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Comment by 1231232131231 | Hacker News Reader

So surprising...

Their approach was quite unique, though. It surprises me how hackers trust each other enough to send money without proof, especially in an environment where you're expected not to trust anybody.

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The only alternative I can think of is to use escrow, which probably isn’t attractive for illegal activities and still requires trust.

I recently read a book [0] that goes into that and how--much like biological parasitism--sometimes you have frauds upon frauds.

[0] Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World

Escrow was pretty popular on Raidforums, high reputation forum users would not only escrow transactions directly but also do things like pseudo-publicly validate or invalidate claims by checking a sellers data or tools against their own collections (presumably the benefits of being a professional hacker escrow and seeing lots of data).

You can use 2 of 3 multi-signatures to reduce trust requirements.

It’s just not a lot of money in most cases. Often in the hundred to few thousand range. And there is usually a data sample, such as the schema and the first 100 rows, or a demo. Of course, those aren’t strict guarantees but it does make faking it all more difficult.

In hacker world, the liability is distributed just like in corporations

the person hacking data isn’t usually the person turning that into money, the person turning it into money isn’t the person doing identify fraud, or breaking into users bank accounts etc

But whoever takes on the most liability stands to make the most money

But whoever trades the liability only gets a little bit

It's not their money.

You can probably do like a thousand transactions where the first part of the database is a freebie. Almost no trust needed.

I.e. pay for the first part to get the 2nd, and so on.

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