it seems better from their perspective than street gangs shooting each other over turf imo. an improvement for everyone involved, frankly.
>How do you make sure the product gets to your support layers?
through dead drops, of course ;)
In this system, you have drops. How does a rival gang know where they are? They'd have to buy the product to discover the drop and drops shouldn't be used multiple times. They could watch a user find one, but then that drop wouldn't be used again so they couldn't stake out and wait for their rival to refill it.
I think it's very unlikely a drug business can get to scale without reusing drops; the cost of scouting a good drop is significant, and the number is finite. Regardless, the value of a drop declines the farther it is from customers and from the dealers who supply the drop. So in practice, gangs will still have an incentive to claim turf and to harm other dealers using drops on their turf.
Even if that somehow doesn't happen, they'll still have the same strong competitive incentives. So they'll be very much inclined, as now, to discover rivals and take over their business through violence.
As a bit of a "spoiler" his solution is a covenant with the citizens. The government will hack all of our computers, will own the IME equivalents of every machine, and in return they will only use this power to hunt down terrorists and mass murderers, people who are looking to leverage technology to build nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, etc.
Things like parallel construction would have to stop though. Or be considered an immediate dismissal.
Another post on the same site as the root post discusses the surveillance state, he roughly justifies what is happening currently:
https://opaque.link/post/fog_of_cryptowar/
But I disagree on a couple of points, truth is more important than pseudo "pragmatism". A problem with incorrect pragmatism is that we collectively talk each other away from the seemingly impossible... which may in fact turn out to be possible. The study of cryptography (both primitives and protocols and systems) can be viewed as the study of paradoxical possibility. Things that seem to be impossible until they turn out to be possible.
It is in this sense that I wrote:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16947652
Perhaps I should be writing science fiction stories instead...
History suggests that is not long.
Still a fine line to walk.
People from Europe have this sort of... experience. Most of us know that trusting the government with our lives is not a good idea.
The US isn’t naive. In fact, it’s the opposite. It is a country that was so aware of the folly of government that it deliberately inhibited its own government by design. Because it knows damn well what happens when you relinquish control of yourself to another. That’s why the 2nd amendment is so fundamental.
The US doesn’t have to worry about things happening to the govt overnight, because the worry is built in. A successful model exits, it just needs to be followed...
I would have agreed with that assessment in the past but in the present I really can't.
Isn't "terror cell" a little over-the-top? It's just trade craft. The US does it. Russia and China do it. The various mafias (at least, modern ones) do it.
Terror cells have had to operate with reduced resources since the dawn of terrorism. The terror cell structure is trying to keep things as isolated as possible, and I'm saying this structuring and proliferation of dead-drop tech will all boost the potential power of the terror cell.
I'm saying that what they've described is a structure analogous to what exists, just higher tech. The time to adoption of this by terror elements is going to be short.
Last years state only tech is next years commercial tech. Once upon a time only the clergy were literate, now everyone can read and write whatever they want. Once upon a time the state could control the news. Now anyone with an internet connection can publish stuff. Once upon a time only major powers had tanks and artillery now every podunk warlord has them. Once upon a time only superpowers sent things into space. Now companies are doing it and making a profit. Once upon a time only the three letter agencies could bug a room. Now anyone can buy pinhole cameras for $5.
Trying to stand in the way of that is just stupid. You can't stop the long slow march of technological progress. At best you can quarantine off some small dystopia that you control.
The best counter to terrorism is a homogeneous population.
We'll probably see "white hat" distributed networks with pseudonymous reputation used for the provision of security and crime-prevention services, with no need for traditional Law Enforcement to get involved in any real way other than in a secondary, oversight role. After all, tools that "common malcontents" can use, can also be used by people working for the social good.
In this sort of arrangement, a jurisdiction's authorities could require shipments to be bonded, with forfeiture of the bond if it is found to contain a restricted substance. This would result in policing happening at the edges, by those providing the bonds, and likely relying on trust networks to assess the risk that a package originator is a terrorist.
Such a world would have a lot more trade friction than an idealized world govermment that centralized control of the movement of goods to prevent malevolent behaviour while allowing free trade of benign goods, at least in the earlier stages where localized solutions are not well-developed/efficient, but it would mean a far lower chance of a significant fraction of the world coming under the tyranny of a single malevolent government.
An all-powerful central govermment will always pose a far greater threat to the advancement of society than chaos IMHO.
As interesting as it all is, it's also very concerning for Law Enforcement. While petty things like drugs don't really worry me much, the advances in the anonymized distributed networks like this do mean that things that previously required big budgets of national intelligence agencies become easier for common malcontents to use. The article essentially describes a quintessential terror cell structure, but with the added benefit of 0 direct interaction. The separation of layers has always existed with limits (IE you had to have some form of communication) but this potentially allows for goods and services to easily be passed from fully anonymized layers to others without every having any interaction at all.