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Are Assassination Markets Just a Revenge Fantasy?

posted by n1 on Monday June 19 2017, @09:42PM   
from the i'd-buy-that-for-a-dollar dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After the last of the Dirty Harry films, The Dead Pool, was released in 1988, libertarians began to discuss the potential for crypto-currency prediction markets to become crowdfunded assassination markets. Many schemes were proposed and many were unworkable. The main complication is an assassin using zero-knowledge proof to claim a bounty without implicating any other party. This arrangement ignores betting exchanges where anyone can lay or back bets and no-one on a given exchange may be involved in assassination. Discussion has been sparse regarding secondary markets for fake death followed by new identity.

Whether or not a dead pool is bloodless, ire has been most often directed at government officials and the actual use of lethal force. When a BitCoin dead pool launched in 2013, Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, became subject of the biggest bounty. Perhaps it was obvious with hindsight that libertarian capitalists in possession of digital currency would focus on the person directly responsible for managing the world's largest, centralized, debt-based, nation-state, fiat currency.

Anyhow, given that a real assassination market has supposedly been running for four years, where are the high-profile deaths? Or disappearances? Is digital currency too complicated for soldiers of fortune? Too risky? Too ephemeral? Are the rewards too small? Will digital currency's increased value and flight to safety encourage libertarianism not previously seen? Or are people wimps?

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Original Submission

• Re:Beta Cuck Wimps (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:19AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:19AM (#528352)

  ..I have never had to do a contract kill before but I would assume people that do are pretty desperate.

  No, not really. There are true psychopaths out there who'll kill someone for their own 'twisted' reasons at the behest of others, and not all of them are in the employ of the state. There was a televised discussion about Ireland many years ago here in Britain featuring a couple of 'ex' IRA guys, one of them came out with a statement along the lines of 'just because the IRA uses psychopaths, don't make the mistake of thinking they're all psychopaths, psychopaths have their uses...' Almost every criminal organisation has at least one of these characters 'on their books' they can call on to do their dirty work.

  And then there's the 'ex-military' types who get a 'taste' for killing...

  Also to be honest there are probably better ways of making money. Drug dealing is less vastly illegal but can have more of a return than a contract kill does. Also you don't have to deal with your clients dying all the time. So that's nice.

  Money doesn't drive everything, thing is, psychopaths don't care about money.

  I guess I'm a fuckin' idealist but I think it's a safe bet that people don't want to hurt other people in a general sense.

  I used to be one, and believed something similar...30 years of dealing with a wide range of people from a number of countries and backgrounds knocked that right out of me. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good people out there of every race and creed, it's a pity they're in an apparently increasing minority.
  (For the record here, I don't regard myself as being in that minority though I can and do appreciate them and their position(s), however, they're not mine.)

  Also if you reach the point where you're someone with enough connections to get someone like this. You're probably beyond money.

  You'd think that, wouldn't you?, care to hear the story about the psychopath who'd do any job for anyone especially if it was a place he'd never visited before?
    (he liked to travel, visit new places, kill a few people...)
  No 'connections' required, other than drinking in the same establishment he frequented..money?, for the tickets to-fro area target lived alone.
  (Really pleasant chap to talk to BTW, you just had to be very careful what you said..)

  If a dollar amount wasn't good enough for the guy you're trying to kill. Seems like it won't be for the guy doing the killing. If someone asked me to kill a man the first question I'd think to ask is "why didn't you give this to the man you want dead"? I mean can there be an answer that makes you want that job :/

  I repeat, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, not everything revolves around money.

  If the person doesn't actually have a personal reason for hiring an assassin, it's a cop or loser playing revenge. So not a lot of people willing to take the risk even as an exploratory option.

  As evinced by the rest of the interwebz, like being attracted to like and all that, if such a marketplace attracted a critical number of psychopaths and ex-military nutjobs as 'contractors' it could possibly work, the major worry is that 'Nil Mortifi Sine Lucre' might not be their motto. If you want a horrible scenario, just think about a board where people put the jobs up, and the 'contractors' bid for them, maybe for bitcoins, maybe for a.n.other cryptocurrency, maybe doing the jobs 'for free' as the 'mark' don't like cats, dogs, peas or the 'mark' likes chocolate ice-cream, or is called Kevin...

  Sure, the police will know it's a murder, but the only connection between victim and murderer is a posting on a BBS system on a tor site.

  Parent

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