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"A new decentralized Silk Road for illicit goods and content could appear at any time that uses smart contracts to manage orders, to accept and release payments, and to deduct a founders’ fee, without the need of the operators to leave behind many digital fingerprints, if any at all. It might be impossible to shut down a blockchain-based Silk Road, especially if its nodes were numerous and spread across multiple jurisdictions.48 Obviously, blockchain and smart contracts would also lend themselves to the use for blackmail and for dead hand switches that automatically release content based on pre-programmed conditions. For example, if a certain transaction on the blockchain has not taken place at a specific point of time, it can trigger the smart contract function, which executes a program. 

"One can also imagine the use of a DAO to facilitate an anonymous assassination market, which is a concept originally proposed by anarchist Jim Bell in his 1994 essay “Assassination Politics.” Bell wrote, “While it's comparatively easy to “get away with murder,” it’s a lot harder to reward the person who does it, and that person is definitely taking a serious risk.’ 49 His solution is an anonymous assassination market, where individuals can anonymously contribute funds for the assassination of a celebrity to a legal organization and whoever guesses the correct death date of the celebrity receives all the money donated. A high enough fee for making a bet would discourage contributors from making random guesses. As the contributions increase, so would the incentives for somebody to kill the unpopular celebrity and collect the money.

 "In the blockchain age a smart contract can govern such an arrangement. The assassin could be confident that the sponsoring organization will make the payment for a correct bet and would be able to collect the money in an anonymous fashion. An anonymous vote by all contributors could establish whether the celebrity has died and could automatically release accumulated funds to the correct guesser. 

"According to a report by Vice, people already use the prediction platform Augur to make bets on “the deaths of public figures, including Betty White, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett.”50 The practical advantage of an assassination market for those participating is that it creates legal challenges as to whether Journal of Strategic Security, Vol. 13, No. 1 https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol13/iss1/3 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.13.1.1743 51 making a bet constitutes the incitement of murder and also who could be charged with it in case of a large number of people contributing money to the cause of compensating somebody who makes a correct prediction. 

Blockchain-Enabled Political Revolutions 

"During the Arab Spring small groups of activists could mobilize the masses against the respective government through tweets, Facebook posts, and text messaging. The Egyptian government became so desperate at one point that they temporarily shut down the Internet and mobile services nation-wide on January 28, 2011 to prevent the coordination of anticipated mass protests.51 After the Arab Spring, many authoritarian governments cracked down on social media and NGOs. Major social media platforms and search engines, most importantly Facebook, Twitter, and Google now face strong political demands to police content under the threat of onerous regulation and fines. Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking have pointed out that the social media companies have assumed the functions of government and that “they are now grappled with intractable political problems,” adding that the problems are of “the kind [that are] always destined to leave a portion of its constituents displeased.”52

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