Hacker News Reader

Comment by theshadowknows | Hacker News Reader

I am morbidly curious how much being a hit man pays. I don't want to look it up for fear of finding myself 'on a list' :) but it's such a high risk occupation that one assumes it's pretty profitable. In the US, anyway. This brings me to bitcoin.

Would it be smarter as a murderer-for-hire to ask to be paid in a less-expensive (for now) but growing currency such as Etherium or Litecoin? I mean, ask the 'client' for X dollars worth of that coin and then let it appreciate over time. Maybe that's missing the mark. But I sort of feel like you'd be better off going for the long term gains and, potentially at least, being able to cash out earlier?

View on HN

Seems to go for less than $100K USD, which surprised me (source is Australian though http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/02/05/australia.ki...)

The Wikipedia page has more info on "contract killing", won't put you on a list to just read that :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_killing

Since this murder-for-hire chose to use a global and transparent ledger that will have that transaction until either the world disappears or the ledger somehow disappears from all nodes, I don't think "smarter" should come anywhere near this. Using blockchains like Bitcoin for crime is far beyond stupid.

That’s a great point. And it brings up a question I’ve never had before :)

What would it take for the Bitcoin blockchain to atrophy enough so as to be unusable?

From my reading of probably unreliable/fake sources, a "hit" on a normal civilian typically ranges from $10-50k. Cost increases with difficulty of accessing target, risk of detection and making it look accidental.

A hitman may wish to delay use of payment for opsec reasons, but I think it's odd to think their desire for speculative risk would be much different than the general public.

There have been murders for hires in the US for as little as 2000$, often done by teenagers.

> Would it be smarter as a murderer-for-hire to ask to be paid in a less-expensive (for now) but growing currency such as Etherium or Litecoin?

No, because the efficient market hypothesis.

If you know that some asset is definitely going to significantly appreciate in value why don't you just buy it and skip out the hitman thing? The answer is that almost noone has any better idea of what the correct price should be than whatever the current price is.

eFfiCiEnT MaRkEt HyPoThEsIs

Magic invisible hand waving solves all problems, including cancer, pollution, climate change, death, genocide, taxes, and frizzy hair. It'll even give a good back rub, for a nominal fee.

In this case it was $17,800 according to

https://www.google.com/amp/s/wwmt.com/amp/news/local/former-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com