The Roman Sterlingov case got me thinking. How can we protect ourselves and our property, against bad actors?
Sterlingov did not even create Bitcoin Fog, and even if he did, it is not something he should be punished for.
What if there were an organization of people, who mutually agreed to impose a cost on attackers. If someone is wrongly targeted with state or non-state violence, the member funded organization would then attack, in some way the aggressors, any time a member was threatened?
This wouldn't necessarily need to be physical violence, but that shouldn't be a limitation, either. Using intelligence gathering, it could be simply damaging something that they care about: reputation, career, relationships, etc.
Thoughts??
I like the way you think.
Retribution is a form of deterrence
This sounds like exactly the kind of activity that should not be coordinated out in the open.
Yes I agree, which makes a traditional hierarchical organisation impossible. It would need to have a consensus mechanism comprised of individuals or small cells.
There can't be a single head of the snake, there should be thousands. You could even model some of it on government bureaucracies...a powerful organisation that has accountability only to it's own members, but not to the general populace.
Essentially it could operate like a parallel government, but with voluntary membership. There could be competing organisations as well.
It's a very interesting topic, but I think any discussions that go beyond mutual aid and venture into retribution need to be had elsewhere.
OK, how about the capability of imposing a cost, but not the execution.
In the Prisoners Dilemma, if the counter party knows that they will face no retaliation, they will defect every time, at the expense of the other prisoner. Doing the wrong thing is the only logical choice if you face no consequences. This is the situation a non-billionaire faces today.
I'm all for coordinated withdrawal of support and I'm even more for coordinated support for better alternatives.
Understanding the systemic differences and tradeoffs between war and law helps explain why the application of
physical power is so effective at restoring law and order when rules-based societies inevitably become
dysfunctional. Rulers who exploit rules of law can be compelled to stop by using physical power, in what’s often
called revolution. Participants who can’t be trusted to follow the rules can be compelled to follow them using
physical power, in what’s often called enforcement. Outsiders who don’t sympathize with the rules can be
compelled to sympathize with them using physical power, in what’s often called national strategic defense.
Whenever laws become dysfunctional, the cure appears to be the same for each affliction: keep projecting
increasing amounts of physical power in increasingly clever ways until symptoms improve. As energy-efficient and
peaceful as it would be to remedy the exploitation, abuse, and neglect of laws using courts of law, it clearly doesn’t
work in all cases – else there would be no war in the first place. A great deal of evidence suggests that signing
policy is a far less effective way to fix dysfunctional societies than applying brute-force physical power (see the
1938 Munich Agreement for one of countless examples from history).
Excerpt from Softwar by Jason Lowery