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Comment by cryptozeus | Hacker News Reader

Jesus that was crazy to read...this guy is doing god’s work “There is just one reason that a local police department in Minnesota was aware that someone had paid an obscure site on the dark web to have one of its teenage residents killed, and that reason is Chris Monteiro. Monteiro, a systems administrator who runs I.T. security for a midsize firm in London, spends his nights as a white-hat hacker and independent cybercrime researcher, navigating the shadowy spaces of the dark web. Murder marketplaces have in recent years become both his signature area of expertise and his exhausting burden”

Imagine you can pay in bitcoin where AI drone and carry out the hit...all anonymous

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Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make one person angry enough to kill you, and you die.

If you haven’t, I recommend reading “Assassination Politics” by Jim Bell. It’s an interesting though exercise.

Black Mirror covered this scenario in S03E06: Hated in the Nation.

That has drone killing, but not an assassination market. No one pays or receives money.

That is true. But they could, they have the technology, they would just need the marketplace.

In the 1942 Captain Future pulp "Outlaws of the Moon" [1], President Carthew was anonymously murdered by a drone.

[1] https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/have-no-fear-of-the-bayi...

I'd rather imagine I'm an average person who may have said something on an internet forum that set a nutter off if I want to be disturbed.

another good one is the calvino short story 'Beheading the Heads'

> Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make one person angry enough to kill you, and you die.

Politicians already more or less live in that world... it's why they no longer ride in convertibles with the windows down.

Politicians still attend planned outdoor events. Drones can be deployed at the security perimeter, fly rather quickly, and carry an explosive payload. I'm not sure security is good enough to stop a swarm of such.

The level of political violence in the US is so low that every time antifa and Proud Boys have a rumble it’s national news. If there was a real political violence problem every governor, senator and congressman would have their own security detail. Supreme Court justices sure as hell wouldn’t take public transport in DC.

And I'm arguing that adding drones and crypto isn't going to move the needle very far. The US already has the Second Amendment, a thoroughly armed populace and a deeply ingrained cultural belief in the necessity of political violence to a free state (watering the "Tree of Liberty" and such.)

Violence isn't going to explode exponentially merely because an efficient market forms to enable it - if that were the case, the US would already be knee deep in blood, because having that is literally baked into its system as a feature.

The key here is anonymous market. Random "well-armed" individual contemplating a political assassination is most likely considering it as a suicide attack. An easy-to-use anonymous assassination market would be a qualitative change here.

That still assumes there is a large and untapped consumer base of potential assassins out there who are only not killing politicians because doing so isn't easy enough or anonymous.

People like Jim Bell assume everyone is as sociopathic as they are, but most people aren't. Everyone hates politicians, the government, taxes, etc, but most people aren't willing to kill even if they can get technically away with it. Meanwhile, the personality type willing to commit political violence to begin with is already radicalized enough in their beliefs to likely be willing to risk being caught, even if only for the notoriety. There's no real "casual" market, here.

Then, when you consider the fact that most such sites will always be either honeypots or scams, and the fact that people make OPSEC mistakes all the time (DPR,) meaning people will be caught (and thus, people will know that it's possible to be caught,) then it doesn't seem as qualitative a change as it initially appears.

> That still assumes there is a large and untapped consumer base of potential assassins out there who are only not killing politicians because doing so isn't easy enough or anonymous.

I don’t think it does.

Consider that the purpose of a marketplace is to connect people who want to produce a good or service with those who want to consume it. Right now, there is a disconnect between “people who want to kill <public figure>” and “people who are willing to kill <public figure>”. A market would change that dynamic.

> People like Jim Bell assume everyone is as sociopathic as they are, but most people aren't. Everyone hates politicians, the government, taxes, etc, but most people aren't willing to kill even if they can get technically away with it. Meanwhile, the personality type willing to commit political violence to begin with is already radicalized enough in their beliefs to likely be willing to risk being caught, even if only for the notoriety. There's no real "casual" market, here.

A market would require two parties: someone who cares enough to pay, and someone who needs the money enough to do it.

If payments are truly anonymous and untraceable, then I’m sure that there are plenty of people and entities out there willing to post the bounty.

If payments are ensured and publicly verifiable, then the consumer here isn’t an “assassin” - it’s someone who needs money badly. Someone who is suicidal but wants to set their family up for life, for instance - or someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and sees claiming an assassination contract as a means of ensuring that their family is taken care of after they’re gone.

At any rate, it’s all in the essay. At the end of the day it’s just a thought exercise.

? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh... ?

Wrong shooter, wrong targets. Not allowed to talk about that.

They already have that threat from guns, and already have ways to protect themselves. Bulletproof glass would stop a drone too. Drones don't sound like a real problem compared to guns which somehow haven't assassinated every politician despite being remote controlled point and click instant killing machines that are also cheap and widely available.

That's a good thing. The risk of assassination is a core component of the balance of power between the state and the people.

Actually quite useful for euthanasia.

In my country, euthanasia is legal, but it's very difficult to stipulate it. For instance, saying you want to be euthanized when you get Alzheimer, is extremely difficult. Such a website could be a solution.

To be fair: it is pretty final. Part of the issue with, say, Alzheimers, is that though you might feel strongly about it when you write it, you might feel strongly as you want to live when you have Alzheimers. You leave the people euthanizing folks that don't want to die, which can feel more like murder than a compassionate act.

We need a better system for this. Sure, useful for this, but one's family shouldn't have to resort to what is technically murder to do this. There are surely other methods, like adding qualifiers to the Alzheimer's clause and verified on multiple occasions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro-euthanasia, even in a few ways that aren't really socially acceptable. (Alternative to suicide, so long as it persists over some time and one has tried treatments. Oldish but healthy. And so on, so long as it is planned out).

> AI drone and carry out the hit

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots (a frightening horror mockumentary).

A bit morbid, but how does that work? That is, Bitcoin for murder? Is there some kind of escrow, or do people just send a bunch of money hoping they get what they paid for?

The author talks about that in the latter half of the article, they just pay them hoping they get what they paid for even though there are clear signs of it being a scam.

There already exists at least one decentralized prediction market, Augur (based on Ethereum). Unlike centralized ones, anyone can make a contract about literally any future hypothetical event and then make a market in it.

This can easily be used to create so-called "assassination markets" (a Googleable phrase, not my own).

You could simply create a market like "Will so and so die before such and such date?" Then you place a massive bid order at 99.99% odds. Any would-be takers would then have to put up say $1, go out and kill the person before the specified date, and now they're sitting on tokens that are worth $10,000, because the market will resolve to "true."

Mind your words. Imagine the world you want. The things you want to see. Not the world you don't.

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