Re: Untraceable Contract Killings

[Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>]

On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Tim May wrote:

> By the way, this is not really Bell's "assassination politics," this is
> just anonymous contract killings, known about to some of us since Chaum's
> work was first published...cf. my own "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988.
> 
> I may sound touchy on this issue, but I'm seeing more and more articles
> here and relayed from outside essentially giving Bell the credit for
> inventing these kinds of markets, when in fact he's a relative latecomer.

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.).  For killing a neighbor it
doesn't improve upon the simple untraceable contract, but it can make a
big difference when the target has many enemies (Bell gave politicians as
an example).

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".