http://suvudu.com/2016/07/michael-byrnes-sci-fi-thriller-bounty-and-how-to-crowdsource-an-assassination.html
In Michael Byrnes’ new dystopian science-fiction thrillerBounty, a string of high profile murders are connected to bounty4justice.com: a website that offers bounties for the assassinations of corrupt politicians, crooked bankers, and other targets seemingly above the law.While bounty4justice.com is fiction, it bears a very strong resemblance to a real-life kill-for-pay website first reported on in 2013. Only accessible through the Dark Web, the Assassination Market offered crowdsourced murder to the masses. The site, the creation of pseudonymous entrepreneur who went by the name Kuwabatake Sanjuro (taken from the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo), enabled anonymous users to submit a target for assassination along with a bounty in bitcoin for anyone who could get the job done. Users who might not have a target of their own in mind could contribute to bounties already established.Like bounty4justice.com, the Assassination Market specialized in high-ranking political figures and powerful businessmen: people like President Barack Obama and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke. In an interview with Forbes’ Andy Greenberg, Sanjuro, a self-described anarchist, said that his purpose in establishing the Assassination Market was to make risky for people to seek public officeSanjuro’s Assassination Market was not the first or only one of its kind. The inspiration for Sanjuro’s site, and many others, can be found in the essays of crypto-anarchist Jim Bell. Bell first outlined a model for crowdfunded political murder in a series of essays published in the mid-nineties. In Bell’s model, a group of activists would select a public figure and place “bets” on possible days he or she might die. With all of the crowdsourced funding up for grabs, all a potential assassin would need to do is murder the public figure and collect the funds. In theory, the other bettors would bear no criminal liability for the murder, as their wager was placed on a possible date of death and not how the person would die. In other words, a dead pool: a tasteless but legal game.[end of portion quoted]
