Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With Bitcoins | Hacker News Reader

Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With Bitcoins

forbes.com

48 pointsecopoesis11 comments

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

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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