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Wagers as payment for software completion

aj replied to my note on free software economics.

(Wouldn't it be nice if there were some higher-level metadata about threads across blogs rather tha just A HREFs?)

His wager model is similar to Jim Bell's Assassination Politics. You can factor Assassination Politics into several fairly separate parts:

1. Blinded cryptographic wagers are a good way to arrange payment between n customers and an agent completing a particular task, without needing to know the other's identity.

2. (a) The US government is corrupt, and (b) an appropriate response is to assassinate various government employees, officeholders, or appointees.

You can usefully consider the wager algorithm if you disagree with the second point.

Imagine for a moment that as ordinary citizens were watching the evening news, they see an act by a government employee or officeholder that they feel violates their rights, abuses the public's trust, or misuses the powers that they feel should be limited. A person whose actions are so abusive or improper that the citizenry shouldn't have to tolerate it.

What if they could go to their computers, type in the miscreant's name, and select a dollar amount: The amount they, themselves, would be willing to pay to anyone who "predicts" that officeholder's death. That donation would be sent, encrypted and anonymously, to a central registry organization, and be totaled, with the total amount available within seconds to any interested individual. If only 0.1% of the population, or one person in a thousand, was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead, that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head.

It seems like that would give TV station owners even more power than they presently have.

posted Tue 28 Oct 2003 in /issues/economics | link

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