New Digital Money, New Digital Crimes

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New Digital Money, New Digital Crimes

David G.W. Birch

Unconditionally anonymous electronic money is a really, really bad idea. Prove 
me wrong.
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[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.


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Assassination Politics - by Jim Bell


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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...
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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.


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Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin (2017) | David G.W. Birch

David G.W. Birch


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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]



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