Andy Greenberg reports:
Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation: The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. According to Assassination Market’s rules, if someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be–any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds.
For now, the site’s rewards are small but not insignificant. In the four months that Assassination Market has been online, six targets have been submitted by users, and bounties have been collected ranging from ten bitcoins for the murder of NSA director Keith Alexander and 40 bitcoins for the assassination of President Barack Obama to 124.14 bitcoins–the largest current bounty on the site–targeting Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve and public enemy number one for many of Bitcoin’s anti-banking-system users. At Bitcoin’s current rapidly rising exchanges rate, that’s nearly $75,000 for Bernanke’s would-be killer.
Sanjuro’s grisly ambitions go beyond raising the funds to bankroll a few political killings. He believes that if Assassination Market can persist and gain enough users, it will eventually enable the assassinations of enough politicians that no one would dare to hold office. He says he intends Assassination Market to destroy “all governments, everywhere.”[...]
As for technically proving that an assassin is responsible for a target’s death, Assassination Market asks its killers to create a text file with the date of the death ahead of time, and to use a cryptographic function known as a hash to convert it to a unique string of characters. Before the murder, the killer then embeds that data in a donation of one bitcoin or more to the victim’s bounty. When a target is successfully murdered, he or she can send Sanjuro the text file, which Sanjuro hashes to check that the results match the data sent before the target’s death. If the text file is legitimate and successfully predicted the date of the killing, the sender must have been responsible for the murder, according to Sanjuro’s logic. Sanjuro says he’ll keep one percent of the payout himself as a commission for his services.[...]
Sanjuro says that[...] as a matter of ethics, he notes that he’ll accept only user-suggested targets “who have initiated force against other humans. More specifically, only people who are outside the reach of the law because it has been subverted and corrupted, and whose victims have no other way to take revenge than to do so anonymously.”
Pure insanity.
ReplyDeleteRothbardians rothbarding.
ReplyDeleteFor your information, idiot, Murray Rothbard never called for anyone's assassination.
DeleteFrom Rothbard's "Strictly Confidential":
"I am using the shock term 'revolution' not in the sense of violent, or even non-violent, revolution against the state.I mean by 'revolution' the effecting of an ideological revolution in the framework of ideas held by the bulk of our fellow men. We are, in this sense, revolutionaries--for we are offering the public a radical change in their doctrinal views and we are offering it from a firm and consistent basis of principle that we are trying to spread among the public."
What a horrible idea. Without a change in people's thinking and ideology, this will do nothing more then strengthen and increase government injustice everywhere. This is no solution; just fuel for an already blazing wildfire.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the government is behind it. The FBI is known to encourage poor idiots to commit crimes. Maybe it is the next step of fabricating patsies to be later convicted, tried, and jailed for life. See, citizens? We are protecting you from the bitcoin terrorists!
ReplyDeleteIndeed. A false flag operation is quite possible and could be used to inflame passions so greatly that a public outcry provides government with license to do whatever it deems appropriate.
DeleteApparently these assassins also want to use guns. So maybe its time we start to educate people on the pitfalls and dangers of owning guns. God knows government might come to regulate and/or confiscate them.
ReplyDeleteI mean, seriously, RW. When you want to put something down, you'll clutch at any straw, won't you?
Why don't you stick with the economic arguments against Bitcoin?
If anyone of those targets were assassinated, or even injured in an attempt, I doubt the public at large would shed any tears. But the media go into hysterics and turn them into martyrs. So would the government, which would come down hard on what little freedom we have left in this country. Hard money advocates and libertarians would be accused of inciting violence and subjected to censorship.
ReplyDeleteIt's a counterproductive idea from the standpoint of increasing liberty. But the fact that such a website even exists tells you that things have gotten very bad. People know they're being fleeced, degraded and lied to, and they're angry about it. They recognize the injustice. This is a form of blowback.
1776
ReplyDelete