[Cryptography] Incentive Politics

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 8:29 PM Howard Harmon via cryptography <
cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

So a little while ago, I got rather interested in the commercial
possibilities of making ice cream using liquid nitrogen. I got fairly deep
into developing a business plan and then abandoned it all after an incident
in the UK where some numpty of a bar tender served a girl a nitrogen
cocktail on her 18th birthday that put her in the hospital.

The problem being that it doesn't matter what I do to ensure safety, an
industry like that is going to fall at the first major injury. Which is
pretty much has in the UK, the liquid nitrogen craze ended and while there
are still some players, it is no longer a profitable market.


I think the same is going to prove true of any form of smart contract based
market. Unless you can absolutely exclude the possibility of someone using
the underlying infrastructure to post assassination contracts on members of
congress, someone is going to do exactly that and every exchange is going
to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

There is really no possible fix for this problem that does not ultimately
rely on an absolutely trusted intermediary. You can dress it up any way you
like, but the notion that a majority of capital in some
pseudocurrency scheme will always vote the 'right way' is bonkers.

The ultimate trigger these malign schemes all rely on in practice is an
asset transfer scheme that provides finality with no recourse. It isn't the
confidentiality that led to $BTC triggering the rise of ransomware, it was
the fact that payments cannot be recalled.


Any scheme that offers smart contracts and finality is going to enable
assassination markets. Once the first assassination occurs, the authorities
are going to terminate all infrastructure offering either.

Do not attempt to threaten deadly force against parties that control a
vastly larger array of deadly weaponry.
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