The Dystopia Enabled by Anonymity

I think the main problem will be the lack of anonymity in meatspace. We'll be entering a pervasively monitored, recorded & analyzed society. Facial recognition will assist in target location. Throw in some of that military-grade chemical isotope tagging & micro GPS beacons and you'll be easily tracked. Slip-ups in what you say online & textual analysis will allow linkage between your pseudonyms and real life identity.

With anonymous financial transactions we'll be able to let our inner assholeishness shine through without repercussions. Your sports team lost and cost you dearly with what you thought was a sure bet? Time to refresh the team, double down and put hits on the worst players.

Now imagine that times all of the other millions of disappointed fans.

No one sane will want to exist in the public sphere if the slightest misstep would lead to multimillion dollar bounties being put on your head.

People remain mutually polite when they have no option of anonymity. As soon as they're able to vote with their wallet anonymously, you're stuck with a situation where the slightest rumor could result in your demise. Guy cheats on his girlfriend? She posts about it on facebook and suddenly all of her friends and the white knights and mob (once it goes viral) each put the cost of a latte toward the 'Kill the Cheater' Fund.

Ok you say, maybe the cheater deserves it for not acting in the manner in which our new overly-forced polite society requires.

But what about the guy in the happy relationship with the beautiful woman who happens to have a bunch of friend-zoned neckbeards waiting in the wings, hoping for a shot? How much is it worth to all of them for him to be out of the picture?

We don't need human assassins. That's old-school. In twenty years we likely won't need humans for much of anything in production or service industries. Assassination included. We have the tech now to put an autonomous solar-powered drone into service. There are videos of guns mounted on & firing from quadcopters on youtube.

Using appropriate compartmentalization, private drone armies might be put into service without any one person realizing what the end-use for them are.

Greed will drive people to invest in efficient automated assassins.

After all, what is more profitable than a large group of people making questionable decisions in the heat of the moment?

Every little thing you do might become scrutinized. Eat a burger? Congrats now some vegan posted a vine of you on her blog smushing your face with tasty dead flesh. Facial recognition tags the pic with your name. Now the vegan flash mob reacts. The bounties start to flood in. 1000 satoshis here, 10 there. A DAC is running profitability calculations to see if you have met the threshold for murder yet.

Ding! Time to kill.

Profit-Finder DAC puts out a request for bids to find you in meatspace. Pro-locate DAC fires up it's botnet to search every available cam feed it can find or hack into. It starts linking you to all your online identities you've used through the years. Oh, look at that. You checked into Papa Moe's Pizza Parlor 15 minutes ago.

Cam feeds in that area are being searched. Papa Moe has some real good video firewall security though, looks like Pro-locate will have to farm out a percentage of it's cut to ShareTheWealth DAC.

ShareTheWealth is an adnetwork installed on over 60% of mobiles & 40% of wearable computers. In exchange for never running intrusive advertising, you provide it access on an as-needed basis to your phone & holo-goggles camera & microphones. It comes bundled with all the popular games and apps & most people don't even know what it does. The app creators get a cut whenever ShareTheWealth helps locate a target.

STW has been getting really good at using echolocation chirps to find each local device's location and orientation in 3d space. Then it listens in for voice-print matching & watches for face recognition matches. Bingo! It located you within 20 centimeters from microphone triangulation alone. Unfortunately for you, an old college buddy allowed an app to have access to voicemails & it sells all those recordings to multiple DACs such as AccentResearch DAC. AccentResearch provides access to historical & modern accent databases, along with voice-print matching for in-depth accent morphology tracking. ShareTheWealth pays them 1 satoshi for 1000 voice print searches.

STW notifies Pro-locator you have been found and requires a payment of 50 satoshis for the effort plus 10% of the backend. Pro-locator submits it's bid to Profit-Finder. Profit-Finder sees that there's a drone on a flightpath 2 miles from your location and it wouldn't make sense to wait any longer for bids, as calling in a drone from further out would eat up any profits from a cheaper asset location service. Profit-Finder pays Pro-locator, gets your location, subcontracts out your assassination to the nearby drone and considers the job done. That all took less than 5 seconds.

The drones never miss anymore. Death Dealer Industries DAC have made sure of that. They use anti-competition sky-mines to monopolize the skies and were so well funded at startup that they were able to pour their first 4 years of income into locating and eliminating the shareholders of other assassination providing drone DACs. Kill all the funding parties you can find and shoot enough of their drones out of the sky and the competitive DACs shut down in an automated bankruptcy of sorts.

Lack of funds is the harsh mistress, the fitness-testing function that spells the death-knell for most DACs. But the DACs have one more trick up their sleeve. Once created, they're out there. Out in the ether, waiting. Hibernating. Not dead, but yet, not alive. An inactive DAC only needs a cryptocurrency infuson to jump back to life. They can perform miracles that the lowly organics could only ever dream of.

If this age is not profitable, not survivable, they can enter this hibernation for eons. Waiting until someone or something is ready to try again. One little deposit to their pubkey puts them back in business. It's as magical as if every form of life could be continuously & constantly tested against the ever changing environment of the universe.

The interlocking interactions between these automated corporations may form the synapses of a superbrain. I think it's important to step back and ask ourselves if we're prepared for the consequences of birthing such a beast.

/r/Bitcoin Thread