Bitcoin Forum

http://costofwar.com/ (http://costofwar.com/)

Wouldn't it have been cheaper with a decentralized assasination market?

Almost certainly. Probably only a few hundred thousand to few million before someone close to him finds it economically suitable to turn on him, or for some individual or group to track him down.

i don't believe so.

as i recall, the last bounty on osama's head was either 20 or 40 (i think it was doubled in there somewhere) million dollars.  didn't work, did it?

in any case, good riddance.

Terrorists are so incompetent at killing people that it's practically a waste of money to go after them.

Better focus on car accidents. That kill more people every year. A 9/11 style would have to occurs pretty often to catch up to them.


(So, 3000 people have their justice...but how many lives were brought to kill Osama bin Laden?)

It's the fear of having people like Osama out there that is the real issue though.  We can't live in fear.

It's an irrational fear. It's also when terrorists won. Lives taken are collateral. What get taken is our mind.

That already happened. The retarded security measure taken by TSA actually results in lives taken because people rather drive cars than go through the BS that the TSA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhjeLxeHis&feature=related&t=13

I'm not a fan of murder, but this was the first thing I thought of :P

I am quite serious.

I never said the fear was rational.  But it is real, and no matter how much you tell people it is irrational, it still won't take the fear away.

Things like killing Osama will.

Great job everybody. Now since there's no reason to be in harm's way anymore, we'll just bring the troops home. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to say that. I forgot that getting the troops out of IED blast range isn't supporting them.

I can hear it now--contingency operations, rebuilding after terrorist rule, they still hate us, they still have a bunch of lithium in the ground. All good reasons to stay right where the troops secure our economic interests.

http://fwd4.me/00cF

It also gets votes. Now the Republicans running in '12 will have to decide whether they're pro-war (with the risk of being considered pro-Obama) or pro-peace (with the risk of being considered Ron Paul).

Doesn't mean we should be stupid in killing Osama and doing things like....making long lines ripe for juicy terrorist attacks.

What do you mean by long juicy lines?

The things that TSA like to makes. Long waiting lines.

Kiba is right, as usual.  Just because a lot of innocent people died on 9/11 doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of resources should be spent to kill Osama.  Resources that could have been spend on improving transportation safety.  Opportunity cost.  And no one sees the increases in car accidents resulting from people avoiding plane transportation due to additional security fees and tyrannical TSA agents.


I suppose it is impossible to answer.  But first off, note that the US government's bounty was not a decentralized assassination market.  It was taxpayer (read: theft) money collected and arranged by the US government and paid for in Federal Reserve Notes.  There are many complications with this:

• Morally speaking, many people refuse to accept government money because it is stolen from peaceful people.  There are separate threads about whether taxes are theft, so no need to get into that discussion here.
• Pragmatically speaking, many would-be assassins would be put off by the fact that there would be no guarantee that they would receive the money (the US government rarely honor contracts and is untrustworthy), unlike with a smart-contract assassination market run by a trustworthy computer which could be setup to automatically pay the winner without human involvement (except for maybe a vote to verify that indeed the target was killed on that particular date).  Look, we don't even know for sure that Gavin will not be arrested when he visits the CIA :)
• There is no anonymity for the assassin with the US-sponsored bounty, unlike with a bitcoin assassination market whereby the winner would simply use a new address.  News channels are even speculating about possible revenge terrorist attacks since the attack was a US-sponsored operation.  Would-be assassins may be deterred by the fact that there would be jihadist al-qaeda loyalists out there who would want to kill the assassin.  Plus, the fact that the money would be in USD would make it very suspicious if you are some random arab with $20-million USD all of the sudden.
• The $20-million USD pricetag was not set by the invisible hand of the market, but rather by some government bureaucrats.  It could be that given the difficulties of navigating the rough terrain and getting close enough to Osama to shoot him, the actual cost of such an operation might require a multi-person assassin team composed of professionals with various specialties, but most likely would not have been $400 billion.  The price mechanism can determine the cheapest/optimal cost.

Anyway, I'm not necessarily an advocate of assassination markets, as I'm concerned about negative risks.  But they are inevitable given the existence of bitcoin.  Which is why we should be talking about assassination markets.  And now is a great opportunity.

sounds scary ;) :D

It's not really as scary as it sounds.

It was originally thought of as a way to protect citizens against corrupt government officials. The idea is that the more corrupt an official, the more people that will want him dead. An assassination market is simply a site that allows individuals to guess the date on which an individual will die. Each guess costs some amount of anonymous money (Bitcoin, in our case), and people can contribute to the growing pot without actually guessing too. As the pool grows, there is more and more incentive for a lone individual or group to expedite the death of the individual. Since it happens at a time and place of their choosing, they can be almost certain that they will win the pool.

The originator of the idea foresaw it not only being used domestically against dirty state officials, but leaders of aggressive foreign nations. For instance, if the Northeast United States seceded and became an anarchist society, they could rely on individuals to form a militia, or private defense agencies for protection from aggressive nations. However, they could also use the assassination market to protect themselves. What are the chances that a leader of a country will authorize an attack on the anarchist society if he knows it will bring a substantial bounty on his head?

It also sounds like a great way for an ex-wife to get revenge.  Or anyone who doesn't like you, for that matter.

People will kill for very little if they are good at it and there are no consequences.  I would hate to live in such a society - I would always be living in fear.

Your example of government officials sounds all dandy, but it could just as easily be used against you.  Someone gives a bloke on the street $50 to cap you in the head, and you'd probably never even see it coming.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.
 OBL's sudden death by bullet holes shouldn't surprise anyone.

All of what you say are concerns regardless of an assassination market. It could just as easily happen that your ex-wife or guy that doesn't like you gives a crack head $50 to kill you...

An assassination market is really only useful as tool for a bunch of people to contribute a little bit toward the untimely demise of a widely dislike figure.

How does the hit-man accept the award without implicating himself or tipping off the target?

Everybody that places a bet includes a payment address. The winning bet has the pool amount sent to the associated address.

The hit-man could place a bet last minute, or in advance. Presumably he knows best the time at which the target will die.

So the site would have to only show the pool size and not the actual bets. Very interesting, conceptually, of course, and also because I'm in the middle of a game of assassin with a few friends.

Some friends.  ;)

This is an insightful model. Thinking about how USA is the country with the biggest jailbird population in the world, and e.g. Russia as the country where whole legitimate power structure is intrinsically corrupt and thus violent.

BitterTea makes some good points here.  And keep in mind that there are still would be courts, security providers, and insurance providers to protect against asassinations for meager bounties.  And yes, even today and throught history, stupid people have been killing people for stupid reasons all the time.  Hypothetically, an assasination market (or better yet an arrest market) could be set up against random blokes on the street who assasinate people for unjust reasons.  So it works both ways.  Again, assasination markets are a tool, just like nuclear energy or explosives.  It can bw used for good of bad.  But don't blame the tool...but rather blame the criminals.

I'm just saying, there would be a LOT more of it happening, and it would be a LOT more common-place, if people weren't threatened with going to jail for doing it.

That's not what we're talking about. This system only makes it difficult or impossible to trace, financially, the funding for the assassination. It assumes nothing about the current legal system. There's still physical evidence of the murder itself for law enforcement to collect and courts to judge.

Ok, I guess we're talking about two different things then.

I was talking about an open & legal assassination market that would inevitable present itself in an anarchist society.  It would be a horrible thing, for many reasons.

Why? How would an assassination market contribute to the murder of non-deserving individuals? If you're concerned about people with lots of money, they can hire assassins already. If you're concerned about individual disputes turning into murder contracts, it doesn't work unless lots of other people contribute to it as well.

I'm concerned about individual disputes turning into murder contracts.  Why WOULDN'T it work with just one person contributing?  That must be the part I'm missing...

If you have sufficient resources to contract a murder, you can contract a murder - with or without an assassination market. On the other hand, if a bunch of people all want the same person killed, but nobody has sufficient resources on their own, an assassination market provides a useful tool. Think of it like crowd-sourced assassinations.

Problem is, people will kill for a much lower price than I think you are anticipating.  I would be shocked if the price for a head was over $50 in a free, lawless, anarchist society.

The reason it costs so much in today's society is because volume is low (no efficiencies of scale), and the risk of getting caught.  If you had high volume, and much lower risks (i.e., the only risk is to the assassin if they are incompetent), then it would drive the price down to an extremely low level.

Basically, EVERYONE would have the resources to contract a murder.

Anarchism isn't what you think it is. There can be rules without rulers and laws without government. Bitcoin is proof of that, as are various legal systems throughout history such as Xeer and merchant law. Further, most schools of anarchistic thought have something like the non-aggression principle, which states that initiating the use of force (aggression) is never justified, but responding to aggression with a proportional amount of force is justified.

In short, I don't think the introduction of the assassination market would have a significant impact on the number of murders of innocents, but would provide a very powerful tool for otherwise powerless people to stand up against tyranny.

Somehow I think that if they offered up 200 billion dollars as a reward (half of their costs), I think he would have showed up on the whitehouse doorstep the next day.

Yes...and without the tremendous loss of life.  Just think of how many of the president's botched raids have ended up killing innocent women, children, and non-militant-jihadists...

BitterTea makes great points all through this thread.  Basically, assassination markets don't need to be legal for them to exist.  But they are inevitable.  So what is to protect innocent people against widespread assassinations?  Simple: a competent legal system that protects innocent lives and a general held view in society that assassination is not the preferred method to handle petty disputes.

re. Assassination market. How are would-be assassins assured that previous 'winning' assassins actually received the pay-out? (if there is no such assurance, they presumably wouldn't take the risk).

One way assassination markets work is via prediction markets.  So, instead of being paid directly, an assassin would make a bet that "such and such political figure is assassinated prior to such and such date".  Theoretically this would pay out because of the number of regular market participants demanding adherence to the contract.  In fact John Poindexter tried to setup such a market as the DARPA head before he was shot down (pun intended) by Congress:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

But if the assassin remains anonymous after collecting the prize--which would be necessary for the system to work--how can the next assassin (or anyone else for that matter) be confident that the prize was really disbursed? It sounds like there'd be no penalty disincentivising the host organisation from simply keeping the prize money.

A few things.  First, I don't think anonymity is normally an absolute requirement.  The idea is that it's just betting on predictions, not a "prize".  The number of participants merely following the market would tend to outnumber the actual assassins which makes it difficult to distinguish between them.  Second, there would be enough edge cases in the market (elderly politicians like Castro) to enable participants to build confidence over time that the system worked.  And lastly, it's ultimately just a futures market so the disincentive is the same as any other, reputation and continuing in business taking a cut of the trades, same thing that keeps Mtgox from taking the money and running.

I wonder if bin Laden shorted airline stocks before the WTC attacks.  Talk about market manipulation!

How do you think they finance their operations?

He obviously had insider information then.  ;)

Correctly making a prediction gets you the prize.


I find it hard to imagine this working, since from the perspective of an assassin about to pace his 'bet' there's no guarantee that there will ultimately be enough betters to effectively hide amongst. And even with many betters, he's still exposing himself in a way that could lead to being caught. A much less risky proposition would be total anonymity, as described in assassination politics (http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm). But this has the problem of making it impossible (afaik) to confirm that prize disbursal actually happens.

But ...
Isn't that illegal?

The more difficult or impossible it becomes to effect change in out of touch, runaway central governments, mega corporations and the compounding of government corporatism with the intelligence/resource concentration capacity of such relationships it becomes increasingly necessary for such assassination marketplaces.

The US founding fathers deemed militia as capable of protecting the people from unfortunate threats to liberty.  Dark mega entities will render militia lame as it is by nature coherent and easily targeted. 

A people's CIA of sorts providing covert action will be among one of the only effective tools to check the powers of the ultra powerful.


By the way.  I bet Kim Jong Il will meet his end on 2011.12.11.  Pay me. 

Not talking about this dude (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-il), are you?