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Comment by imaginationra | Hacker News Reader

Re: crypto and this "The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions."

If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.

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I feel like you condensed multiple paragraphs worth of thought into 2 sentences and I simply can't follow at all. Would you care to write it out in more detail?

I am guessing the idea is ubiquity of prediction markets -> there's a prediction market for the liveness of everyone/anyone -> financial incentive to kill anyone

combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence

Something like that- I'm an artist/creative and was working on a (Black mirrorish)story years back about this, thats were the thought comes from- a related ransom system would also be built into it- would create an offshoot of Defi known as DeathFi.

holysh*t this is grim

You aren't seriously suggesting that people will take out prediction market bets on people's death dates and then commit murder to rig the bet? How would a prediction market on anybody's death date get enough liquidity for this strategy to ever come close to breaking even?

They've already used prediction markets to bet on peoples death as in the case of Sinwar from Hamas. It seems like all the pieces are there and moving into place- I'm just an artist/creative imagining things though(shrug)

It would be one way to hire a hitman. A "bet" on the prediction market would effectively function as a bounty on the target's head.

E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"

That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market#Assassina...

Things get very dark in few dozen years anyway - see established mainstream science about global warming. We know and ignore this because it's unpleasant and if we take it seriously it cuts the short term profits.

Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.

> If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon

so second coming of Jesus is on the books?

can't wait.

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