[Cryptography] Incentive Politics

[Howard Harmon]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your questions!

> 1. I come to think of bounty hunters. Does that still exist in the US,
> and did you look at any existing task services when designing this?

We have not considered use by bounty hunters, however we have considered different task services, and that proposed in our paper is distinguished from those we are aware of in a number of ways.  The primary being that every related idea we know of is essentially purpose built to facilitate crime or assassination marketplaces, and offer few "built-in" restrictions on the actual tasks posted (as in quality or ethics). In our view, this not only precludes such marketplaces from hosting other "good" tasks, but also prevents their wide-use and potential due to their inherent criminal foundation.  For example we cite a paper by Juels, Kosba, and Shi that outlines one such marketplace, but all the applications the authors mention (or that we can think of for their marketplace) are criminal.

To this end, the primary question we sought to address was "how can we develop a decentralized & anonymous marketplace that supports any task, but for which it would be as challenging as possible to post criminal tasks (i.e. assassinations) that are successfully carried out."  To the best of our knowledge no existing marketplace accomplishes this aim.  One particular difficulty with this problem is that for all existing solutions, if a marketplace is in fact created that manages to avoid hosting a large number of criminal task contracts, then it could easily be copied and repurposed without such a constraint.  

While there likely does not exist a decentralized task marketplace solving the problem in full, we think our proposal comes close: it would support practically any task (especially "good" ones like incentivizing legislators to pass climate change policy), while all alternative decentralized task marketplaces we are aware of or could come up with either have a much more limited scope, are much harder to use (i.e. fees, proof of work), or offer so few natural restrictions on content that their use would be immediately outlawed or would be ignored.  In contrast, our proposal is very easy to use (i.e. no proof of work or fees to get involved), and naturally supports only "quality" contracts that many participants support by way of the built-in incentives.


> 2. What happened with the assassination markets? I always thought Ukraine
> would set one up for Putin, but haven't seen or heard anything. Sounds
> like a good use case.

As indicated above, our protocol was deliberately designed with the intent of minimizing its use for crime (including assassinations), to a point that even copies of the protocol could not be "purpose built" for criminal marketplaces.  Our protocol essentially accomplishes this by ensuring the only "activated" contracts are those with significant support (i.e. millions of dollars in reward with many backers).  While the "significant support" condition precludes the use of the protocol for almost all crime, there are instances, such as the one you mentioned, where this condition could be met.  And in fact when a contract is activated, if it was designed properly the chances that the task is carried out should be quite high due to the large reward and high probability of correct reward issuance.

Regards,
Howard Harmon




------- Original Message -------
On Monday, October 2nd, 2023 at 6:52 AM, efc at swisscows.email <efc at swisscows.email> wrote:


> 
> On Sat, 30 Sep 2023, Howard Harmon via cryptography wrote:
> 
> > Hi Everyone.
> 
> 
> Hello Howard(s)!
> 
> > For those of you that have been around a while, you may remember Jim Bell’s Assassination Politics essays from a few decades back. If
> 
> ...
> 
> > so, you may be interested in the following paper we wrote that addresses the issues Bell’s proposal has (as well as issues contained
> 
> 
> Two questions...
> 
> 1. I come to think of bounty hunters. Does that still exist in the US,
> and did you look at any existing task services when designing this?
> 
> 2. What happened with the assasination markets? I always thought Ukraine
> would set one up for Putin, but haven't seen or heard anything. Sounds
> like a good use case.
> 
> Best regards,
> Daniel