Latest Bitcoin Scare: It Funds Assassination of Politicians!

Many years ago, a man named
Jim Bell wrote
the essay “Assassination
Politics” about setting up an anonymous online market for
funding hits on control freak government officials and discouraging
people from working within the machinery of the state. Bell ended
up on certain government officials’ radar, as a result, and was
soon busted for harassment of government officials, and
certainly not for exercising his free speech rights,
whatever you or I might suspect. His essay just sort of languished,
as the years went by… And then came Bitcoin…And Tor.

And don’t you know, now there’s an Assassination Market inspired
by Assassination Politics?

Writes
Andy Greenberg at Forbes:

As Bitcoin becomes an increasingly popular form of digital cash,
the cryptocurrency is being accepted in exchange for everything
from socks to sushi to heroin. If one anarchist has his way, it’ll
soon be used to buy murder, too.

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.

If you think Silk Road upset the feds, you ain’t seen nothin’
yet.

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