A Modest Proposal: Bitcoin + Kickstarter +PMCs = Brave New World

I am looking for my razor....

Unless you have been living in a cave, or actually fighting the Shining Path in the jungles of northern Peru, you are aware that Boko Haram, an Islamic fundamentalist organization, has kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls. Their stated purposes was to sell them into sexual slavery, their unstated purpose was to sow general mayhem.  If you want to read more, then feel free to check out excellent coverage here.

The Nigerian government has offered the equivalent of $300,000 for information leading to the whereabouts of the missing school girls. In an age where random kickstarters for pointless, useless crap raise millions of dollars, the international community (not governments, but actual "global" citizens - i.e. you) can probably do better than a bit over 1000 per kidnapped schoolgirl.

This brings us to the intersection of a number of internet technologies and recent global developments. Currently, there is no technological barrier to use a Bitcoin based crowd funding site to hire a private military contractor (UN speak for "Mercenaries") to locate and rescue the girls. There would be obvious implications for territorial sovereignty for the Nigerian Government, but they appear to already have a problem with territorial sovereignty.

How would this work in practice? Poorly. However, it is the logical outgrowth of technologies currently available.

The way bit coin works is to render anonymous the commercial transactions using a finite (but infinitely divisible) resource stock . Libertarians and others find this particularly beneficial because it removes the threat of "fiat" currency fluctuations (of course it introduces other types of currency fluctuations, but that is not the point here ) and allows for transactions to occur outside government control and inspection. This
combined with a crowd-sourcing model would let denizens of the world contribute to a fund anonymously.  Millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins could be electronically transferred to a holding entity that was the point of contact.  This aggregation of resources could use a crowdfunding model, one well developed over the past few years, to solicit and explain the purpose of the holding entity.

During the United States' decade and a half worth of combat in the Middle East, PMCs have increasingly been used to guard kep individuals, do recon, and even engage in combat. (The nightmare that was Fallujah started because some PMCs went looking to settle a score with insurgents).  Now, they comprise an international shadow military active in almost every conceivable military role. They have their own equipment, weapons, command structures and PR teams.

In our scenario, once the funds were amassed, they would be used to hire a PMC outfit to retrieve the girls.

People might cheer or wring their hands, but no one should assume that this in not possible today. These three technologies combined form a platform.  Lets call it an "Anonymous Crowd-Sourced Conflict Management" or ACSCM platform (and API!).  Once it is successfully deployed, there would be no reason to think that other enterprising individuals wouldn't use the platform for more nefarious ends. One could envision Dark Nets full of Terrorist Groups pleading and copying other groups request for crowd sourcing (which raises a interesting question out IP theft among various terrorist groups) to fund their particular plots.

We are constantly told how new technologies will change the world. The problem is that we always default to that change being only beneficial. All technologies have the capacity to use and misuse in ways their original creators never intended.