Cypherpunks Used To Dream of True Disruption

Cypherpunks used to dream of true disruption. Many still do, but many have also tempered their aspirations and imagination. 

Most things being built in this space these days are basic consumer applications. New payments tools, new marketplaces for digital assets and collectibles, ways to scale more payments tools, etc. Nothing has been done in a while to truly rock the boat in a new way. The last thing produced in this space that truly did that is probably the last thing anyone would think I would say: Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). 

Say what you want about them, but it truly shook up the world order. 99.99% of ICOs were impractical scams, pump-and-dump schemes, or outright fraud. But they shattered barriers, they broke down moats. They let anyone, anywhere, invest in anything, with no legal frameworks being applied (or even enforceable, depending on the jurisdictions issuers operated from). 

A lot of the last few years has just produced more ways to integrate with the old order, to placate them, to adapt to them rather than vice versa. There isn’t much driving at disrupting the old order. The spark seems mostly gone. 

Let’s try and find it looking at infamous cypherpunk Jim Bell’s idea for disrupting the system: assassination markets. 

Jim Bell proposed the concept in his 1995-96 essay “Assassination Politics” published on USENET. Its core premise was aligning incentives through the use of a prediction market where participants would wager on the date that certain individuals would die. The idea was that market actors who placed large bets on certain dates would therefore have an economic incentive to bring about that individual’s death somehow, directly or indirectly. 

As the pot of money grew for a specific individual, eventually it would grow large enough (at least that was the idea) that someone would act and actually arrange for the individual’s death, if not take care of it themselves. 

This is technically possible to do now with Bitcoin privacy tools and trustworthy oracles. All you need is tools to keep your bets (or winnings) in bitcoin anonymous, and oracles people will trust to disperse funds honestly after a “victim’s” death. 

This is obviously a highly unethical, immoral, and wildly dangerous idea. But it’s also a powerful one, and revolutionary. A successful assassination market working at scale would radically alter the calculus of the governing interacting with the governed. 

How different would the world be if leaders had to weigh the risk of inciting an evergrowing pot of money incentivizing their untimely demise if they did something unpopular or detrimental to those they governed? 

Obviously in the real world, building an assassination market is insane, if you can find oracles that wouldn’t just steal the money and run. But it’s conceptually possible. What happened to thinking about ways to actually disrupt? To resist and overturn the existing order? 

Jim Bell also had a second, less extreme, idea: Federal “Justice” Shutdown. While everyone has a right to a trial by jury, almost no one criminally prosecuted actually goes to trial. Most people plead guilty or take a plea deal to escape the risk of harsher sentences at trial. Mr. Bell proposed crowdfunding money to pay attorney’s fees for anyone being charged with a victimless crime to go to trial. 

The idea was to subject the federal court system to a Denial of Service attack. Without the vast majority of people taking deals or pleading guilty, the federal court system would not have the resources to hear all of these trials in a timely fashion. It would clog up the court system. This could be used as leverage to force the government to repeal illogical laws surrounding victimless crimes.

This is possible right now with nothing more than basic Bitcoin wallet software and internet communications channels. It’s not as cool or “wow” in a gritty cyberpunk fashion, but just like his original assassination market idea, it could have a profound impact on resisting and upending the old order. 

Cypherpunks need to dream of true disruption again. People can do all kinds of things if they want to, they just need to imagine them first.