On Thu, Nov 28 2013, David Vorick wrote:
I hadn't though about it this way until now, but having the ability to achieve full anonymity on the internet enables things like this, and assassination markets might not be the first or most viscous thing enabled by anonymity.
I can imagine that if assassination markets were to take off, you'd see some large bounties (in excess of $100k) on every major politician in the world. Pretty much any figure of high popularity would probably have some sort of assassination bounty on their head, because the more popular you are, the more haters you have.
What other sorts of unacceptable things could you do given fully anonymous money coupled with a fully anonymous internet identity? I can think of:
website takedowns funding murder, rape, arson, etc. bombing certain buildings funding smear campaigns (say, tear the clothes off a popular celebrity or something) bounties for drugs, child porn, etc. kidnappings doxing
You could basically attempt to crowd fund any illegal activity.
This doesn't particularly concern me, because a) you have to get enough people (or people with enough money) who are willing to fund murder to actually fund it, and b) someone has to actually do the act. Making a liquid market for murder means you can overcome the risk only for high profile targets with a lot of enemies. That means primarily politicians, asshole celebrities, CEOs of widely hated companies, etc. And on the other side, you can also crowdsource defense, as has already been happening with the various legal defense funds. I fear the interventions governments are likely to engage in far more than I fear the new markets. -- Sean Richard Lynch <seanl@literati.org> http://www.literati.org/~seanl/