Re: MUD anyone?

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 09:47 AM 8/27/96 -0700, Jon Leonard wrote:
>> Would anyone out there be interested in helping set up a 
>> crypto-anarcho-capitalist MUD to play around with some of the social 
>> aspects of crypto-anarchy and anarcho-capitalism? I can probably hack 
>> together a basic lpmud in a month or two if someone has a machine which 
>> it could run on and which could run a mailing list for those involved. 
>
>I've been planning to run a MUD like that, at mud.umop-ap.com port 2121.
>I just don't have enough coded to be worth announcing yet.
>Which cryptographic primitives should be coded in initially?
>Obvious choices are:
>Pseudonyms
>Anonymous digital cash (issued by any pseudonym, not just "banks")
>Public and private keys
>Secret sharing
>Anonymous broadcast & message pools
>Anonymous markets
>
>What am I missing?  Should there be direct support for Jim Bell's
>assasination markets?  It'd provide a means of demonstrating its
>ineffectiveness as a means of social control.

Aren't you writing up the results of the experiment before you even take the 
data?  That's called "dry-labbing."  

In any case, I'd welcome such a simulation, but there are a number of 
caveats.  To me, the most obvious one is GIGO:  Simulations, especially 
political/social ones, might depend heavily on assumptions that are 
programmed into them.   A trivial, yet interesting example is the computer 
game "Sim City" which allowed you to adjust the "tax rate" but problems 
always cropped up the further away you were from 7%.   The libertarians were 
frustrated that we were unable to drop the tax rate and still get a 
well-functioning, happy society.  It is unlikely, obviously, that there is 
anything magical to a society about a tax rate of 7%   The answer is likely 
that the people who wrote the program simply hard-coded it into the game, 
either directly or as a consequence of various political/social assumptions 
that they didn't realize they were making.

Another problem was demonstrated a few weeks ago when a "game theory"-type 
problem was proposed on CP, the one where 20 thieves sequentially are given 
the task to propose the disbursement of $20 million in loot, with a vote on 
the proposal and death for the proposer of a rejected proposal.  I pointed 
out that the difficulty with an _exact_  (game-theoretical) solution to such 
a problem is that the "cost" of death in this problem is undefined.  A 
person might be willing to take a risk of death for $20 million that he's 
unwilling to take for $20 THOUSAND,  and certainly not $20 DOLLARS.

AP (Assassination Politics), at least the initial "government-eliminating" 
function of it, should work on a financially-sound principle:  Actuarially, 
the value of a continuing $1/year obligation is $20 if the real interest 
rate is 5%.  This means that if a randomly-selected government employee is 
paid $40K per year including benefits (money which is stolen from 
taxpayers), it would be worth a one-time cost (actuarially speaking) of 
20x40K, or $800,000 to see him dead and not replaced.   Assuming his death 
can be purchased for less than this, you are dollars ahead to buy it.  If 
you can buy his death for, say, $20,000 (half his yearly salary) you have, 
in effect, profited by $800,000-$20,000 or $780,000 to do this.

(Technically, the amount _society_ would benefit is actually the amount of 
salary cost eliminated, minus the ordinary benefit  of that government 
employee doing his usual job.  A person (statist?) might try to conclude 
from this that getting rid of them won't save much.  That's the collectivist 
point of view.   However, the people who (unwillingly) finance these 
salaries with their tax dollars, and the people who arguably benefit from 
these employees are, in my estimation, two separate and distinct groups of 
individuals, so my analysis is still valid for the former group.) 

It gets even better.  If most of these employees decide that discretion is 
the better part of valor, and 90% of them resign rather than (almost 
literally!) get the ax  then the average cost of getting rid of a given 
employee is reduced by another factor of 10, perhaps to $2,000.   And 
obviously, the system feeds on itself:  Once the average cost of getting rid 
of them drops to $2,000, their fate is so certain that the resignation rate 
would probably skyrocket to well over 99%, which would further reduce the 
average cost to perhaps $200, and so on.  The overall effect is somewhat 
akin of "falling off a cliff," or perhaps the collapse of a star destined to 
become a black hole:  Once a certain point it reached return is impossible 
or impractical. 

Now you should understand why I'd be quite pleased to see such a system 
modelled:  It would be great to be able  to vary the initial conditions, and 
see that the outcome turns out almost identically each time.  Such an 
outcome would make you very nervous:  It would show that I am correct!

(BTW, a similar analysis will probably suggest that the amount of money 
traditionally spent on US national defense would drop from the current 
figure of about $250 billion to no more than 1/1000th of this, or maybe even 
far less, and for similar reasons.)


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com