2018-04-08-1038Z


the craft had landed, but the spoilers didn't deploy, and we both just braced for impact. but apparently the runway was very long, so I started looking for things that I could do. overhead there was a long tube with something that looked like an umbrella mechanism, so I pushed against it. it unjammed, and the glider, plane, or whatever it was immediately started to slow.

the world was in civil war, looked like mostly military against politicians. sabotage was rampant; a combatant would travel miles to kill someone then find none of his weaponry working. often both assassin and potential victim had been disarmed and must fight to the death with whatever they have available.

what a dream. and the night isn't over yet.

my Ethereum lottery is somewhat working, but often fails during payout by running out of gas. the loop is just too long, and has too many transactions. I need to bundle them. another possible improvement would be to use a fixed 256-uint array of mappings address->uint count, if such a thing is even supported by Solidity. the final byte of the winning blockhash would index into the array.

I still haven't read "assassination politics" in its entirety. it's pretty longwinded, with a lot of repetition, but seems to get lost in the weeds (or maybe it's just me getting lost) when it comes to the details.

if it's to have a primarily deterrent effect, rather than simply serve as a marketplace for murder, I think all the records should be publicly readable. let the tyrants watch the price on their heads rise, and they might get plastic surgery and drop out of sight, turning up incognito at places like San Pedro la Laguna. wouldn't that work just as well?

as for determining time and date of death, and thus which winner is rewarded, I can't think of anything both built-in (nonreliant on external sources of authority) and sabotage-resistant. but right now I'm leaning on paid transactions that submit, support, or reject timestamps. some certain threshold of support not counterbalanced by rejections would trigger the avalanche of payments, with all those additional payments awarded to the winner. so that any attempt to slow down or stop the predictor/assassin from getting paid would eventually fail anyway, and would just make him richer. in the case of a particularly despised despot, the groundswell of support from grateful people ought to be massive.

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