It's been interesting to watch the escalating complexity of business models vs. the opportunities to make money by nullifying someone else's business model. Sometimes it seems like capitalism is about to devolve into chaos (in a mathematical sense), and that the flow of money is becoming increasingly arbitrary until it becomes entirely random.

It used to be that market economies were simple: you wanted something, you paid for it. Companies would pay their employees a fair wage for their labor, and then those employees would spend that money on consumer products. Their were some exceptions, like advertising on broadcast TV, but they were a relatively small part of the economy.

Netscape seems to have opened the flood gates with their "commoditize the browser, and make money selling servers" approach. Suddenly, it became consumers' expectation that things should be free, and business's expectation that you can't actually make money by selling to consumers. And businesses adapted: first it was the dot-com boom, where the business model was "use VC to grow marketshare while losing money on subsidized products, IPO, and have clueless tech stock investors foot the bill for cheap cool consumer products." Then there was Google, which made finding stuff free but extracted huge rents for getting found, and Facebook, which is similar but with more personal data. Then there were all the startups whose only revenue model was to sell to Google or Facebook - sometimes by threatening legal precedents (YouTube) or irrelevance (Instagram/Whatsapp). Consumers don't have money and would never be able to pay for their YouTubing/Instagramming - but Google & Facebook will pay a lot to maintain their business model.

Now we have ad-tech to optimize the ads shown; clickbots to make (fraudulent) money for a publisher; more clickbots to bankrupt advertisers; botnets (often distributed through these ads!) to hijack users' computers; clickjacking to hijack users; adblockers so consumers don't have to deal with any of this; and counter-adblockers to block the adblockers. It's like humans are doing their best to never see ads, which are only getting clicked by machines, which aren't actually buying the product but are usually attempts by competitors to bankrupt their competition. Oh, and of course all of these players are getting hacked on a regular basis.

Add to this the whole credit-card & consumer debt industry, which is based on some portion of the population never paying for stuff, but making up the losses on the interest payments of people who pay for their stuff late.

It's occurred to me that if a financial terrorist wanted to do a lot of damage to the capitalist system, they need only hand out free credit cards that are backed by lists of numbers stolen in one of the many data breaches that have happened this year. It's free money for the consumer, who can buy whatever they want, anonymously, with no bill. Indeed, with the lists of credit cards stolen in 2015, someone could pose as the credit card company and mail out these cards to unsuspecting consumers, who would think they were using a legit card rather than one with someone else's account number. The merchants won't care initially until the cards start getting declined, which may not happen for a month. The CC & government resources dedicated to investigating card fraud would be overwhelmed if millions of people became fraudsters at once. And then straightening out the mess of who owes what would likely be impossible, with goods already "purchased", fenced, converted to cash, and gone.