> I can't believe they are thefts out there paying other thefts for theft-services...
Why wouldn’t there be? It’s not like an economy needs anything more than a medium of exchange and a kind-of-functional guarantee of nonviolence to arise. If you have that, you don’t need to arrange for a market, it will just happen, more or less. (Healthy or not is another question.)
Anyway, yes, there’s phishing for hire, bring-your-own-payload exploitation for hire, ransomware for hire, and of course DDoS for hire. Captcha solving for hire is legitimate enough to occasionally get posted on HN (and I don’t think it shouldn’t be). People’s residential or mobile internet connections for hire, hijacked via free VPN browser extensions and mobile ad SDKs, are legitimate enough to be sold via advertising conglomerates (but I think they shouldn’t be).
A market isn’t something you build, it’s something you have to actively prevent.
another example of this phenomenon are "free" markets in prisons, where the currency is usually cigarettes.
Other places where freedom is limited have similar characteristics, I remember that we had a sort of food market when I was a child at a boarding school.
As a side note, France has a thing called “fiscal stamps” (timbres fiscales) which I had to use to pay a ~60€ government fee of some sort. One time I did it I paid online and got an A4 thing I needed to print out, which, OK, sure.
The other time I couldn’t do that for reasons I don’t remember and paid cash at a store to get one. What I got was a tiny thing that looks exatly like a small postage stamp of the standard almost-square shape (which is itself funny because all the actual French postage stamps I used were twice as large) except it cost the aforementioned ~60€. Needless to say, I was terrified I’d lose it the whole hour or so before I handed it over to a clerk.
Wikipedia tells me this was a common approach once[1].
Why wouldn’t there be? It’s not like an economy needs anything more than a medium of exchange and a kind-of-functional guarantee of nonviolence to arise. If you have that, you don’t need to arrange for a market, it will just happen, more or less. (Healthy or not is another question.)
Anyway, yes, there’s phishing for hire, bring-your-own-payload exploitation for hire, ransomware for hire, and of course DDoS for hire. Captcha solving for hire is legitimate enough to occasionally get posted on HN (and I don’t think it shouldn’t be). People’s residential or mobile internet connections for hire, hijacked via free VPN browser extensions and mobile ad SDKs, are legitimate enough to be sold via advertising conglomerates (but I think they shouldn’t be).
A market isn’t something you build, it’s something you have to actively prevent.