I’m worried that a blackmail-for-non-crime contract is weirdly hard to enforce. The blackmailer has an incentive to leak the information to their friends, so that their friends can begin separate blackmail attempts and extract more money from the blackmailee. The blackmailee has no good defense against this, but does have an incentive to murder the blackmailer to prevent the blackmailer from leaking the information (and to save money on their blackmail contract).
I’m sure there are other categories of contract which give one party an incentive to murder the other, but I’m not sure if there are other categories of contract which give such a strong incentive. I think it might be correct to outlaw blackmail contracts just to avoid situations where people have such bad incentives.
The sensible approach is. to demand a stream of payments over time. If you reveal it to others who also demand streams, that will cut how much of a stream they are willing to pay you.
Let’s talk about blackmail-for-non-crimes.
I’m worried that a blackmail-for-non-crime contract is weirdly hard to enforce. The blackmailer has an incentive to leak the information to their friends, so that their friends can begin separate blackmail attempts and extract more money from the blackmailee. The blackmailee has no good defense against this, but does have an incentive to murder the blackmailer to prevent the blackmailer from leaking the information (and to save money on their blackmail contract).
I’m sure there are other categories of contract which give one party an incentive to murder the other, but I’m not sure if there are other categories of contract which give such a strong incentive. I think it might be correct to outlaw blackmail contracts just to avoid situations where people have such bad incentives.
The sensible approach is. to demand a stream of payments over time. If you reveal it to others who also demand streams, that will cut how much of a stream they are willing to pay you.