Assassination market

An assassination market or market for assassinations is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous electronic money, and pseudonymous remailers) on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately. This would incentivise 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. Because the payoff is for knowing the date rather than performing the action of the assassin, it is substantially more difficult to assign criminal liability for the assassination.^[1]

Early uses of the terms "assassination market" and "market for assassinations" can be found (in both positive and negative lights) in 1994's "The Cyphernomicon"^[2] by Timothy C. May, a cypherpunk. The concept and its potential effects are also referred to as assassination politics, a term popularized by Jim Bell in his 1997 essay of the same name^[3][4]

It has been argued^[5] that the feasibility of an assassination market precludes the development of any form of anonymous electronic money.

Left-anarchist Matt Taylor, another cypherpunk, declared in May 2001 that he was advancing assassination politics by taunting Ohio and California police online.^[6] He began an initiative called Operation Soft Drill — a name which reporter Declan McCullagh wrote was created by Bell — with the stated intention of intimidating police and corporate polluters into respecting human rights.^[7]

See also

• Dead pool
• Tontine
• Policy Analysis Market
• The Visit

References

External links

• Jim Bell, Assassination Politics (from archive.org)
• The Usenet discussion containing the initial publication of the first part of Assassination Politics
• Academic discussion of the idea from an anarchist perspective