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Assassination market

Type of market that incentivizes assassination

Type of market that incentivizes assassination

An assassination market is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous electronic money and pseudonymous remailers) on the date of death of a given individual. This incentivises assassination of the individual, as parties with advance knowledge of an assassination plot can profit by betting accurately on the date of the death. Because the payoff is for accurately picking the date rather than performing the assassination, it is substantially more difficult to assign criminal liability.

History

Early uses of the terms "assassination market" and "market for assassinations" can be found (in both positive and negative lights) in 1994's "The Cyphernomicon" by Timothy C. May, a cypherpunk. The concept and its potential effects are also referred to as assassination politics, a term popularized by Jim Bell in his 1995–96 essay of the same name.

Early in part 1, Jim Bell describes the idea as:

In order to prevent such a system from becoming simply a random unpaid lottery, in which people can randomly guess a name and date (hoping that lightning would strike, as it occasionally does), it would be necessary to deter such random guessing by requiring the "guessers" to include with their "guess" encrypted and untraceable "digital cash," in an amount sufficiently high to make random guessing impractical.}}

Bell then goes on to further specify the protocol of the assassination market in more detail. In the final part of his essay, Bell posits a market that is largely non-anonymous. He contrasts this version with the one previously described. Carl Johnson's attempt to popularise the concept of assassination politics appeared to rely on the earlier version. There followed an attempt to popularise the second in 2001 that is ongoing today.

Technologies such as Tor and bitcoin have enabled online assassination markets, as described in parts one to nine of Assassination Politics.

Assassination Market website

The first prediction market entitled "Assassination Market" was created by a self-described crypto-anarchist in 2013. Utilising Tor to hide the site's location and bitcoin-based bounties and prediction technology, the site lists bounties on former US President Barack Obama, economist Ben Bernanke and former justice minister of Sweden Beatrice Ask (all of whom are still alive as of January 2026). In 2015, the site was suspected to be defunct, but the deposited bitcoins were cashed out in 2018.

References

References

  1. Harkin, James. (2009). "Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own". Knopf Canada.
  2. May, Timothy C.. (1994-09-10). "The Cyphernomicon: Cypherpunks FAQ and More, Version 0.666". Cypherpunks.to.
  3. Bell, Jim. (1997-04-03). "Assassination Politics". Infowar.
  4. McCullagh, Declan. (2000-04-14). "Crypto-Convict Won't Recant". [[Wired (website).
  5. Jim Bell. "Assassination Politics".
  6. (1999-08-27). "CJ files".
  7. (2001-05-15). "Online Cincy Cop Threats Probed".
  8. (2003-07-07). "Online threats target Denver investigators".
  9. Greenberg, Andy. (2013-11-18). "Meet the 'Assassination Market' creator who's crowdfunding murder with Bitcoins". Forbes.
  10. (22 July 2015). "Inside the Digital Underworld".
  11. Merchant, Brian. (January 2020). "Click Here to Kill".
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

crypto-anarchism prediction-markets anarcho-capitalism homicide
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