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suy  1yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   Edited 1yr ago   3848 thread views

Scott Alexander on Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Effective Altruism

astralcodexten.substack.com

I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.

Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body

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No, I need crypto to move assets out of an authoritarian country, to buy actual illegal drugs and VPN and bulletproof servers, to fund people doing unapproved research and in the extreme case, assassinations.

Talk about ambitions ;-)

Cyber crypto assassinations are something that happens in cyberpunk fiction and anarcho capitalist theory, there is no one documented case IRL of succesful online murder for hire.

To order assassinations, you need close and deep personal connections of the right kind, the opposite of crypto.

"Why are you so sad? Seeing my friend sad breaks my heart so much."

"Billy Bob is messing with your business and causes you so much trouble? Fortunately, I know some guys who know how to deal with such problems. No, I do not need anything, I will do everything for my friend."

...

Few days later, Billy Bob is found swimming in the nearby lake wearing concrete shoes. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Sounds like a market opportunity to me. Why aren’t there Bond-villain type organizations that kill for profit alone? Was RICO that effective?

Any hired killer who actually put themselves up online openly would get immediately arrested, and anybody who googles "hire killer online" will be led to a police honeypot and promptly arrested. Because duhhhh.

Maybe there are no Bond-villain type organizations? I mean, there are crime syndicates, but they do not need to retail their enforcement capabilities to any random Joe with a bitcoin. They want them for themselves, tightly controlled by their leadership. And those who would retail probably would end up taking an order from LEO and going to jail very soon. It's an inherent contradiction between having wide retail appeal and tight opsec.

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