Sedition, Subversion, Sabotage and now Strikeback
In the last article, we uncovered a technical combination that has never been discussed before and on the surface holds some promise in its ability to challenge the asymmetry of power.
But the devil is in the details. There are many details, many legitimate concerns and a good dose of systems-thinking will be required to see how it will be used, for good and bad.
One thing is certain: we must examine this with a dispassionate, methodical approach, because the genie is out of the bottle.
Let’s re-summarize the core idea.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume Dr Evil starts oppressing a minority Elbonians.
Imagine 1 Million Elbonians, the future potential victims of genocide, each creating prediction market transactions of this kind: “Dr Evil will be alive 6 months after the publishing of this transaction”, to which they assign a significant monetary value: e.g. $1000 worth of ‘tokens’.
They do not broadcast this transaction, they only prepare it and sign it.
Then they encrypt the transaction along with some Miner-Extractable-Value (a gratuity) and lock this up inside a Dead Man Switch payload, which gets released and decrypted when they die.
Suddenly, if Dr Evil decides to kill these people, he finds himself with a prediction market that has a payout of $1 Billion if he’s not alive 6 months after he kills them or locks them up.
This is only robust if the Dead Man Switch and the Prediction Markets are decentralized because of course Dr Evil would send an army to try to stop it.
Tyrants would all try to stop it and kill whoever tries to build it.
You have been warned.
The Sword of Damocles
The picture is a rendition of the Sword of Damocles, a Greek parable, famously recounted by Cicero, illustrating the constant peril and anxiety accompanying power. Damocles, a flattering courtier, praised King Dionysius II's luxurious life, seeing only the benefits of his title. The king offered him to be king for a day, placed him on the throne under a sword suspended by a single horsehair, demonstrating that wealth and power are shadowed by ever-present danger.
I like the analogy of this technology with the sword of Damocles because Modern tyrants seldom face any threat whatsoever.
The Devil in the Details
As I stated last time, I don’t think there is technology in existence today to make this sort of thing happen.
But if it could be done, it would first need to be done a certain way to achieve the expected result: deterrence.
For example, the Dead Man Switch cannot have any of its parts centralized. This means for example that no company gets to decide whether you died, or hold decryption keys to the payload. Even simply having a company provide some part of the infrastructure that allows the mechanism to function is a vulnerability. For example, if your failure to check-in depends on an email you’re supposed to receive or respond to, surely you can see how any Nation State would find this attractive. If the dead man switch payload is stored in a private database, or a private cloud it will also not be safe. Its encryption has to be impenetrable before the dead man switch expires. The operation of the dead man switch must also be unstoppable once triggered, which means there should be no way for a nation state to stop the publishing of the payload.
Likewise, for the prediction market, there should be no way for a nation state to object to the creation of the market, to limit access to it or prevent its resolution. Currently, prediction market corporations are either susceptible to be pressured into refusing to ‘accept’ the market, or they might have a DAO community vote on whether the market follows some guidelines. Don’t forget that DAOs are token-based and that governments have debated the legal status of these tokens, claiming the power to regulate their existence. We didn’t really talk about the details of what ‘kind’ of market could be robust enough but clearly, the prediction should depend on some objective conditions. There is the time condition, the deadline to any market. If you were the only person creating the market and placing a bet, the deadline could simply depend on when the market was created. But if you were to design one such market in which thousands of people should be able to ‘contribute’ to something that amounts to a substantial bounty, then each transaction would have to be able to create of bet into an existing market, with its own deadline.
Then there is the determination of Dr Evil’s death. Can Oracles be manipulated ?
Of course. We hear regularly of Crypto hacks that leverage the vulnerability of these ‘decentralized’ sources of information. If governments can manipulate the news and make you believe in false flag attacks, certainly they could perhaps manipulate the market such that it resolves to the negative long before any assassin could influence it:
Pretend dear leader was poisoned in a specific way, collect the rewards then magically heal him. This requires systems-thinking.
Then there are DAO based resolutions, for which I have seen a discussion that DAO voting members would hesitate to resolve a market in the negative because in doing so, psychologically, it is likely they would absorb some guilt in the murder.
Then there is the topic of attribution and free-loading. These topics we mentioned previously but clearly as the person wanting to deter your own fate as collateral murder, you might want some assurance that the incentive and the deterrence is on solid ground.
Perhaps the bet from the assassin must be accompanied with some cryptographic commitment (a term for a unique identifier whose origin only the assassin can produce) which would gate access to the payoff later unless the pre-image (the origin of the commitment) is revealed. This commit/reveal mechanism is common in blockchain systems to ensure anonymous participants cannot be impersonated.
I know this was full of technical lingo, but roughly it would look like this:
The assassin places a bet along with a cryptographic hash X nobody can reverse, and he/she/they use a very detailed piece of information they know will be true of the assassination to generate it. A very detailed picture of the poison’s recipe, or a precise GPS coordinate of the sniper’s location, a picture of the weapon. In other words, something nobody else would know about the murder. Then, once the market is resolved, the original clue (e.g. Miss Scarlet with the Rope in the Lounge) is provided to verify this is the wining bet on the negative side, to the exclusion of all other freeloader bets, because the blockchain participants can verify that X is the cryptographic hash of “Miss Scarlet with the Rope in the Lounge”
This approach also has the benefit of preventing Dr Evil who might be a billionaire, or any of the thousands of his authoritarian useful idiots, from trying to balance the positive side bets with negative side bets, i.e. dilute out the reward. At best they can place bets for all combinations similar to Colonel Mustard with a Candlestick in the Library on February 14, Valentine’s Day.
From this point forward, I’ll refer to the combination of ( Dead-Man-Switch + Prediction-Market-Transaction ) as the Damocles set-up.
Let’s continue to look at potential issues with this combination.
What if you died in a legitimate accident, not a bio-weapon attack ?
Your ‘bounty’ would be activated.
Oh, that’s probably fine. Unless you’re quite rich, locked up a significant bounty and somehow found yourself at risk of being volunteered for a science experiment, this is not likely to become an incentive large enough to alter history.
But this leads to a perhaps more legitimate question: would this cause the psychopaths to harden their inner security practices ?
Yes. Definitely.
The first Roman emperors had created a security force to protect them, the Praetorian Guard. In fact the whole apparatus of Law-fare isn’t just designed to keep you in line, it’s also a justification for the Byzantine bureaucracy (funny how that term took describes the succession of the Roman Empire) that makes access to the circles of power more difficult. In their time, they created large and impressive buildings that acted to reinforce their charisma - the third pillar - to obtain obedience from awe alone, but also acted as a maze to confuse anyone too eager to reach them. They still do this now of course. I don’t think the pillar of charisma can ever be weakened.
What is different with the Damocles set-up is that - provided the system is anonymous enough, the would-be assassins or conspirators could be anyone in the inner circles of the powerful psychopaths on whose heads the bounties have been assigned.
Of course, the simplest way for a potential tyrant to ensure none of this random threat gets activated is to simply behave. In other words: don’t be a tyrant.
Were you thinking about this possibility ? If not, ask yourself why.
The second best way is of course to place bets on the other side. The instant one of the people in their ‘flock’ dies with such a set up, a market would be revealed, which would enable them to bet on the opposite side. This would be a cost similar to ‘leader insurance’ , which would need to be continually supplemented. Would it cost more or less than beefing up their personal security ? Perhaps.
In past civilizations, potential leaders had to endure painful trials, sometimes irreversible, such as mutilations, in order to prove their worthiness. It’s hard to know whether that worked well. But the cost of placing defensive bets is continual, probably correlated with how belligerent the leader might be and importantly hypothetical. As a leader, you can never be sure how much safety your investment in the opposite bet might need to be. Killing a million of your subjects might not result in hardly any bounty on your head, or it might result in far more than you could possibly counter.
What if not all the potential victims agree on who is responsible ?
What would happen here is that a myriad intermediaries, innocent or not, could become targets of the system. The wrong Health Administration director, the wrong Military General, the wrong State department employee ?
This may seem shocking. But why ?
Are the intermediaries just following orders and that makes them innocent in your mind ? At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi officers who use this as a defense were rebuked.
From the standpoint of protection by deterrence, this would just imply that intermediate actors, responsible for enough to warrant the suspicion of potential victims, would also be deterred from doing harm by more than just honor a paycheck and a pension. At the very least, this might become an incentive toward increased transparency, as these intermediate actors strive to demonstrate their innocence.
But it might also mean that the people in charge, the psychopaths, would try to set each other up for blame, with the real decision makers staying in the shadows. It could also mean that the truth might be more difficult to find, since it would be a logical move for them to distort the truth to avoid becoming a target, in an attempt to distribute responsibility to their intermediaries by casting doubt on their own.
In other words, not too much different from what we have now, but perhaps more layers of obscurity around which organizations bear responsibility for your impending death.
I’m going to stop here for this article, since it’s getting fairly long.
In the next one we’ll touch on more ethical dilemmas and ‘problems’ that might result if this technology is ever created.