Moloch coin: Blockchain for Evil
Moloch coin is an automated and nearly unstoppable blackmail engine. No one should ever build it.
This is a crytpocurrency horror story.
Recently I’ve had network-effects on my mind. Specifically token sales, ICO’s, or whatever coin someone is trying to sell you now. The supposed goal of these sales is to raise funds for development and fuel some useful distributed mechanism.
And some astonishingly small percentage do actually achieve something useful with their token. Mostly around governance I’ve seen so far.
But the vast majority are about locking in and extracting value from users.
I don’t like lock in on principle. It restricts the user where good technology should prove it’s worth by empowering users to do things that where previously impossible.
Of course the argument against my anti-token views is that crytocurrency projects can only have positive ‘network effects’ and not negative ‘lock in’ because they have to provide value to someone to be used at all right?
Wrong. I present Moloch coin, a conceptual idea for an ICO that is as close to unambiguously evil as possible.
All Moloch coins are created and sold in an ICO, the value of these coins is that they can be used to mine for secrets.
Not cryptographic secrets, real secrets. Things people don’t want other people to know.
This data is encrypted to an M of N key scheme using all Moloch coin miner addresses. The other components of a submitted secret are a publicly visible message field to notify the blackmailed party, a tribute amount, a tribute address, and an interval at which tribute must be paid.
Using a proof of stake system Moloch coin holders can mine new blocks, containing both transactions and secrets.
If a victim does not pay tribute within the specified period the mining nodes produce the key to unlock their secret collectively. The secret is then included in plain sight in the Moloch coin blockchain.
To prevent their secret from being revealed the blackmailed party must make a transaction that meets the tribute criteria within the required interval paying both the blackmailers address and a transaction fee to the miners.
This provides automated blackmail that backs the value the Moloch coin and forces the blackmailed party to buy Moloch coin or attempt to hold enough of it to prevent the revelation of their secret.
In a lot of ways Moloch coin is the perfect cryptocurrency, everyone is strongly incentivized to hold for the long term and new users must constantly come in and buy more whether they want to or not, pushing the value even higher.
Combine with zero knowledge proofs for blackmailer payouts and you’ve invented the perfect speculative cryptocurrency using the power of evil.
But is it actually possible to build? At it’s core Moloch coin is a sort of reverse AdChain where the network votes on the validity of entries. Except in Moloch coin the network challenges the entries constantly instead of requiring a specific challenge from an active user.
The hard part of this whole process is that submitting secrets is expensive in both storage space and processing time.
We can dramatically reduce this by requiring miners to stake some coins that they will remain online for a given period, then message sizes are proportional to the mining pool size, not the total Moloch coin pool. If there are so many miners as to make submitting messages difficult a queue can form of who is allowed to participate in mining what blocks into the future. Prioritized by the amount of Moloch coin staked to make taking over the pool difficult.
This is somewhat analogous to the delegated proof of stake schemes already in development.
There’s nothing stopping a secret from being resubmitted an unlimited number of times of course. A new-secret fee is paid each time to prevent spam.
With only 10,000 miners a 300 letter secret is a mere 3 megabytes and remains valid for blackmail as long as enough miners from when it was submitted remain online.
While submitting on a normal computer would still take a while and the new secret fee would need to be high to manage the storage. But that’s well within the range of practically for sufficiently high value secrets.
Obviously Moloch coin could never become a mainstream currency, this would impede it’s appreciation some, but what it loses in ease of use it gains in perpetual lock in. The more blackmailers feed high value secrets to Moloch coin the more valuable it grows. It’s the perfect perpetual rent seeking engine, fueled by the suffering of those who make it possible and the apathy of long term holders.
Like any tool crytpo-economic network effects can be abused. We’re fortunate that most malicious ICO’s are merely creating worthless tokens.
If you’re designing a crypto-economic incentive system and trying to figure out how to lock in users rather than create something new and better.
Or if you’re buying tokens for nothing but speculation.
Remember that you are feeding Moloch, increasing the incentive to create something like Moloch coin.
Tread lightly, the crowd is the cruelest of us all.
