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Comment by robbomacrae | Hacker News Reader

This whole article is one giant time sapping piece of click bait.

The author makes the unexpected claim that businesses want a non zero amount of fraud. And so as a reader you are tempted to read on because you haven't heard this before. But essentially the argument is that fraud is needed as an unavoidable byproduct of allowing trust/credit in the system to facilitate transactions. However, if businesses could have the trust without the fraud of course they would. I wouldn't be so upset if the author had been more upfront about what this was about. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who are learning about the fraud and trust/credit relationship for the first time. Just don't try and spin this in a way that it isn't.

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There is an interesting thought experiment you can do. Imagine a world with 100% honest, rule-abiding people. What are the consequences of such a world?

The initial things you realize are, no keys, no locks, no gates, no passwords. ...but it gets even more profound the more you think about it. No police, no military, no cashiers, no ticket collectors, no bouncers, no bartenders (for beer/wine), no security guards, no prisons, no weapons manufacturing or sales, no security cameras or systems, no cybersecurity professionals or monitoring software, no criminal judicial system, no financial enforcement agencies... ...and how many industries would function far more cheaply such as insurance, unemployment, credit cards, and healthcare, due to no fraud?

It's actually staggering how much of society is structured purely around a lack of trust. It's easy to imagine that security is responsible for a huge portion or all human GDP/budgets - maybe 50%?

...and what percentage of the population is really responsible for causing this? It is 1%? 5? Or maybe it's much more? Maybe most of us are not criminals because of the enforcement?

If we could program in obedience in people - what leaps and bounds we could achieve!

But more realistically, there is an equilibrium that exists between dishonest behavior and efficiency. The more common dishonest people are, the more expensive the entire system becomes. ...and it's not at all linear. A change from 0.1% dishonest behavior and 1% dishonest behavior probably results in an outlandishly more complex security setup.

> It's actually staggering how much of society is structured purely around a lack of trust.

You've ignored one huge category: disagreements. We can all observe the rules, but we may not all come to the same conclusions as to how they bind our actions. Reasonable people can disagree without being "dishonest."

Further, you're pre-supposing a list of rules that does not and does not need to change. Which is far less profound than you make it out to be.

I agree whole heartedly. Often wondered the same. But I'd always think a small amount of conflict is needed to keep our defenses evolving in case we ever come into contact with a society that would be more sophisticated than us in that regard. The same applies to computer viruses, pathogens, and even scams and haggling. I know at least some of these been explored already in fiction (Pandora's Star, War of the Worlds, Bender's Big Score).

This reminds me of War of the Worlds, where the martians had no diseases and thus no immune system. When they came to earth they died from diseases.

A society like that, with no defenses, would be very vulnerable. That's why it's better to actually have some bad actors to keep "selective pressure" on societies so we evolve our defenses.

Utopia vulnerable to aliens? Sign me up

Too late. They are extinct. (we humans eliminated them and took over the earth)

This is fanciful but ignores that a huge amount of this system is in place because we can’t even agree on what is correct.

> It is 1%? 5? Or maybe it's much more? Maybe most of us are not criminals because of the enforcement?

Far more. The number of people who speed consistently and only slow down when they see a cop is the most visible evidence of this. Marijuana use was something like 20% of the population before any legalization passed.

You would still have wars and thus need the military, just their leaders would be open as to their motivations for doing so.

The optimal amount of headline fraud is also non-zero.

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