Markets in Assassination?

Steven Schear schear.steve at gmail.com
Fri Jul 27 15:50:35 PDT 2018


It's nice to see Declan back in the CPunk saddle. It's been too many years
since he was a Defcon fixture.

On Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 3:27 PM jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> https://reason.com/archives/2018/07/27/markets-in-assassination-everybody-panic
>
> Markets in Assassination?  Everybody Panic!!
> July 27, 2018
>
> Declan McCullagh,
>
> It's been a few years since the last media scare about prediction markets.
> So we were overdue for this week's handwringing about Augur, digital
> currencies, and assassinations.
> Augur, which has been under development since 2015 and launchedthis month,
> is a set of smart contracts built on the Ethereum blockchain. It's
> intentionally decentralized, meaning that anyone can use it to propose
> wagers, anyone can bet on the outcome, and human judges known as reporters
> have a financial incentive honestly to decide whether the event happened or
> not. No central authority exists to reject unacceptable, or illegal, wagers.
> This week's media scare arose after a single person used the Augur
> protocol to bet on whether President Donald Trump would survive 2018, and
> that person apparently placed the bet on a lark after a Twitter discussion.
>
> Cue the frightened headlines: The Independent reported: "Donald Trump
> assassination market appears on blockchain platform Augur." Newsweek:
> "Welcome to Augur, the cryptocurrency death market where you can bet on a
> Donald Trump assassination." Mashable may have been the most
> worried, declaring Augur "terrifying."
>
> In reality, Internet assassination markets have existed for years.
> A Forbes article from 2013 described a self-proclaimed "Assassination
> Market" that attempted to crowdfund murder with bitcoins. Bounties were
> established on NSA Director Keith Alexander, President Obama, and Fed
> Chairman Ben Bernanke (Bernanke's bounty, the highest, would be just over
> $1 million at today's bitcoin prices).
>
> Five years later, those officials are still alive.
>
> Human beings can be creative creatures when choosing to do evil, and one
> day prediction markets may well be used for actual foul play. This is
> especially true when one person stands to gain a lot from harming another:
> Murders have been committed to gain life insurance payouts. Worse,
> prediction markets could reward not only assassins, but criminals involved
> in mass shootings or terrorist attacks as well.
>
> At least these public markets do one thing that underground
> payments-for-assassination do not: they let the target know that he or
> she is a target. If you knew that there was a large bet that would pay off
> only if you died in the next 24 hours, you might want to take the
> appropriate precautions, including a vigorous exercise of your Second
> Amendment rights. Hope your state doesn't require a waiting period! (There
> may be a market in bots that, for a fee, will scour new Augur contracts for
> your name.)
>
> This is probably why the CIA, which presumably never would favor the
> assassination of a U.S. politician, seems to like prediction markets.
> A 2006 analysis published by the agency concludes that "the record of
> prediction markets is impressive." It adds that "prediction markets can
> contribute to more accurate estimates of long-term trends and threats and
> better cost-benefit assessments of ongoing or proposed policies." And of
> course it was the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency that proposed a
> prediction market based on events such as regime change in the Middle East.
>
> George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, whose work partially
> inspired DARPA, uses the history of short selling to suggest that the
> danger of foul play in prediction markets is exaggerated. He writes:
>
> > Some people suspected that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on
> the New York World Trade Center were funded in part by trades of airline
> stock options. Similarly, some feared that the 1982 Tylenol poisonings were
> done to profit from short sales on the Tylenol stock. Airline stock prices
> did fall on September 11, as did the Tylenol stock with the 1982
> poisonings. And a study has found that Israeli stock and currency prices
> respond to Israeli suicide bombings. Thus, it is not crazy to think that
> terrorists might use financial markets to profit from their acts.
> Nevertheless, we know of no examples of anyone using financial markets to
> profit from such sabotage.
>
> The idea of arranging assassinations online through pseudonymous
> identifiers and paying in digital cash is not exactly new. It's been
> discussed for nearly a quarter-century.
>
> In September 1994, retired Intel engineer and polymath Tim May
> published The Cyphernomicon, a manifesto that said: "In my highly personal
> opinion, many people, including most Congressrodents, have committed crimes
> that earn them the death penalty; I will not be sorry to see anonymous
> assassination markets used to deal with them."
>
> May included assassination markets in his list of what truly anonymous
> digital cash could accomplish. Such markets, he suggested, were merely one
> consequence of what the wrecking ball of cryptographic technology would do
> to the nation-state. Others included illegal markets in gambling, bribes,
> payoffs, insider trading, contract crimes, fencing, organ selling, and
> military and trade secrets. On the cypherpunks mailing list, May outlined
> an experimental scheme called BlackNet to demonstrate anonymous information
> markets.
>
> A few years later, Jim Bell, an MIT-educated anarchist, stepped in where
> May left off. Bell published a 23-page essay with the provocative title
> "Assassination Politics." Bell's sketch of how this system would work
> argued that an "organization could quite legally operate, assisted by
> encryption, international data networking, and untraceable digital cash, in
> a way that would (indirectly) hasten the death of named people, for
> instance hated government employees and officeholders."
>
> The Forecast Foundation, the nonprofit group leading Augur's development,
> has taken some steps to prevent their project from morphing into
> Assassination Politics or BlackNet. For instance, it added code to allow
> participants to reject transactions as unethical and therefore "invalid."
>
> But different people–the ones acting as reporters–may reach different
> conclusions about what transactions are unethical or invalid. The creators
> of Augur call this disagreement a potential fork. If there is a dispute,
> there are built-in ways to try to resolve it; if it cannot be resolved, the
> market will be forked over a 60-day period.
>
> A March 2018 white paper calls forks a "nuclear option" that "are expected
> to be exceedingly rare events." If a disagreement over bets on the
> longevity of politicians ever arises, a Coindesk report suggests there's a
> "possibility that Augur could fork into two platforms, one–call it Augur
> Dark–that tolerates assassination markets, and one that doesn't."
>
> There are other ways the foundation could try to curb potential illegal
> wagers, including altering the codebase to inject additional safeguards.
> But participants in the Augur marketplace would be free to ignore the
> alterations. An intentionally–even radically–decentralized system is
> difficult to tame again once it's released into the wild.
>
> The foundation has tried to distance itself from unlawful uses of Augur,
> stressing on its website that it "has no power to censor, restrict, or
> curate markets, orders, trades, positions or resolutions on the Augur
> protocol contracts." Earlier this week, it formally relinquished its
> ability to shut down the network. Now the fate of Augur, and of its
> associated prediction markets, now in the hands of its users.
>
> [end of article]
>
>
> Jim Bell
>
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