The discreet escort, or how Bitcoin makes prostitution unprosecutable

benkay: ;;later tell mircea_popescu how does the discreet escort leverage the WoT?

Before getting into that, consider that money changing hands is strictly the only way to successfully prosecute prostitution in all those backwater jurisdictions that still have particular flavours of sex criminalised.ⁱ Hook-ups, ie, fucking around, are legal pretty much anywhereⁱⁱ. Finding yourself in a certain place, such as wherever whores gather, be it a university campus or truck stop is also legal, and will stay legal by definition : if the place of gathering becomes illegal, people will necessarily gather some other place. Which will then be the gathering place. It's that simple.

Now suppose you're a policeman married to a fat ugly sow, like all policemen ever are. It's not as much a matter of not getting any nookie, for you. It's more a case of, you wouldn't want the sort of nookie readily available if it were freeⁱⁱⁱ. Consequently the hot, braless hussies running wild all over the place piss you the fuck off, with their complicated shoes and their gangbangs and slave collars and who knows what the fuck else. So you're gunna git yourself one, and put her slutty ass behind bars! And then jack off for two months to the memory of that high.

So it's settled, you be prosecutin' over here!

Except... how ? Bitcoin is impervious to your advances. Suppose you believe that 1 BTC moving from address 1richbusinessmanvisitingtown to address 1eageryoungsluttwilltakeitinthebutt through transaction a1b2c3m4o5r6t7a8u9x0v1a2c3h4e5s6 represents payment for sexual work done by Candice H. Plumsybutt upon Mr. James W. Ewesworth. Can you prove 1eageryoungsluttwilltakeitinthebutt belongs to Mz Candice ? Not really. If she wants you to, perhaps you could, but unless she gives you a signed statement to that effect, you've got nuttin'. (Notably, a signed statement by 1eageryoungsluttwilltakeitinthebutt is worthless to you, as anyone could have signed that thing, whether they were in fact Candice being honest or her sister Janice being jealous or just some random trollops trolling you all.) She doesn't have to keep her wallet on her person, it could be a paper wallet burried in the yard of her mother, three states over. She can still check the payment made it, on the public ledger, without proving thus that she actually owns the address. Isn't this new technology just fab ?

Ah! But there's still a matchbox^iv left in your bag of tricks! You could pretend like you aren't really buying sex work, because you're a cop that's pretending to be buying sex services in order for to greater justice! You know, like all sophisticated and shit, a Victor/Victoria is you. I think South Park did it.^v

This may be problematic, in that if Mr. Copper V. Butthurt contacts Candi and pretends to be just another Mr. Ewesworth, he could persay request a Bitcoin address from her. Should she be clueless enough to not reuse addresses^vi and should she then do something else stupid, like proving to some cop or other that indeed she does control that address, it is conceivable that a jury may convict. It is inconceivable however that a DA would greenlight a case on such flimsy evidence, at least for another decade or so. This because the little known secret about commissars, be they in the old Soviet republic or in the current one, is that failure hurts them a helluvalot more than success helps. So, one single case lost before the jury scares our friendly asshole DA a lot more than the possibility of winning entices him. After all, it's not him that put all the hard buttwork into building the case, it's the cop. He couldn't care less.

For extra safety, this is where the discreet escort can leverage the WoT. For instance, she knows that I'm not likely to rate some guy who's just a cop married to a fat sow and butthurt about it. So if she only fucks the people in my WoT, not only can she turn a pretty penny because we're all rich and powerful and whatnot, but she can also rest reasonably assured that she's not about to get stinged. Moreover, if she does get stinged, she has recourse! She can complain to me, for instance, and I can just as soon turn my rating into a negative, and all that hard work put into penetrating the WoT and acquiring valuable ratings is now gone in an instant!

Which is the overarching point here, leaving aside Candice and her passionate cocksucking passtimes : perfect money corrupts absolutely. Like so :

mircea_popescu: Anyway, take the NSA Satoshi hypothesis. So the NSA spent 5mn making this thing, which we all embraced. As part of that expenditure it has premined 10mn BTC, which it kept, secretly. We don't know. Today at NSA headquarters, "Sir, I would like to apply for permission to spend 10bn USD in BTC equivalent by dumping our stash." "We don't have 10bn in the budget. Application denied."
jayk: hohoho
mircea_popescu: Bitcoin, even should it have been made by NSA, has actually taken it over. Win.

via #bitcoin-assets.

Should the copper get in the WoT, his incentive structure changes so that he's more inclined to act like us than like the other coppers. That's the major fucking point, it's not that nothing can kill Bitcoin. It's that nothing can survive it.

Nothing at all.

1. Prostitution is only different from traditional marriage in the sense getting fat on McDonalds is different from getting fat on Skittles. A purely academic point, of interest strictly to some very weird, or perhaps very bored people. [↩]
2. That's right, Saudi Arabia isn't somewhere. There, I've said it. [↩]
3. Which it is, for very good fucking reasons, like say the efficient market hypothesis. And it's also exclusive. Very very exclusive. In fact, in the entire world, you're absolutely the only one to have it on his plate. Also for the same reason. [↩]
4. To quote :

   asciilifeform: re: 'wreckers' - correct. since the entire raison d'etre of the u.s. security apparatus is now 'terrorism' - well, the fireman, absent a fire, buys a box of matches.

   [↩]

5. Yes they did. Sting Operation. [↩]
6. Like a certain group of not quite so innocent folks recommend, for very obvious reasons. [↩]