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An assassination market is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous electronic money, and pseudonymous remailers) on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately. This would incentivise assassination of individuals because the assassin, knowing when the action would take place, could profit by making an accurate bet on the time of the subject's death. Because the payoff is for knowing the date rather than performing the action of the assassin, it is substantially more difficult to assign criminal liability for the assassination.^[1]

An early use of the term can be found in the Cyphernomicon by Timothy C. May.^[2] It has been argued^[3] that the feasibility of an assassination market precludes the development of any form of anonymous electronic money. Nation-states are capable either of arresting and prosecuting those underwriting such hypothetical payment systems as accessories to these crimes. This follows from the fact that anonymous digital cash requires publicly known underwriters, e.g. banks participating in guaranteeing and forwarding payments made using a hypothetical digital cash.

Contents 1 See also 2 References 3 Sources 4 External links

[edit] See also

• Crypto-anarchism
• Dead pool
• Tontine
• Policy Analysis Market

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

• Hess, Patrick (2002). Cyberterrorism and Information War. Anmol Publications PVT. LTD.. ISBN 9788126111619. http://books.google.com/books?id=v9NSYnE3G_sC&pg=PA89&dq=%22Assassination+politics%22+Timothy. 

• Thomas, Douglas; Brian Loader (2000). Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age. Routledge. ISBN 9780415213264. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZlkOcTP6A_AC&pg=PA126&dq=%22Assassination+politics%22+Timothy&lr=. 

• Sukumaran, R (2004). "Cryptology, digital assassination and the terrorism futures markets". Strategic Analysis 28 (2): 219 – 236. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/ftinterface?content=a791916793&rt=0&format=pdf. 

• Clarke, R; Dempsey G, Ooi CN, O'Connor RF (1998). "Technological Aspects of Internet Crime Prevention'". Proc. Conf. "Internet Crime" Australian Institute for Criminology, Melbourne University, 16-17 February 1998.  (note: this reference needs to be confirmed)

[edit] External links

• Jim Bell, Assassination Politics (from archive.org)
• The Usenet discussion containing the initial publication of the first part of Assassination Politics
• Academic discussion of the idea from an anarchist perspective