The weapon of Mass Deterrence. No, it’s not the guillotine.
By the way, it’s too late for you to have plausible deniability. Your visit to the URL has been recorded in some NSA vault somewhere if substack isn’t sending it directly. You will be investigated as soon as someone uses this solution to stop a war.
This is serious stuff.
When I first though of this, I was in a conversation and I just combined the ideas out loud. At first I laughed because I thought it was ridiculous and yet beautiful but I soon got worried. I was stunned by the potential.
I was careful to only mention it to a few people who could think it through. To be perfectly honest, only a couple of people, the most deprogrammed people I know, have shown a positive response. I was a little worried about the ethical, moral consequences of the things I couldn’t yet contemplate. I tried to reach out to a few people known for their philosophy as this surely opened new trolley problems to analyze. Then I realized nobody was curious or cared.
I understand. If someone came to me with a ‘new’ solution to end wars, I would probably roll my eyes too, and assume it’s some kind of lame petition thing.
People have been so numbed to continuous wars that they cannot imagine a world without it. They don’t think it’s possible to stop the wars the psychos keep starting. There is some dopamine reward in getting together with other people and fighting a political battle, even pushing a rock off a cliff. [Men at Work, Iranian Movie]
As you will see, if anyone used this technology even once, there is nothing governments would spare to try to stop it. But of course, that might stop that too.
Let me preface this by saying this is quite technical, and you will hate it. It will make you feel very uncomfortable and you will want to reject it on moral grounds. Please hold your judgement. In future articles, we will dive in carefully about all the moral aspects of this, one by one, because I don’t want you to walk away with the sense that this is just a garage nuclear device that can harm many people.
We already discussed the decentralized Dead Man Switch, which I had designed, but there may be other ways to create one. The important things is that I’ve proven it can be done, and the technology will only be improved going forward. What we didn’t discuss is what sort of things could be locked inside the dead man switch. We just assumed it was just information, financial secrets, crypto secrets and family secrets that someone does not want to be revealed until their death. That’s the inheritance case. We also mentioned government secrets, corporate secrets and journalist secrets, for which the use case is the protection of their lives, the threat that the secrets will be released if they are killed. That’s the David vs Goliath case. This is something that could deter someone from killing you, because they don’t know what secrets could be revealed.
But as a business, you can imagine I was always in search for new use cases, for the opportunity they might represent. Another type of information that can be locked in a Dead Man Switch is a pre-signed transaction. This came up a few times in discussions with other crypto and blockchain people, for the simple reason that many of them assumed the company was going to ‘execute’ transfers of crypto assets. That wasn’t a desirable feature of the product, because we didn’t want to ‘control’ the assets, and at the same time, we had questions from people who owned assets on blockchains that didn’t seem connected to those we used. My answer was always simple, just deliver keys, not transactions, but if you really have a number of assets among many wallets, it’s not practical to deliver keys to many wallets to many people, it’s just easier to pre-sign transactions. It’s more complicated in UTXO chains like Bitcoin, because one spend transaction can invalidate older transactions, but that was the general response, with a prompt to sit down and talk about strategies. So how does that work ?
Well, any Web3 app can create a transaction on a contract or a simple transfer of token transaction and get your wallet to sign it. Then it normally sends it. But it doesn’t have to. The transaction can also include multiple recipients, which can include a sort of generous refund that whichever miner executed the transaction could collect. Think of it as a tip. This acts as an incentive for them to prioritize executing your transaction. Often an undesirable friction for day to day operations, this can be useful to ensure timely, unstoppable execution. In other words, the Dead Man Switch isn’t simply for your last wishes, to be executed at someone else’s discretion. This is unstoppable, postmortem action.
No permission required, no intermediaries.
Surely this leads to brand new trolley problems, weird Rube Goldberg levers with trolleys full of zombies. Right ?
We also briefly talked about assassination markets. We need to revisit them and if you didn’t skip the last article on incentivizing information leaks, this will be a review.
They were proposed by Jim Bell a while back before Blockchain existed. There were multiple versions, but the core idea was based on a complex and secure system that utilized anonymous electronic money and pseudonymous re-mailers to allow participants to place bets on the date of death of a given individual. This anonymous prediction market would incentivize assassination because parties with advance knowledge of an assassination plot could profit by accurately betting on the date of death. It relied heavily on encryption and anonymity technologies.
Now with Blockchain, and specifically prediction markets, the same thing is possible. Here is how it’s supposed to work. Let’s assume you want Dr Evil to be eliminated.
You create a Prediction Market that claims Dr Evil will be alive in 6 months.
You place a large bet on the positive outcome (Dr Evil will be alive in 6 months)
Others possibly add to the bet, creating a very large payoff for the opposite outcome, if Dr Evil dies within the 6 month period.
Austin Powers, with the ability to influence the outcome with any kind of weapon takes the opposite bet, perhaps just $1.
Austin Powers kills Dr Evil. The bet placed by Austin Powers is now worth much more, totaling all the bets that were made on the other side.
That’s the core idea. Because current prediction markets are not really anonymous and rely on blockchains that are public ledgers which allow tracing of transactions and because most of them perform some curation of the prediction markets and finally because verification of the outcome isn’t simple, none of this is a viable scenario today. That won’t stop mainstream media from panicking over the idea and propagating false stories to reinforce the idea that “our” politicians lives are sacred.
But even assuming that the privacy, market curation and outcome verification are handled, there are still economic problems with the setup. For example, there is nothing stopping someone from betting $2 on the negative outcome along with the ‘killer’. You can immediately see how some opportunistic gambler could just snipe at such markets, and collect massive gains for very little work. This of course destroys the incentive for the enterprising hit-man, since there is no assurance that they will collect on the entirety of the bet by influencing the outcome, since at any point, even on the last day, they might have to split the reward with an anonymous freeloader.
There are of course ethical concerns regarding the set-up, since it can be argued the person creating the prediction market is incentivizing the murder, as well as those betting on the positive outcome.
You might have guessed where we’re going with this now:
What if an unstoppable dead man switch could secure a signed but unpublished transaction that places a bet on an assassination market ?
I’m going to stop here for this article so you can think it over, examine the idea in your own mind before we dive into the technical details of the possible implementations, moral implications, incentives, threats, failure modes and more.
In the next few articles, we’ll analyze those aspects.