Group assassination markets

The purpose of this post is not to encourage the creation of any systems but merely to describe theoretical economic-political possibilities in existence that people may come to be faced with in the near future.

In 1995, Jim Bell described the idea of “assassination markets”. In broad strokes, it was a system for individuals to crowd-fund bounties on people’s heads, without having to do the unseemly IRL work of finding a hitman and hoping he does the deed properly.

The basic idea is simple: somebody would set up a site that keeps a pool of cryptocurrency for each intended victim. Punters could bet money (like at a bookmaker) that a victim would die on a certain date¹. If they didn’t, the money would go into the pool and increase the bounty. If they did, they’d be paid out according to odds.

Let’s look at a practical example: a hypothetical assassination market for the American former businessman Brian Thompson.² According to the American National Center for Health Statistics, a 50-year old non-Hispanic White male runs a 0.6467% risk (chance) of dying within the next year. Based on this information (and none other, such as the fact that he was likely more healthy than average but–evidently–engaged in a risky occupation), we can extrapolate³ a 0.001773% probability that Mr. Thompson would die on December 4, 2024. This gives fair betting odds of about 56400.00. If there had been a bounty of $1’000’000 and bets were offered at these odds, a punter would be required to stake $17.73 to claim the whole pot, provided they correctly guessed the date of death.

The pros and cons of such a system have been already extensively discussed, and I won’t delve deeply into it - suffice to say that subjecting human life to the free market may turn out to make society a less pleasant place to live. However, the idea, as proposed by Mr. Bell, does not reach its full limit of efficiency. And this is displeasing.

Within the game of chess, the ability of a piece to “capture” another piece can be used to your advantage in two ways:

1. You can capture the opponent’s pieces, so they lose them.
2. You can “prevent” a piece from moving, if by moving it the opponent would leave another more valuable piece open to attack.

This is also what Mr. Bell envisioned: the idea is not per se to murder people, but to use the ever-present threat of death to induce people to behave in a certain way. Bell writes:

Perfect anonymity […] combined with the ease and security with which these contributions could be collected, would make being an abusive government employee an extremely risky proposition. Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office.

Here is where the 2013-2015 attempt at implementing an assassination market with Bitcoin failed. $100’000 won’t be enough for someone to kill the chairman of the Federal Reserve, whereas some total nobody like Mr. Thompson isn’t going to be hated enough to actually amass a sizeable bounty.

But these people are not really hated on account of their names or their identity; they are hated on account of their profession, for the work they do, and above all for the system that they represent. The object of the market is not to attack the people but, above all, to attack the system.

The sensible course of action, then, seems to me for an adversary to do just that: instead of putting a bounty on one person, put it on all of them. While Mr. Thompson may, through his untimely demise, have had the misfortune of becoming a symbol for a larger industry, it must needs be remarked that everyone involved in this affair (whether for or against) is utterly indifferent towards the human being Brian Thompson (recall how the headlines had to describe him as “healthcare CEO”).

And Jim Bell, seemingly not realizing its importance, did remark:

A smart car-theft victim would be happy to donate money targeting ANY discovered car-thief, not necessarily just the one who victimized him.

Rather than going through the arduous work of looking up who runs what firm, an adversary would to better to adopt the old Western maxim to shoot first and ask questions later. Here’s how this would work:

1. Punters put a bounty of $100’000 on “healthcare CEOs” (or even “the 182’502 employees of a large American advertising and search engine company”).
2. The pool might decide to never pay out more than, say, 20% of the pool on a singular correct prediction/event, to account for race conditions, and to be able to graduate the reward scheme. For example, it may seem prudent to pay out more money for the people at the top while maintaining a common pool for a whole industry, or to specifically reward particularly gruesome killings (livestreamed, against family members, torture and dismemberment, etc) pour encourager les autres.
3. When predicting, instead of only predicting a date, a punter may also predict other modalities or side bets - things like “video posted within 72h of death”, or the specific person who will die.
4. After the person has stopped living, claims for payouts would be made the normal way - by unblinding the pre-commitments. The odds would be calculated first at this stage - unless they are unblinded, the site wouldn’t even know if it was a serious bet or just someone looking to increase the bounty by another $100.

While this extension is fairly straightforward, its implications have not, to my knowledge, been explored in depth:

• This is more capital-efficient. With the same amount of money, you can threaten more people.
• This is more aesthetically pleasing. The guy at the top can at best serve as a symbol or representation of the system for whom he works; designating him on this account rather than directly is a much cleaner solution.
• This is harder to defend against. It’s not really viable to pay for security for thousands of people, but even a relatively small risk of death probably isn’t worth the pay rise and resumé benefits that would become inherent to being an engineer at EvilCorp.
• This keeps the markets honest. Given that people die all the time for all sorts of reasons, a punter could place small bets on propositions like “at least 3 employees of EvilCorp will die within the next month” and scan the obituaries. If he can then prove payout of a win of $7 on his stake of $5, this would go a long way towards proving that a market is at least not a complete scam (and the opposite - a documented refusal to pay out - certainly would).

I would like again to remark that I do not support the creation of such a system, or for that matter the murder of human beings, and that both are liable to cause problems for society. Some may argue that it is important to practice harm reduction, wherein people are directed from a risk-filled behaviour (such as injecting heroin) to a less risky but not necessarily harmless behaviour (such as snorting heroin).

In this regard, those people may find the recent encouragement of vigilantism saddening, what with young people throwing away promising lives only to do for free what a real professional could in all likelihood do better and cheaper. In this respect, it could be argued that implementing the system described above would be a better use of one’s time and skills, at a much better ratio of risk and reward.

However, I would not be inclined to agree with them. The American politician Nancy Pelosi once remarked that it would be necessary to pass a law in order to figure out what it does. On the topic of women, Pandora had to open her box in order to figure out what was inside, and Eve had to take a bite in order to gain the necessary knowledge to be able to determine why doing so was not a good idea. I personally reckon that such a system would probably do what it’s supposed to, but at what cost?