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Next on the Blockchain: Crowdfunding Death
by jim bell 03 Aug '18

03 Aug '18

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-30/ethereum-augur-death-bet… It’s now easy to anonymously bet on the date of a celebrity’s death. Does that encourage assassination? ADDRESS: By Elaine OuJuly 30, 2018, 8:00 AM PDT A new prediction market has been live on the Ethereum blockchain for less than three weeks, and already the death bets are rolling in. Up for wager on the Augur market are the fates of public figures like national leaders, celebrities and tech company CEOs. It’s controversial not just because some find it unseemly, but also because it could create incentives to kill. There’s nothing inherently wrong with speculating on a person’s untimely demise; that’s the entire purpose of life insurance and the old pooled annuities called tontines. But the players in a prediction market are rarely all dispassionate observers. Short sellers in the stock market are motivated to drag down a company’s share price. Bettors in a “ghoul pool” prediction market have effectively created an assassination market. An assassination market differs from traditional murder-for-hire in that unlimited wagers can be made against a potential target. The greater the odds stacked against a person’s death, the larger the incentive for a prospective assassin to take the opposite side and execute the outcome. This is not a new idea: In 1995, crypto-anarchist Jim Bell designed a system he called “Assassination Politics,” a prediction market where participants could anonymously contribute digital cash to bounty funds designated for the death of government officials. 1 The idea has been launched multiple times on the dark web, but it’s unclear that any of these markets resulted in assassination. Previous conceptions of such markets relied on centralized operators that could be identified and shut down. Because it uses the Ethereum blockchain, Augur exists as a decentralized application, replicated on thousands of computers around the world. Participants are pseudonymous, and payments are made in cryptocurrency. Even if the creators of Augur are prosecuted, the source code is freely available so that anyone can replicate the model. As a result, the platform is essentially unstoppable. But don’t panic just yet. Any prospective assassin is unlikely to trawl prediction markets looking for a job; it wouldn’t even be good business. There are better ways to profit from advance knowledge of a death, and there’s a bloodless alternative as well. The stock market provides far greater liquidity and noise to avoid tipping off the target in advance. And deaths move markets. Even rumors of deaths move markets. In 2008, CNN inadvertently spread a false report that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, triggering a 10 percent decline in Apple’s share price. In 2013, the Associated Press Twitter account announced that President Barack Obama had been injured in an explosion at the White House. The market lost over $130 billion in stock value, then rebounded when AP confirmed that its account had been compromised and the report was false. In both these cases, no one was harmed in the making of fake news. 2 But some people surely made money as the markets heaved. When it comes to censorship-resistant markets, critics are quick to jump to the most abhorrent possible use cases. But despite an abundance of profitable opportunities, we don’t see a lot of high-profile assassinations. The truth is, there simply isn’t some massive pent-up demand for murder, languishing for want of a group buy. It’s possible that we could see a rise in milder tasteless markets — character assassination, for example. Instead of incentivizing the murder of a public figure, bet on an executive’s departure and then put out a bounty to escalate embarrassing tweets until the executive gets fired. Such campaigns already informally self-organize on social media. Censorship-resistant markets don’t inherently generate new demand for terrible things; they simply make it easier to do what people already wanted to do. - Each bounty would accept anonymous predictions on the politician’s date of death, and upon the target's demise, the reward fund would be transferred to anyone who correctly predicted the date. The idea was that only the assassin would have known the date ahead of time (predictions required some amount of collateral to discourage blind guessing). - The market responded because trading volume is in large part driven by machines that automatically parse and respond to news. While Augur’s prediction market may be immune to censorship, it still relies on humans to accurately report the outcome of an event. Augur’s arbitrators have the option of marking an outcome as unethical and withholding payout. There seems to be some debate over whether an assassination market is truly unethical. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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The First Augur Assassination markets have arrived
by jim bell 03 Aug '18

03 Aug '18

https://www.coindesk.com/the-first-augur-assassination-markets-have-arrived/ × "Killed, not die of natural causes or accidents." Pretty much everyone saw them coming, but it was no less disturbing when assassination markets actually began to appear on Augur, a decentralized protocol for betting on the outcomes of real-world events and that launched two weeks ago on ethereum. The markets – which allow users to bet on the fates of prominent politicians, entrepreneurs and celebrities – in some cases explicitly specify assassination, as the quote above shows. (CoinDesk is intentionally not providing links to these markets or naming the individuals concerned.) In addition to targeting individuals, some markets offer bets on whether mass shootings and terrorist attacks with certain minimum numbers of casualties will occur. Augur was created by the Forecast Foundation and funded through an ICO in 2015. It is an uncensorable platform where users can create prediction markets based on the outcome of any verifiable event, from World Cup games to elections to cryptocurrency prices to the weather. Augur became one of the most popular applications on ethereum shortly after launch. At the time of writing, it has nearly $1.5 million staked on over 600 markets, according to Predictions.Global, a site that displays data on Augur markets (and has censored the assassination markets). Since Augur consists of smart contracts on ethereum, a blockchain network that is not controlled by any single party, users from around the world can place bets on its prediction markets – without governments being able to stop them. This quality appeals to gamblers in jurisdictions where sports betting isn't allowed. It could also appeal to people who want to incentivize – or simply purchase – the assassination of a public figure. By creating a market for an assassination and placing a large "no" bet (actually, selling shares in the outcome), an individual or group could in effect place a bounty on the targeted person. The would-be assassin could then place a bet on "yes" (buy shares) and manipulate the outcome, to put it delicately. What's next? Long before the first assassination markets appeared, users on Augur community forums frequently discussed their eventual creation, as well as potential responses by the community and the authorities. One response would be for Augur's "reporters" – the users designated by market creators to determine the outcome of the event being wagered on – to step in and quash the markets. "The Augur Reporter community has a powerful tool in their ability to mark a market as 'invalid,'" said Predictions.Global co-founder Ryan Berckmans. Holders of Augur's "reputation" or REP token could dispute the decision to call these markets invalid, Berckmans continued. In other words, they could insist that the markets be settled (users bet in and are paid out in ether, not REP tokens). But ultimately, he added, reporters "are incentivized to report in a way with which they expect the REP-holding community will agree." In other words, it's up to token holders' consensus to decide whether taking out life insurance on other people is acceptable on Augur. That opens the possibility that Augur could fork into two platforms, one – call it Augur Dark – that tolerates assassination markets, and one that doesn't. The white paper describes the procedure for forking when REP holders cannot agree on how to report an event. Judging by Reddit commentary, the consensus appears to be that incentivizing murder is "100 percent immoral." Then again, one user wrote: "I think you're overestimating the number of people who would seriously put money down to see another person killed unless said person REALLY did something nasty and wasn't going to be brought to justice otherwise." No control Another potential route to shutting down the death markets appears to have closed. Augur's developers announced Monday night that they had given up ownership over the "escape hatch" function, which would allow a designated party to shut the system down. "If the Forecast Foundation is compromised by a state agency," Micah Zoltu, a developer who has worked on the platform, remarked, "the system can't be turned off." In other words, governments may not be able to threaten Augur's creators with prosecution in order to alter or shut the platform down (they could of course threaten them with prosecution anyway). The individuals facing the most immediate legal risks may be the users who created these assassination markets. Someone, according to a person with close knowledge of Augur, used a wallet funded through Binance, an exchange, to set one market up. They can almost certainly be traced and identified, the person added. Gun image via Shutterstock The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Is this phishing?
by jim bell 03 Aug '18

03 Aug '18

Your membership in the mailing list cypherpunks has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 01-Aug-2018. You will not get any more messages from this list until you re-enable your membership. You will receive 2 more reminders like this before your membership in the list is deleted. To re-enable your membership, you can simply respond to this message (leaving the Subject: line intact), or visit the confirmation page at https://lists.cpunks.org/mailman/confirm/c [rest deleted] You can also visit your membership page at https://lists.cpunks.org/mailman/options/cyph [rest deleted] On your membership page, you can change various delivery options such as your email address and whether you get digests or not. As a reminder, your membership password is [deleted] If you have any questions or problems, you can contact the list owner at cypherpunks-owner(a)lists.cpunks.org

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[PEACE] New Syrian era begins - Israel bends the knee - massive news, celebration
by Zenaan Harkness 03 Aug '18

03 Aug '18

>From war, peace, so it's time to change the subject tag from [WAR] to [PEACE]. Tears. Looks like our slavic brothers have a harder time bending the knee than modern day Israelites - and thankfully so for individual human rights which seem fundamentally at odds with a one world government. The tide is changing, and it's good news - multi-polar world courtesy Putin and Russia, and now the USA, is in my opinion a much better balance of power - we the "lowly" people have it hard enough even with nations as they are - it would be worse with a one world government which thankfully seems to be off the table now. Great news! Thank you to those who stood (and still stand) against the NWO. Celebration #1 of 13941228453 yet to come. Well done world, Israel Just Said Assad Being in Charge of Syria is Good for Israel https://dailystormer.name/okay-so-israel-just-said-assad-being-in-charge-of…

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Happy Earth Overshoot Day...
by grarpamp 02 Aug '18

02 Aug '18

...you fools https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/08/01/2041251/earth-overshoot-day-came-e… https://www.popsci.com/earth-overshoot-day-2018 https://www.overshootday.org/about-earth-overshoot-day/ https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/08/01/028255/judge-blocks-release-of…

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Storage
by grarpamp 02 Aug '18

02 Aug '18

https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/

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Re: Surveillance forces journalists to think and act like spies
by jim bell 01 Aug '18

01 Aug '18

On Friday, May 1, 2015, 2:31:49 PM PDT, <dan(a)geer.org> wrote: The (my) speech I cited is what I had to say on the record, and is the best that I've (currently) got; I'll revisit when time permits. Here, though, is Paul Krugman in a similar vein three weeks ago today: [PK] Paul Krugman, "Apple and the Self-Surveillance State," New York Times, 10 April 2015 krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/apple-and-the-self-surveillance-state > --dan Paul Krugman is that fool who predicted an economic crash after the election. He quickly modified this prediction, https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/the-long-haul/ but he carefully hedged by saying: "But it’s important not to expect this to happen right away. There’s a temptation to predict immediate economic or foreign-policy collapse; I gave in to that temptation Tuesday night, but quickly realized that I was making the same mistake as the opponents of Brexit (which I got right). So I am retracting that call, right now. It’s at least possible that bigger budget deficits will, if anything, strengthen the economy briefly. More detail in Monday’s column, I suspect." The problem is the definition of "briefly". Months? Years? Economies tend to be cyclic, which means that until the next recession occurs, Krugman will say he's right, and when that recession occurs, he will still say he's right. Jim Bell

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How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
by Steven Schear 01 Aug '18

01 Aug '18

Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behind https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-fut…

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CP Fight Club - Stephen Cohen fatally boots CFR's Max Boot - [MINISTRY]
by Zenaan Harkness 01 Aug '18

01 Aug '18

Intellectual fight club picks up pace - in this round, Council on Foreign Relations' sophisticated <ahem> Max Boot, takes a sturdy, vaseline-free boot from the ever dignified Stephen Cohen : Boot delivered some CNN-level class in short order, chucking a year 7 ad-hominem at Cohen : "you're just a Russian apologist!" Oh no, Bat-man! The meek and naieve Cohen must be just about CRUSHED by such sophistry‼ Or may be Cohen delivers a Peterson-level full frontal battering :) Cohen : "Why do you have to defame somebody you don’t agree with?" "you are the threat to American national security", and "they used to [use defamation ad-homs] in the old Soviet Union". In reply Boot shakes his head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... Did I mention Boot shakes his head back and forth? So what, exactly, does a CNN-tier Marxist lefty do in the face of such an intellectual response to his failed grade school ad-hom, besides shaking his head back and forth? Why he DOUBLES THE FIRETRUCK DOWN kiddo, he doubles the firetruck down (this IS the ever entertaining CNN after all) : Boot: “You're apologizing for Russia!” Yeah Boot, that repetition will boost CNN's share price. Or something :D Cohen calmly reaches into the cookie jar and hands y'all a treat : “You know what I think? I think that Mr Boot would've [only] been happy if Trump had waterboarded Putin at the summit and MADE him confess.” Intellectual masochists the world over are wishing they were Max Boot right about now. Fight Club FTW mofo :) Cohen has to be one of those Jews even Anglin would admire :) As good as it gets, folks. For everything else, there's Mir card :D Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb4ryRqJPe8 "You Are Criminalizing Diplomacy!" Professor Stephen Cohen Slams Neocon Max Boot In CNN Debate https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-31/you-are-criminalizing-diplomacy-p… (Zerowedgie slips a little 'tube Cohen easter egg in too, to the (literally) screeching Hissing Weasel IV, Christiane Amanpour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-B1vWFdPXo "Life just isn't the same without globalists." With apologies to Twisties(TM)(C)(F)(R)(MOFO). -- International Bankers, the new Globalists. International Banking - that unique type of banking named an anti-semitic noun by the ADL and WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/20/on-anti…

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[MINISTRY] Semites triggered by Honky-in-chief
by Zenaan Harkness 01 Aug '18

01 Aug '18

Firstly, a) Trump names globalist pushing Koch brothers as globalists, and secondly, in a twist of tribal self indictment so ironic the irony meter literally burst, b) the prestigious and uniquely globalist Jerusalem Post gets their yarmulkas in a yddish panty twist, citing the MINISTRY's own ADL's definition of ‘globalist’ as some anti-semitic slur. Dang dude! Soap, +1 for defending your own I guess :D #ItsOkToBeWhite Never Forget: The ADL Classifies “Globalist” as an Anti-Semitic Slur https://dailystormer.name/never-forget-the-adl-classifies-globalist-as-an-a… -- Anti Dumbass League Department of Triggering

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