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.

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.

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. It could work in everything from North Korea to Somalia to hypothetical anarchist utopia.

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 understand that part. However, if I'm not selling BTC, but accepting BTC and paying people with PayPal, I see no risk involved.

Longtime OCN member here. OCN has gone down the shitter the past couple of years. The new moderators are just god awful. They will give you infractions and close threads just for not agreeing with you or saying something simple like "stupid". It's beyond ridiculous. The management is killing the site basically.

I found out about bitcoin from that thread though, so I'm glad someone put it up. There are a lot of idiots at OCN though, more beyond belief. But then there are some people really skillful with computers and some powerful systems.

Hmmm, you are right.  

I don't know much about this stuff, but based on the fact that a 5870 can get up to 2.7 Teraflops, that would make the government computer 370,370 times faster.  I hear that 5870s get about 300 Mega hash/s so that means that the Exaflop computer would get like 111 MILLION Mega hash/s or 111 Tera hash/s.  That's a block every 59 minutes on average, at the current difficulty level.  Did I do my math right?

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?