From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 01:04:19 +0800
To: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
Subject: Re: Untraceable Contract Killings
In-Reply-To: <v03102818afc32f6b5b30@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970611095122.006bf104@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 05:39 PM 6/10/97 -0700, Wei Dai wrote:
>I think the novelty of Bell's scheme is that it allows assassination
>payments to be pooled from a large number of anonymous payers without
>explicit coordination (i.e., the payers do not have to communicate with
>each other to work out a contract, etc.).  

That's not the novel part - in addition to anonymous contract killings,
it's also easy to run an anonymous fund that _claims_ it will use any
donations of digicash encrypted to the fund's public key for assassinating
the designated target.  In both that approach, and Bell's, there's still
the reputation problem of making sure the person collecting the money
really does pay off the killer.  What's novel about Bell's version
(and I don't know whether it originate with him or not) is that
it provides a cyberspace-only mechanism for the assassin to 
demonstrate to the payer that he's the one who did the job
and isn't some wannabe claiming to have done it to collect the cash.
	(like the wannabes who called newspapers claiming to
	have been the World Trade Center bombers, etc.)
There are alternatives, like posting a photo of the corpse to
a time-stamping service and then to Usenet, though this adds
some risk to the assassination, and is less useful for
public killings (e.g. if the President gets shot,
and there's a well-known address for the assassination pool,
the White House Press Corps may try to get their photographs
into the pool before sending them to Reuters and, umm, AP.)

The assassin still has to make sure he gets paid, and Bell suggests
(incorrectly, I think) that since all the payer is doing is
running a lottery, not contracting for killings, that the payer
could be a persistent entity with some reputation capital
who has an incentive to pay off.  

>Now in light of the fact that when the target has many enemies the
>assassination becomes a non-excludable public good, it is almost certain
>that the scheme cannot actually work in practice.  All of the potential
>payers would rather free-ride and let others pay, so the public good ends
>up not being "produced".

I think Bell is imagining that a lot of people would be willing to
pay $5 for killing high-profile targets, like a few IRS agents,
so this wouldn't be a problem for the targets _he_ wants killed off.
Getting people to chip in large amounts of money is tougher.




#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)