First Augur assassination markets have arrived

mirimir · Aug 3, 2018

A few months ago, I had a truly and quite literally "revolutionary" idea, and I jokingly called it "Assassination Politics": I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly "predicted" the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash.

I also speculated that using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous "digital cash," it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given. Even the organization itself would have no information that could help the authorities find the person responsible for the prediction, let alone the one who caused the death.
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http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm

That went out in ~1995 on the cypherpunks list.

Sure enough, Augur already has the CFTC’s attention. But even if the agency decides that Augur is breaking the law, how will it enforce that decision? Augur’s creators claim they don’t have control over what its users choose to do with the protocol—or the ability to shut it down. This creates a problem that is “endemic” to blockchain technology, says Wright, who recently co-wrote a book on the subject: “If you do not have a very concrete intermediary—i.e., a company or group of people that are running the marketplace—how do you apply laws and prevent that activity from occurring?”
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...rket-platform-could-cause-napster-size-legal/

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.
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https://www.coindesk.com/the-first-augur-assassination-markets-have-arrived/

Well, doh. Augur syncs with UDP, and Tor doesn't handle UDP, so expect more lulz

Edit: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...augur-death-bets-are-like-crowdfunding-murder

Edit: https://news.google.com/stories/CAA...nRJRUYxWjNWeUtBQVAB?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

guest · Dec 22, 2019

Click Here to Kill
The dark world of online murder markets
REPORT — From the January 2020 issue
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/

The idea of an online assassination market was conceived long before it was possible to build one, and long before there was anything resembling the dark web. In 1995, Jim Bell, an anarchist engineer who had studied at M.I.T. and worked at Intel, began writing a serialized essay titled “Assassination Politics” that proposed a theoretical framework for encouraging and crowdsourcing the murder of public officials
Murder marketplaces may force us to reexamine—and redefine—what constitutes criminal intent. Though judgments have been somewhat inconsistent, courts seem to regard making a payment of any amount as proof that the desire for harm is sincere.

Assassination markets do not need to be foolproof, Jim Bell–style operations for users to turn to them. The fear is that as more out-of-work men hear that it is possible to make money contracting on the dark web, even shoddy, scammy, and slipshod marketplaces could help arrange killings. As a result, Jim Bell himself is feeling sanguine. “If anything, I’d argue it’s not nearly as controversial as I thought it’d be twenty years ago,” he said.
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After years of being ignored by the FBI and burned by the NCA, Monteiro, for his part, is glad that other agencies are finally paying attention. He’s been in close contact with a branch of DHS, which is working with him to identify targets.
According to him, DHS plans to pursue everyone who’s made a transaction on Yura’s sites with the intent of ordering a killing, and even some who have posted names and expressed intent without paying, if the threat is determined to be serious enough.

But, in many cases, Monteiro worries, it may be too late. “There are hundreds of names,” he told me. By the time law enforcement sorts through the list of potential victims, “some will be dead.”
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