New Digital Money, New Digital Crimes | | | | | | | | | | | New Digital Money, New Digital Crimes David G.W. Birch Unconditionally anonymous electronic money is a really, really bad idea. Prove me wrong. | | | [partial quote follows] Assassins and Alarms But what about a more sinister candidate for large-scale crimtech investment? Is it time for the "assassination market”? This idea originated, to the best of my knowledge, with Jim Bell who, back in 1995, set it out in an essay on “assassination politics”. A few years ago, Andy Greenberg wrote a great piece about assassination markets here on Forbes. He was exploring the specific case of "Kuwabatake Sanjuro" who had set up a Bitcoin-powered market for political assassinations, but in general an assassination market is a form of prediction market where anyone can place a bet on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they “guess” the date accurately. This would incentivise the assassination of individuals because the assassin, knowing when the action would take place, could profit by making an accurate bet on the time of the subject’s death. | | | | | | | | | | | Assassination Politics - by Jim Bell | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With B... Andy Greenberg As Bitcoin becomes an increasingly popular form of digital cash, the cryptocurrency is being accepted in exchang... | | | Here’s how the market operates and why the incentive works, as I explained in my book "Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin”. Someone runs a public book on the anticipated death dates of public figures. If I hate some tech CEO (for example), I place a bet on when they will die. When the CEO dies, whoever had the closest guess to their date and time of death wins all of the money staked, less a cut for the house. Let’s say I bet $5 (using anonymous digital cash through the TOR network) that a specific tech CEO is going to die at 9am on April Fool’s Day 2022. Other people hate this person too and they put down bets as well. The more hated the person is, the more bets there will be. | | | | | | | | | | | Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin (2017) | David G.W. Birch David G.W. Birch | | | April Fool’s Day 2022 comes around. There’s now ten million dollars staked on this particularly CEO dying at 9am. I pay a hit man five million dollars to murder the CEO. Hurrah! I’ve won the bet, so I get the ten million dollars sent to me in anonymous digital cash and give half to the hit man. No-one can pin the crime on me because I paid the hitman in untraceable anonymous digital cash as well. I’m just the lucky winner of the lottery. But better than that is that if I can get enough bets put on someone, then I don’t even have to take the risk of hiring the hitman. If I use some anonymous bots or friendly tolls to coordinate a social media campaign to get a million people to put a $5 bet on the date of the tech CEOs death, then some enterprising hit man will make their own bet and kill them. If the general public had bet five million bucks on 31st March and some enterprising cryptopsycho had murdered the CEO themselves the day before, then it would only have cost me $5, and I would have regarded that as $5 well spent, as would (presumably) everyone else who bet $5.[end of partial quote]