In 1995 Jim Bell, an anarchist engineer who had studied at MIT and worked at Intel, serialized an essay called “Assassination Politics.” His design: a site where users anonymously nominate someone to be killed and pledge money toward the bounty, then pay a small fee to register an encrypted prediction — visible only to them and the site — of when the person will die. When the death is confirmed, the predictions are decrypted and the pot pays the winning predictor. The best way to be right about the date is to cause it. “If only 0.1% of the population… was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead,” Bell wrote, “that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head.”

This is the piece Harper’s published in January 2020, and it is the necessary companion to the current fight over prediction markets, because it documents what happened when people tried to build Bell’s machine before it was technically easy.

  • In 2013 a developer using the alias Kuwabatake Sanjuro launched a site called the Assassination Market, built largely to Bell’s specification, with bounties up to $75,000 on Barack Obama, Fed chair Ben Bernanke, and NSA director Keith Alexander. Nobody took it seriously; it sat idle until 2018, when Sanjuro cashed out the accumulated bitcoin — by then worth over a million dollars.
  • In 2018 Augur, a blockchain prediction-market protocol, launched and immediately produced a wave of assassination markets and death pools, almost certainly as stunts. The pools were small and nobody trusted them. The technology was the point.

The report’s centre is what the fake markets actually did. By 2018 an IT security researcher named Chris Monteiro had spent years infiltrating and shutting down the successive murder-for-hire sites of a Romanian scammer calling himself Yura — Besa Mafia, Sicilian Hitmen, Azerbaijani Eagles, Camorra Hitmen. The sites took bitcoin, never performed any killing, and then extorted the customers who complained. But the orders were real:

  • Amy Allwine, a dog trainer in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, was the target of a $6,000 order placed by a user called dogdaygod, who supplied her schedule and asked that her husband and son be spared. The FBI warned the couple together. Six months later her husband shot her with the gun they had bought for protection. He had taken out a $700,000 policy on her life, and the bitcoin signature of the payment to Besa Mafia matched a key on his hard drive. Convicted of first-degree murder in 2018.
  • Bryan Njoroge, 21, a US serviceman in Indiana, was found shot in the head on a baseball field after a roughly $5,500 order. The police ruled it a suicide and stand by that conclusion.
  • A 14-year-old boy in New Jersey had a nearly $20,000 hit placed on him, after the buyer asked the site whether 14 was “an acceptable age or too young.” Yura said it was acceptable.

Merchant contacted the people whose names and photographs were sitting on kill lists. About half said police had never alerted them — and the FBI’s position was that murder-for-hire mostly falls outside its jurisdiction (“We are not a world policing agency and must be mindful of our venue, resources, and limitations”).

Bell, when Merchant reached him, was pleased with how things were going. The new prediction markets were the direction he had wanted: “I’ve been waiting twenty-three years. I’m happy they’re finally getting around to making this happen.” Asked about markets targeting ordinary people rather than public officials, he allowed that he could not prevent others from being less selective than he was.

Read together with the current picture, the useful thing about this piece is the mechanism it isolates. Bell’s insight was never really about murder. It was that if you let anonymous money take positions on outcomes, someone will eventually find it cheaper to change the outcome than to predict it. Everything downstream — the threats to a reporter’s family over a missile market, the insider bets that arrive minutes before the news — is that insight compounding at scale, with the elaborate dark-web scaffolding stripped away because it turned out not to be needed.