

Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With Bitcoins - ecopoesis
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-creator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins/

======
JoeAltmaier
A simple solution for the feds presents itself: offer a large award for the
site's founder.

------
NAFV_P
"Kuwabatake Sanjuro" roughly translates as "mulberry field thirty year old".
The Kuwabatake Sanjuro from _Yojimbo_ could cut a kimono off of a man's back
without drawing blood, and hit leaves blowing in the wind with a throwing
knife.

On the other hand Ogami Itto had the ability to throw swords.

------
polemic
"Creepy" seems like a massive understatement.

It serves to highlight the creator's priorities though. Someone who believes
in the cryptoanarchic ideal to such an extent that they're willing to get in
bed with murderers. I understand that they believe that the ends justify the
means, but were that the case, why would you have to purchase the services of
assassins to achieve it?

The line between cryptosnarchism and is getting _very_ narrow.

------
nmridul
Seems like more negative campaigns related to bit coins are getting prominence
in mainstream press recently. Similar to what was observed during Wikileaks,
Snowden etc time.

These articles slowly create that distrust among the public for bit coin. All
they remember when thinking about bit coin would be silkroad and
assassinations.

~~~
krapp
Well... the articles aren't exactly making the association between Bitcoin and
illegal activity up. Bitcoin does seem tailor made to facilitate extralegal
trade, and silk road was a thing.

------
JoeAltmaier
The method of payment is flawed. An encrypted file with the date of murder is
presented as proof that you knew the date beforehand, thus are the murderer.
But anybody can submit any number of such files near the likely date of the
hit; its trivial to forge them.

~~~
jlgreco
I am not familiar with this particular site, but the general idea of an
"assassination market" is that such a market is "actually" a dead pool where
all participants are guessing when somebody will die, and _anybody_ who
guesses correctly gets the payoff (or a share of the payoff, if there are
multiple winners).

A dead pool 'becomes' an assassination market when the dead pool participants
realize that by being an assassin, they can accurately guess when somebody
will die.

So, in an assassination market set up this way, the prize does not necessarily
go to the assassin. It just goes to whoever correctly guessed the date of
death. If the assassin puts money down on April 15th, and I do as well, then
the assassin would get half the money and I would get the other half, even
though I had nothing to do with the assassination _(besides in part 'funding'
it. Also "half" assumes that both I and the assassin put the same amount on
April 15th...)_. The problem of other people besides the assassin winning
money isn't actually a problem, it is just the system working as intended.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nope this is a so-called anarchist setting up a murder-for-hire site. The
date-encrypted file is supposed to prove you did it, because you knew the
date.

------
voidlogic
What effect will near-future government quantum computers have on bitcoin's
anonymity? Are all the folks that have used bitcoins for illegal transactions
in for a rude surprise?

~~~
PeterisP
What anonymity? The transaction history is public, and doesn't need a quantum
computer to analyze, any institution with available time can do stuff like
that.

The only truly anonymous bitcoin way is if you mine some bitcoin and spend it
right away without it ever being related to any other data about you.

------
IvyMike
I'm confused. What's to keep Sanjuro with absconding with everything he's
holding in escrow?

