

Assassination Politics (by Jim Bell) + Bitcoin = ? - mike_esspe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

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yummyfajitas
The difficulty with an "assassination market" is that markets facilitate the
transmission of information to everyone.

Suppose an assassin wishes to purchase futures for, e.g., Obama dead on 5/15.
If she purchases more than the normal amount of Dead Obama 5/15 Futures
(DO515F), there will be a price impact. All of a sudden, the price of DO515F
will spike and an observer will conclude there is an elevated probability of
assassination on 5/15.

A system designed to disseminate information as widely as possible is not that
useful for conspiracies.

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mike_esspe
As far as i understand, the prediction date is encrypted, until you want to
cache-out and send the decryption key.

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3pt14159
How does the buy-ask resolve if there is information hidden?

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mike_esspe
The predictor should send his decryption key, after prediction was successful.

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mike_esspe
Original essay: <http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm>

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Udo
This is very, very dark stuff and it has absolutely no upside. Though the
essay states the advantages of being able to assassinate another Hitler or
Stalin in order to prevent them from abusing their privileges, the reality of
a real Assassination Market would look quite different. People would be
assassinated _all the time_ , even if they're not really in a position of
power.

Can you imagine the last three American presidents surviving a system like
this? What about the current president? I think a large number of lunatics
would donate insane amounts of money towards his assassination just to see it
through.

The idea that this is a constructive mechanism to put more checks and balances
in the hand of the general population is horribly misguided. Who would like to
live in a world like this? Also, it wouldn't even fix the most pressing
problems, like corruption and abuse of power. An Assassination Market would
just shift corruption and abuse to another group. The average citizen would be
totally screwed, even worse than today (I know, it's hard to imagine
sometimes).

There are so many worthwhile ideas to improve the concept of government. For
example, I believe it is worth looking into abandoning the concept of
representation or at least de-emphasizing it in politics. So many ideas worth
discussing. Anonymous Assassination Markets is not one of them.

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mike_esspe
President of the current liberal democracy obviously can't survive in this
system because he is the head of organization, that extort money from its
subjects by force.

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flashgordon
Sorry but where do bitcoins come in all this? Neither the wikipedia page or
any of the comments here mention bitcoin (until now).

