Re: Twenty Bank Robbers -- Game theory:)

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 11:35 PM 7/25/96 -0500, ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov) wrote:
>In my initial post that caused all the turmoil I said (literally) this:
>``Twenty cypherpunks robbed a bank.''
>        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>I was careful choosing words.

That was my reaction as well.  I'd assume that if twenty cypherpunks
rob a bank, either it's one of Eric's party games (:-), or else 
they probably conspired over the net to rob a bank by computer.

1) The bank probably knows which bank got robbed.
2) The public probably won't hear about it.
3) The cypherpunks might or might not.
4) The number and identity of the cypherpunks is unknown,
        both to each other and to the bank.
5) If all twenty bank-robbing cypherpunks do conspire to
        get together in a room to split up the loot,
        it's probably a chat-room or mud-room;
        it's not likely to be physical space.
6) It's very hard to kill people whose identities you don't know
        across a net that obscures their physical location as well.
7) I suppose you could kill-file them, which does cut them out
        of the voting process, and therefore probably out of the money,
        but is certainly less drastic than shooting them.
8) Besides, how do you tell who's first on the list when they're
        all nyms anyway?
9) Who's got the money, anyway?  Was there some sort of secret-sharing
        protocol to make sure that the one cypherpunk holding the loot
        doesn't just telnet to Argentina.com with it?
10) Money? What money?
11) How do they conduct the voting?  Merely arguing over the voting
        protocols could occupy megabytes of list bandwidth.
12) They could just decide to use the money to pay the winner of
        a lottery to predict when somebody shoots Jim Bell.
13) But that wouldn't really take much, so there's still a lot left over.
14) N>10 of the twenty are really all Tentacles, so they can all
        vote to shoot any non-Tentacle and then vote to split the
        cash between themselves.  
15) They could even killfile one or two Tentacles just to make it look
        like a fair process.
16) I _knew_ we shouldn't have killfiled Lieutenant Niedermeyer!
17) Seventeen is the mystical number.
18) If the public _does_ hear about it, the bank's stock will drop
        like a rock, and they can use the money to buy out the bank.
19) It's mine, mine, all mine!
20) Bang!



#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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