is oversimplifying the situation.
> First off, I was unaware of the existence of cypherpunks list as of 
> January 1995, when I thought of the idea that I called assassination 
> politics.  I actually knew of Tim may, probably as early as 1979, having 
> known that he discovered the reason for soft errors in dynamic Rams.
> But, if somebody had said the name Tim May to me in January 1995, this 
> soft error thing, and the fact that Tim May once worked for Intel, is 
> all that I would have known.
> I won't try to claim that I was entirely unaware of the concept of using 
> encryption to pay for anonymous hits on the internet; indeed, I probably 
> vaguely knew of that idea.
> However, I think it's appropriate to point out that the idea that Tim 
> May thought of amounted to:
> 'Anonymous person A anonymously hires anonymous person C to kill person C.'
> This, of course, was a fascinating concept, especially for the era of 
> the early 1990s.  While I have not read the cypherpunks archives for 
> those years, I have no doubt that this was extensively discussed, and 
> indeed should have been discussed.
> Someone who does such reading should critique my idea that, however, 
> what I "brought to the party" extensively and dramatically changed and 
> added to the overall concept.
> What I added, first of all, was the idea that the donations were to come 
> not merely from one person, but potentially hundreds, thousands, 
> millions or even billions of people.
> 
> Functionally, this is an entirely different system. There are probably 
> very few people who are hated by one other person enough that the other 
> person would be willing to spend the money necessary to hire a hit man 
> to kill him.
> But, once a system is set up that allows hundreds or thousands of people 
> to donate to such a fund, there are a great deal of potential targets. 
> Raise that number of donations to millions, and perhaps the amount 
> donated will be millions or tens of millions of dollars, and the system 
> will work in ways and places that I believe Tim May did not anticipate.
> The second thing that I added was the concept that the contract would 
> not merely be offered to one willing hitman, but in fact the contract 
> would be offered to everyone in the world.  Potentially billions of people.
> This makes it an entirely different system imagine you a person who is 
> fearful that he is being donated to death by some other individual, but 
> the contract was limited to only one person. It is probably actually 
> fairly straightforward to identify such a person.
> But, if the number of people who might potentially collect that contract 
> rose to 'everyone on Earth', it would become virtually impossible to 
> identify the person who's coming to collect the bounty.
> 
> 
> On Sep 9, 2023 2:18 AM, pro2rat at yahoo.com.au wrote:
> 
>     "assassination politics" boils down to be being a minor variant on
>     a well-established topic: the use of untraceable payments for contract
>     killings.
> 
>     Timothy C. May 1996
> 
>     https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/archive/1996/11/e64f667c278643deb58a45642d0f3ea6b64a01fab294bcc9be681fd5656895f2/
> 
>     Reposts not deadpools on Paul Wolfowitz made in July 2003 ( see
>     archive )
> 
>