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You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / Freedom by Assassination

Freedom by Assassination

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File this under unsurprising: the glibertarian currency Bitcoin can be used to pay for assassinations.

Bitcoin has long been accused of aiding money-laundering, but today it’s been implicated in a more grisly business: assassination. In Forbes, Andy Greenberg details a site called Assassination Market, which offers up crowdfunded bounties for the murder of public figures. As previously reported in The Daily Dot, the site is primarily motivated by hostility to overreaching government, offering bounties ranging from 40 bitcoin for President Obama to a whopping 124 bitcoin for outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. At current bitcoin rates, that would add up to over $70,000.

You can tell it’s the Paulistas because the price on Bernanke’s head is 3X Obama’s.

Reader Interactions

163Comments

  4. 4.

    Bubblegum Tate

    The bulk of the hitmen for hire are fraudsters, according to Deep Web aficionados, but there are legit ones, too.

  6. 6.

    Original Lee

    Free speech and all that, but isn’t this site seditious? I would hope at least a few of these would-be assassins are really undercover FBI or Secret Service.

  7. 7.

    Roger Moore

    @Karmus:
    Bitcoins have all the drawbacks of the gold standard without the benefit of being backed by a tangible (if grossly overvalued) physical good and with a supply that’s guaranteed not to be big enough to run a real economy.

  11. 11.

    Elizabelle

    I don’t even like talking about this.

    And what a horrible story to highlight, this week in particular.

  12. 12.

    carbon dated

    I dislike Ayn Rand Paulookas as much as the next guy, but it isn’t a tad dishonest to link the glibbert crowd with assassins just because they have bitcoins in common? I’ve trucked in bitcoins (before Silk Road went down); a lot of people who have nothing but contempt for libertarians do. So by inferring (and then implying) that groups using a common currency are perforce comrades in arms, well isn’t that just gilt* by association?

    *You heard me.

  13. 13.

    burnspbesq

    And when said glibertarians are on the wrong end of a Bitcoin-facilitated swindle, you know they’ll be lined up outside Main Justice and the SEC demanding that Holder and Ceresney DO SOMETHING!

  14. 14.

    Roger Moore

    @butler:

    And this is legal… how?

    Because the government is inherently illegitimate and shouldn’t be allowed to make anything illegal. Remember, the people who are trying to arrange these assassinations are people who don’t believe in ordinary currency; they’re not exactly mainstream.

  15. 15.

    Belafon

    @Elizabelle: I think it’s very relevant and needs to be brought up, especially to the proper authorities, especially in light of this week. We should be pointing out when some group wants to kill someone.

  16. 16.

    Belafon

    @carbon dated: I think the evidence is in the article. Why otherwise would Bernanke be worth more than Obama? Why shouldn’t people who run around claiming that government and the people who run it are dangerous be linked together, especially when someone like Paul uses the passion of these other people for his own political gain?

  17. 17.

    Elizabelle

    Larry Sabato hyperventilating in Talking Points Memo today:

    Add it all together: JFK’s lengthy list of enemies, racial turmoil greater than the nation had seen since the Civil War, social upheaval that unsettled millions, the clash between the anticommunist right wing and those willing to negotiate with the Reds, and most of all, a shockingly casual approach to presidential security based on utterly false assumptions. This toxic combination of trends and events made Kennedy a terribly vulnerable target for murder.

    JFK was a marked man. If Lee Harvey Oswald had never been born, if the Texas trip had never been scheduled, John F. Kennedy would still have faced great peril every day of his presidency. Given all the factors threatening JFK’s safety, even without Dallas, Kennedy would have been very lucky to have survived to January 20, 1969.

    I worry for President Obama every single day. The Secret Service has gotten better, but so has lethal weaponry, and the rightwing is hysterical, and has its own cable news channel today. (Several, you might say.)

    Toxic atmosphere in this country. And now the news media’s constant drum: President Obama is lying to you, he’s taking away your insurance, Obamacare is a failure.

    Did we have congresswomen getting shot early in JFK’s term?

  18. 18.

    Eric U.

    wow, I thought the bitcoin bubble had burst, it’s over $600. I want to say that buying at these levels is kookoo-banananuts, but I also feel that way about gold. Google finance doesn’t supply a chart, I guess that’s to be expected, but finding a chart isn’t easy.

  19. 19.

    Cacti

    Speaking of the Bitcoin crowd…

    Jeremy Hammond of Anonymous was sentenced to 10-years in a federal prison for his cyber-theft of 60,000 credit card numbers and records of 860,000 Stratfor clients.

    His lawyers, natch, argued that he was just a concerned citizen, worried about the role of private firms in intelligence gathering.

  21. 21.

    Amir Khalid

    At the current exchange rate, that works out to 24 thou and change for offing POTUS. Doesn’t sound like the kind of money to pique Scaramanga’s interest.

  22. 22.

    MikeJ

    I seem to recall a Reason (sic) article a few years back saying that political assassination wasn’t really all that bad because you could always just get another politician and there was no downside to society, even if we had to admit it was sort of a bummer for the public servant who was targeted. Nobody ever told Fonzie about WWI.

  23. 23.

    Hawes

    Max Weber defined the state as an entity with a “monopoly of violence” over a given territory. Glibertarians hate the state. Therefore, let it rain Bitcoins on those who would bypass this monopoly of violence.

    The good news is that this proves that Cohen is right and these folks ain’t racist. They hate Bernanke more than Obama.

    Or maybe they just put a higher dollar, er, bitcoin value on the white guy.

  24. 24.

    JPL

    Without regulations, how is one assured that it’s a real assassin and not a phony? Is there a school for assassins and are they licensed? hmmm

  25. 25.

    butler

    @Roger Moore: Naturally.
    I just figured the illegitimate government might be interested in illegitimately investigating these true patriots for any number of trumped up reasons: conspiracy to commit murder, threats against the President, etc.

  27. 27.

    Karmus

    I can buy that glibs might find bitcoin attractive. I don’t buy perforce that bitcoin is, in and of itself, glib.

    I am not saying I have strong feelings about this, and I’m not picking a fight. I need to know a lot more about a hill than I do about bitcoin before I choose to die on it.

    On the other hand, I do think it deserves scrutiny, and to be taken seriously; not so much in and of itself as part of a phenomenon. Bitcoin is also a proof of concept. There will be other such things, more than likely. The whole idea seems to have a lot of power to be highly disruptive, and capable of a lot of social clout–for good or ill.

  28. 28.

    Glocksman

    @Bubblegum Tate:
    Or undercover cops.

    Though it would be the near perfect fraud.
    Your ‘victim’ can’t exactly go to court and file suit over your refusal to honor the ‘contract’.

    Of course how many of the ‘I need a hitman’ ads are really placed by law enforcement looking to bust would-be hitmen?

  29. 29.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I wish Obama would get his thin black ass in gear and get those FEMA camps online for the processing of glibertarian vermin.

  30. 30.

    Glocksman

    @Hawes:

    Not all teatards are Paulistas.
    In fact a lot of the teatards* I know consider Paul to be a nut even though they both have a bit of the goldbug in common.

    *The teahadis I know are evangelicals, not glibertarians.

  32. 32.

    Jockey Full of Malbec

    @Cacti:

    His lawyers, natch, argued that he was just a concerned citizen, worried about the role of private firms in intelligence gathering.

    But Aaron Swartz was a dirty little thief who deserved to die. Because freedom.

  33. 33.

    carbon dated

    @Belafon: I think the anarchist element in Bitcoinistan accounts for the higher price on Bernanke’s head, not libertarianism. However, I agree that it could be true that many libertarians would cheer on assassinations if it furthered their moist dreams of statelessness. Just don’t think there is enough here to make that blanket assumption. I could be wrong.

  34. 34.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Amir Khalid:

    Scaramanga of course charged one cool million a hit.

    But professional hit men would NEVER consider going after POTUS. Too well protected, the investigation would never end.

    Also, the golden bullet from the golden gun is rather, um…incriminating…

  35. 35.

    snoey

    All the nonsense about how our fiat currency is better than the government’s is beside the point here.

    As with drugs on Silk Road, bitcoins are equal to benjamins for untraceability etc., they just don’t require a face to face exchange. And also as with drugs the other half of the transaction does have a physical component, which is where the problems start.

  36. 36.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Crackpot fringe currency draws interest of crackpots on fringe. Sounds like a dog bitcoin story to me.

    @Karmus:
    For what it’s worth, commentary from Krugzilla earlier this year:

    The similarity to goldbug rhetoric isn’t a coincidence, since goldbugs and bitcoin enthusiasts — bitbugs? — tend to share both libertarian politics and the belief that governments are vastly abusing their power to print money.

  37. 37.

    MikeJ

    Arguing about the difference between bitcoin users and glibertarians is like arguing about the difference between rapists and pædophiles. Everybody in both categories is despicable.

  38. 38.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @carbon dated:

    Oh, the glibertarians are liars. They don’t want statelessness. They imagine they’ll be Louis XIV in the brave new world where that fucking egalitarian stuff is banished to the realm of wind and ghosts.

  39. 39.

    Jebediah, RBG

    @MikeJ:
    How fucking psychotically glib. By that reasoning, I suppose, murder in general is hunky-dory as long as the murder rate is a little lower than the birth rate.
    I suppose Reason magazine editors and writers are pretty easy to replace, too?

  41. 41.

    Cargo

    Alright, I’m the furthest guy from a Paulbot that you’ll ever meet, but I’ve followed bitcoin for a couple years now and bought a bunch a year ago, and made a decent profit when I sold. I’m kicking myself for not hanging onto most of the BTC I had. Even still it’s been by far the best-returning investment I ever made. I’d wait for it to crash again from its current spike before buying any more – but it’ll crash down to $200 or so, not $2 or $50 or $100 like previous crashes.

    Bitcoin has a shady side and a legitimate side. Like gold coins, or USD for that matter, it’s a neutral medium of exchange that also functions as an investment commodity. It is backed by mathematics, not the government or the availability of a metal.

    I don’t want it to destroy the Federal Reserve, but I absolutely want it to destroy Western Union and Paypal. A nice convenient way to send money worldwide without middlemen is a sorely needed technology.

    That assassination market thing is an obvious FBI honeypot to attract idiots so anyone stupid enough to participate deserves arrest and incarceration. It’s like the “digital 10 year old” designed to ensnare pedophiles.

  42. 42.

    Jockey Full of Malbec

    @MikeJ:

    Nobody ever told Fonzie about WWI.

    Actually, he probably does, and is all for it: WWI brought an end to Bismarck’s wave of social programs.

  43. 43.

    Cacti

    @Jockey Full of Malbec:

    But Aaron Swartz was a dirty little thief who deserved to die. Because freedom

    Does it cause any cognitive dissonance that the heroes of the white internet left are headed by a rapist, and tend to be a pack of felons?

    I’m opposed to global warming, I think I’ll start breaking into houses and stealing jewelry to strike a blow against the man.

  45. 45.

    Cacti

    @Cargo:

    That assassination market thing is an obvious FBI honeypot to attract idiots

    Obviously.

    There are no such thing as assassins.

  46. 46.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Cacti:

    I’m opposed to global warming, I think I’ll start breaking into houses and stealing jewelry to strike a blow against the man.

    Flawlessly logical, in the “logic is a pretty flower, that smells bad” sense.

  47. 47.

    Karmus

    @Bill E Pilgrim: Thanks. ‘Bitbugs’, I have to like that.

    @MikeJ: Noted, although I’m not sure I agree wrt bitcoin users. On the other hand, money is money, and getting too wrapped up in it seems to be where a lot of problems start. The whole background idea behind notions such as bitcoin is intriguing to me precisely because it seems to offer mechanisms that could subvert many of the problems that arise due to money. But, in the end, it involves people, so that’s probably a hope dead a-borning.

  48. 48.

    Roger Moore

    @Eric U.:

    Google finance doesn’t supply a chart, I guess that’s to be expected, but finding a chart isn’t easy.

    It doesn’t seem to be that hard. I googled “bitcoin exchange rate history” and got a site with charts as the first match. It looks as if the bubble is well and truly on, since the price of bitcoins has more than tripled in the past month.

  49. 49.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Karmus:

    On the other hand, money is money, and getting too wrapped up in it seems to be where a lot of problems start.

    Mammon is one serious son of a bitch.

  50. 50.

    Cacti

    @taylormattd:

    “#Bitcoin ‘offers the potential for a censorship-resistant currency,’”

    And yet, the front pagers here insist that GG isn’t a glibertarian nutbar.

  51. 51.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Cargo:

    Bitcoin has a shady side and a legitimate side. Like gold coins, or USD for that matter, it’s a neutral medium of exchange that also functions as an investment commodity. It is backed by mathematics, not the government or the availability of a metal.

    The idea that money is both “neutral” and “backed by” anything is to some degree a contradiction.

    Here’s Krugman again saying it better than I could which, given the Nobel Prize and so on, is something I’m okay with. With which I’m okay. Whatever:

    The philosophical misconception, however, seems to me to be even bigger. Goldbugs and bitbugs alike seem to long for a pristine monetary standard, untouched by human frailty. But that’s an impossible dream. Money is, as Paul Samuelson once declared, a “social contrivance,” not something that stands outside society. Even when people relied on gold and silver coins, what made those coins useful wasn’t the precious metals they contained, it was the expectation that other people would accept them as payment.

  56. 56.

    Suffern ACE

    While I find the site’s topic destestable, its also not something I’d worry too much about. You’d really need to be a down on your luck kind of hitman to participate in the site. This has about as much chance of turning from fantasy to reality as someone printing up a “Wanted, Dead or Alive” poster offering a reward for the arrest and detainment of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.

  58. 58.

    Belafon

    @Cargo: Yeah, imagine basing an economy on a currency that swings between $200 and $600 on speculation.

    And I would like to meet this mathematics that the coins is backed by. Cause you know what, the mathematics I know has this limitation that us humans don’t generally have to follow. Perhaps you have heard of them. If not, I recommend a course in set theory at a minimum. So, as much as I love mathematics, it will not handle the fact that people, those who are manipulating the currency, live outside the system.

    I’m also pretty sure that the dollar is backed by mathematics as well: 1c + 1c + 1c + 1c + 1c = 5c which we call a nickel.

  60. 60.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Suffern ACE:

    This has about as much chance of turning from fantasy to reality as someone printing up a “Wanted, Dead or Alive” poster offering a reward for the arrest and detainment of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.

    There were posters like this up in Dallas 50 years ago with JFK’s face on them.

  63. 63.

    scav

    For a while, through an entire accident acquired for other purposes, I had one or two highly valued beanie babies that I mostly used to amuse myself by tracking against mickeysoft stock. What is it about the letter b that attracts this kind of I’ll retire on the profits behavior?

  64. 64.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Cacti:

    Not to mention Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Anwar Sadat, Mahatma Gandhi, and Yitzhak Rabin, just to name a few others.

  65. 65.

    Roger Moore

    @Karmus:

    I don’t buy perforce that bitcoin is, in and of itself, glib.

    Bitcoin was invented by a bunch of glibertarians who don’t believe in government backed currencies. It may have found some use outside the original crew, but that doesn’t make it non-glibertarian.

  67. 67.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @JPL:

    Without regulations, how is one assured that it’s a real assassin and not a phony?

    The sacred free market works in mysterious ways.

  68. 68.

    catclub

    @Karmus: “I can buy that glibs might find bitcoin attractive. I don’t buy perforce that bitcoin is, in and of itself, glib”

    True enough. But i seem to remember a very recent LGM posting wherein the principled glibertarian just happened to always vote with the bigots. Eventually you decide it is because he agrees with them.

  69. 69.

    Cargo

    @Belafon: you should probably read about the technical underpinnings of bitcoin if you’re curious. google around, there’s plenty of info about it and how it works.

    I know a lot of people dismiss it but I dunno, I got a nice juicer on my kitchen countertop that bitcoin paid for. And I’ve never bought drugs or paid to assassinate anybody, and libertarians are generally dopes (but even a stopped clock, etc)

  73. 73.

    Cargo

    @carbon dated: man, bitcoin is one of those things that really, really, enrages some people. When something is that threatening to that many established power structures my ears prick up.

  77. 77.

    Cargo

    @Bill E Pilgrim: the Chinese are very interested in a reserve currency that is not the USD. For some reason. Current speculation has it that Chinese interest is what has led to the current spike.

  79. 79.

    Citizen_X

    @Cargo:

    that threatening to that many established power structures

    @Cargo:

    I got a nice juicer on my kitchen countertop that bitcoin paid for.

    You keep fighting the power, bro!

  82. 82.

    scav

    Appeals to mathematics as proof of reality is one of those things that makes me giggle. The first rounds of ponzi schemes and chain letters also result in counter top appliances. Still waiting for the fat lady warbling while bringing in the pudding, basically.

  83. 83.

    Betty Cracker

    Via Bloomberg News:

    The Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission are telling a U.S. Senate committee that Bitcoins are legitimate financial instruments, boosting prospects for wider acceptance of the virtual currency.

  84. 84.

    Chyron HR

    @MikeJ:

    Is anyone surprised that the guy who first wrote this up back in the 90s did time for tax evasion and stalking a federal agent?

    Apparently the Bitcoiners would prefer you call it, “threatening the established power structures”.

  85. 85.

    Roger Moore

    @Cargo:

    It is backed by mathematics, not the government or the availability of a metal.

    No. It is structured around mathematics rather than government contrivance or the value of metal, but that mathematics isn’t what gives it value. The only thing that gives it value is people accepting that it has value.

  86. 86.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Suffern ACE:

    Hitmen know better than to get involved in politics. It’s all “in the family” with the occasional foray into the outside world for a straying spouse or a business dispute.

    That’s one of the tells of glibertarian involvement. Actual reality is ignored in favor of fantasy.

  87. 87.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Roger Moore:

    The only thing that gives it value is people accepting that it has value.

    This, right here, is the key. You’ll note that bitcoins are indexed against the currencies that have much wider acceptance.

    ALL MONEY is fiat money.

  88. 88.

    Chris

    Jesus, people! How much do you think your hitmen are worth if they’re willing to take payment in bitcoin?

    “Sir, the death mark we placed on al-Qaeda’s Number Two has received a very favorable response, and ninety percent of applicants are willing to accept our offer of payment in bitcoin.”
    “Thank you, Miss Moneypenny! Now be so good as to remove these fourth raters from the interview process, and go with that other chap who’d only accept payment in gold bullion!”

  89. 89.

    Cargo

    I _know_ how y’all feel about bitcoin based on its chief proponents and BELIEVE ME, I know reddit’s /r/bitcoin is a nest of crackpots that make doomsday preppers look sane. And yeah, not too many bitcoiners are fans of Ben Bernanke, but who IS really, apart from the banksters?

    Look, I know, I know libertarians are wrong about a lot of things, but you guys, bitcoin is for real. It’s not going to displace “fiat currency” but it IS a very valid alternative to cash transfers over the internet, a technology that has ginormous implications to huge swathes of the world currently unserved by paypal or credit cards. In Africa mobile payments via bitcoin are just getting started. Google around, read about what bitcoin actually is and how it works on a technical level.

    Bitcoin is a classic piece of internet disruptive technology, not another way for teens to send pictures of their junk to one another. It has upside so huge that it beggars belief.

    If I’m wrong in ten years, I’ll buy you a steak.

  90. 90.

    Ripley

    @carbon dated: I suspect you’re right. I’d also bet most commenters here only know of Bitcoin and the Deep (Dark) Web through blog posts about it, including DPM’s goofy, subtly panicked screeds.

    Bottom line? The Deep Web is likely 90% drug sales, 5% gun sales, & 5% candy-ass would-be assassins/glibtard paradise-seekers. And Bitcoin is less an attempt at anonymity (mostly fail) or redefining the monetary paradigm (complete fail) than it is play money for weed-loving geeks with delusions of non-conformity. I.e., yours truly.

    Oh, and Silk Road 2.0 is up. Widely considered a sting-op honeypot. There are alternatives, so everybody: Get high enough to think all of this is worth being scared about or offended by. It boosts the narrative of Fear All The Time.

  94. 94.

    Chris

    @Glocksman:

    In fact a lot of the teatards* I know consider Paul to be a nut even though they both have a bit of the goldbug in common.

    Paul has the foreign policy ideas they call “Blame America First.” Which pretty well disqualifies him from Supreme Leaderness.

  97. 97.

    Peter

    The best part about all the people jerking off over the bitcoin spike and how they could all be millionaires is that the instant they try to cash out, the price would crash through the floor. It’s a currency run entirely by speculators.

  98. 98.

    Suffern ACE

    @Roger Moore: Ummm. I’m thinking no. It’s more like “if bitcoins aren’t legitimate, a lot of what goes on in financial markets isn’t legitimate.” They aren’t claiming it should compete with legal tender, but speculating on them is o.k.

  100. 100.

    Mike in NC

    The Sunday paper had a front page article on the four people out to primary Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for not being a True Conservative, and yet it referred to all of them not as Republicans, but as Libertarians. Go figure.

  101. 101.

    lol

    Why is anyone surprised? The guy who ran Silk Road took out a couple hits and apparently got scammed each time.

  102. 102.

    Zifnab25

    But you can use it for more than just assassinations. BitCoins are also extremely useful for releasing your computer from a malware trojan horse.

    The frightening Cryptolocker malware has already evolved. It still locks up your precious files with 2048-bit encryption and threatens to throw away the key, but now it allows you to pay its ransom in Bitcoins.

    Freedumb!

  104. 104.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The assclowns of Noisemax are just beside themselves on the topic of Obama’s Iraq War (h./t to Village dipshit David Gregory). Even Kkkarl Rove is getting exuberant about the prospects of the Death Eaters for electoral gains.

  105. 105.

    Cargo

    @burnspbesq: there’s been tons of bitcoin related swindles already, from pyramid (sorry, “high yield investment”) schemes to fake companies selling bitcoin mining equipment that vanished. generally the reaction is “sucks to be you!”

  106. 106.

    Zifnab25

    @Ripley:

    Bottom line? The Deep Web is likely

    The Deep Web is simply a set of sites that aren’t aggregated in traditional standardized search engines. There’s nothing more mysterious about it than that. It isn’t about drug sales or libertarian freedom assassins. It’s about shit Google hasn’t indexed for one reason or another. VPN-only accessible business resources. Sites with bad meta-data. Old mirrored copies of geocities pages. Any content that is dynamically generated or password protected. That sort of thing.

    It has nothing to do with illicit practices and everything to do with the most trivial garden-variety security practices.

  107. 107.

    Karmus

    @Roger Moore: All right. My take is/was a bit different, but you may very well be right. I don’t have any automatic fealty to “government-backed currencies”, nor do I have any ideological antipathy for them. I think I should look at the original motives of the bitcoin originators. What has grabbed me about bitcoin (and related ideas) is the use of the technologies involved (open source, distributed computing, and, yes, math), and the notion of a new evolution of money. What it all means politically and economically is a separate (important) question. The pointers to Krugman are (hat tip to BEP) useful and appreciated.

    To those arguing about what bitcoin is/isn’t means/doesn’t mean, there is, you know, a FAQ. I found it through Google. Perhaps it’s a seething pile of glibertarian lies, perhaps not. But it’s fairly self-explanatory, and seems a good place to start. I only mention this because it does (seem to) answer some of the questions that have been raised here.

  108. 108.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Cargo:

    Bitcoin has this small problem of being grifter central.

    Once they get past that, they’ll be fully legitimate! Just like Genco Industries!

  109. 109.

    Zifnab25

    @Suffern ACE:

    “if bitcoins aren’t legitimate, a lot of what goes on in financial markets isn’t legitimate.”

    If you can’t tell the difference between debt issued by a Fortune 500 company and a fancy random number generator, I guess I can’t help you.

  111. 111.

    Cargo

    @Zifnab25: yes, the stellar and eminently rational management of money by our nation’s ethical and morally impeccable banking and financial services sector is evidence that they know exactly what they’re doing, and are working for the good of us all.

  114. 114.

    Roger Moore

    @Cargo:
    The problem with bitcoin replacing other online payment systems is that it’s deliberately limited. Bitcoin is designed to have an absolutely limited supply, which is great if you’re setting up a Ponzi scheme intended to lure in goldbugs, but which are inherently limiting for a real-world currency. Once it reaches its pre-defined limit, it will start having the classic problems of any deflationary currency. It’s designed to produce speculation and hoarding, which are antithetical to practical use as a currency.

  116. 116.

    catclub

    More Bitcoin can be generated by a very complicated computer process. The NSA has a lot of computer resources.

    In WWII, one means of warfare was counterfeiting the opponents’ currency.

    I also noticed that there are already cell-phone linked payment systems. Combine that with
    handing off burner phones, and it sounds easier than Bitcoin.

  118. 118.

    Citizen_X

    @Cargo: No, the bitcoin market is just some stupid bubble, no different from tulip or gold or other bubbles throughout history, and the market for an untraceable currency is dominated by money launderers and other crooks, because that’s where the demand is–not with bring-down-Wall-Street anarchists. It’s the free market at work!

  120. 120.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Some glibertairan goldbug idiot once told me that there was no inflation until paper money was introduced.

    Adam Smith would of course disagree with him, as would the Spanish Hapsburgs, but no one has ever read Smith’s book and the Spanish Hapsburgs were statists.

  121. 121.

    scav

    Beta worked in practice as did laser discs, and do they currently rule the world? And I’m not sure being associated with dodgy activities and appeals to footed-pajama threats to the man and tyranny will add to the long-term allure of this particular alternative payment scheme. Fat lady with pudding.

  122. 122.

    Cargo

    @Roger Moore: the deflation factor is an issue, and partly why the price is going up. Yes only goldbugs think deflation is useful. But we are a long way before the 21 million bitcoin limit is reached. What I see the real long term use case is as a replacement for the wire transfer. In that case my money is not IN bitcoin very long, so the exchange rate doesn’t really matter. I locally convert 50 zlotys into bitcoin at whatever the exchange rate is, send them to you instantly, and you convert them back to USD on your end. Or don’t – you can already buy lots of things in btc directly. Right now wire transfers, especially of any size, are a pain in the neck, but btc makes it as easy as a torrent file.

  123. 123.

    Suffern ACE

    @Zifnab25: If you can’t tell the difference between a security backed by pooled mortgages and a security created by bankers to consist of bets for and against the value of those pools, you haven’t been paying attention.

    Although I think bitcoins are more like the market for Eames chairs myself….

  124. 124.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @David in NY:

    Aye, I’d forgotten about that.

    The forced birth people use classic, nay, textbook terrorism tactics in their fight to keep those vaginas under firm control.

  125. 125.

    Chris

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Adam Smith is up there with Jesus and the Founding Fathers in terms of “people everybody uses as conversation-ending authorities, but never actually get around to reading.”

  126. 126.

    replicnt6

    @Cargo:

    I locally convert 50 zlotys into bitcoin at whatever the exchange rate is, send them to you instantly, and you convert them back to USD on your end.

    The difficulty with this use case is that the transfers take time, don’t they? A certain number of peers need to have “seen” the transaction before it’s settled? It seems like that makes you vulnerable.

    The problem I see is that the inherent deflationary bias makes it good for a hoarding tool, and bad for a currency. Which is exactly what we’re seeing right now.

  127. 127.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @scav:

    Beta was overcome by VHS. Now VHS is ancient history, gone the way of the LP, which once ruled the world.

    Plus ca change, etc, ad naseum.

  129. 129.

    Zifnab25

    @Suffern ACE: Even a casino has assets. When MF Global and Enron went under, there was property that could be seized, even if it wasn’t as much as was stated on the ledgers. BitCoin is a virtual boiler room. There’s no there, there.

  130. 130.

    Ash Can

    To be honest, I can’t fault Cargo et al. for wanting (and managing) to make a few bucks on bitcoins. They strike me as similar to any other fad commodity — beanie babies come to mind immediately, for example. And if some people want to gamble some amount of money they would feel comfortable losing (the correct approach to the stock market) and end up shaking down some Randian true believers for their lunch money, I can’t get worked up over that. What I don’t like about bitcoins is that they operate in an unregulated market that exposes people foolish enough to take it too seriously to a really ugly level of risk. Apart from that, though, you’ll find all the same kinds of seamy and lawless actors in the markets for far more established and conventional (and tangible) commodities, beginning with national currencies. I’m more than happy to mock and jeer and throw rotten produce at glibertarians who run around insisting that bitcoins are going to destroy tyranny and prepare the world for the second coming of Ayn Rand and usher in a golden age of IGMFY-ism. But I can’t get het up at people who simply choose to dabble in what’s essentially just another commodities market.

  131. 131.

    daveNYC

    Those prices are stupid low. Not that I’d ever be thinking of moving off my fat ass and getting into the killing major political figures for profit line of work, but 24k for the POTUS? Who exactly do they think would even consider not laughing their ass off at that low an offer?

  133. 133.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    I’m old enough to remember when assassinations were attempted out love, crazy love.

  134. 134.

    Bob

    Did anyone here go to the actual site? Because all I see is a dead pool. There are very specific instructions which make it clear that this is a gambling thing, not a please-kill-this-person thing.

  137. 137.

    Ripley

    I’m old enough to remember when assassinations were attempted out love, crazy love.

    And I’m old enough to remember when good old Yankee dollars & cents could buy a killin’.

    Oh wait, still can, never mind.

  139. 139.

    Ripley

    @Zifnab25:It has nothing to do with illicit practices and everything to do with the most trivial garden-variety security practices.

    I’ll spot you the trivial security notion – the TOR network is pretty creaky stuff and pretty limiting – but what is & isn’t Deep is more qualitative than your description: sites that aren’t aggregated or suffer bad metadata, prehistoric Geocities pages, and so on go deep only in the sense that they’re buried like a corpse. Sites offering chemical diversions, guns, & bogus hitmen are Deep by design. Perhaps Dark Web is a better term after all.

    Weirdest thing I ever saw there? Cases of hijacked greeting cards, priced to move. It’s a puzzling world….

  141. 141.

    Ripley

    @Zifnab25:

    It has nothing to do with illicit practices and everything to do with the most trivial garden-variety security practices.

    I’ll spot you the trivial security notion – the TOR network is pretty creaky stuff and quite limiting – but what is & isn’t Deep is more qualitative than your description: sites that aren’t aggregated or suffer bad metadata, prehistoric Geocities pages, and so on go deep only in the sense that they’re buried like a corpse. Sites offering chemical diversions, guns, & bogus hitmen are Deep by design. Perhaps Dark Web is a better term after all.

    Weirdest thing I ever saw there? Cases of hijacked greeting cards, priced to move. It’s a puzzling world….

  142. 142.

    lol

    @Cargo:

    All you seem to be doing is swapping out the middleman. There are still fees for changing the currency, possibly higher ones because you’re changing it twice.

  143. 143.

    artem1s

    @Zifnab25:

    The frightening Cryptolocker malware has already evolved. It still locks up your precious files with 2048-bit encryption and threatens to throw away the key, but now it allows you to pay its ransom in Bitcoins.

    someone’s been reading Neal Stephenson

  145. 145.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Cargo:
    A currency/commodity that has no regulation that can be easily manipulated by rumors and rampant speculation?

    Where do I sign up!

  148. 148.

    Andrey

    @Cargo: Bitcoins have no property that makes them inherently better than “ordinary” wire transfers, and some properties that make them worse. Technologically speaking, wire transfers are as fast as Bitcoin transfers; you’re just sending bits over the wire. The slow part about wire transfers is verification – and Bitcoin has that step as well. The agencies that do wire transfers charge fees, but the transfer of funds into and out of bitcoins will also incur overhead.

    The technology underlying Bitcoin has recently been proven to be vulnerable to greedy agents – and I mean that in the mathematical “hard proof” sense, which is unusual. Basically, there is a way that a set of Bitcoin producers can act that increases their profit and gives them increasing control of the currency; the protocol rewards growth in this manner; and once a pool of producers grows to a certain size, they gain the ability to control the transaction log, canceling or forging transactions as they see fit. It was known since the start of Bitcoin that if you got a majority of the production capacity you could gain such transaction control, but people thought that was improbable – the new discovery is that the protocol specifically rewards collusion of this sort.

  150. 150.

    StringOnAStick

    @Zifnab25: Yep, Crytolocker hit the place my husband works last week. Someone opened an email that appeared to be from someone they knew, but it had that lovely zip file attached, and then it wormed throughout the network. The IT engineering dept there is lazy in general and there should not have been any kind of hole that let emails with zip files attached through, so their laziness just bit them hard in the ass. They are certainly paying for it now, what with the clean-up needed and figuring out how the hell that happened. It is a big enough company to have a real back up system, but a few people who chose to just let their work reside on their individual PC instead of on the network got totally wiped out.

    However, if you are a smaller, less deep-pocketed company, this virus could destroy you completely. I wonder if people/companies trying to recover from total computer destruction are paying the ransom and helping drive up the Bitcoin prices? This is the real problem with having an untraceable currency – it is an easy way to make extortion profitable and untraceable, at least for those who don’t currently have access to the old way of extortion and profit: bank accounts in tax havens.

  151. 151.

    Roger Moore

    @Cargo:

    What I see the real long term use case is as a replacement for the wire transfer. In that case my money is not IN bitcoin very long, so the exchange rate doesn’t really matter. I locally convert 50 zlotys into bitcoin at whatever the exchange rate is, send them to you instantly, and you convert them back to USD on your end. Or don’t – you can already buy lots of things in btc directly. Right now wire transfers, especially of any size, are a pain in the neck, but btc makes it as easy as a torrent file.

    The wire transfer thing only works well as long as there’s a good market for bitcoin. Even then, you’ll wind up paying transaction fees in the form of currency exchange fees on both ends of the transaction, which may wind up being comparable to the cost of a wire transfer.

    Please note that I’m not bagging on the idea of an online currency using a lot of the mathematical methods that bitcoin uses. I think something that can be used online much like cash and can be easily converted with real currency is a great idea. I just dislike the specific economic choices made by the designer of bitcoin, which reflect ideas that have been rightly rejected by every vaguely modern economy. I think the long-term solution is something like bitdollars, biteuros, or bityuan: a digital currency that is guaranteed to be exactly equivalent to a major economic power’s ordinary currency and is thus automatically managed by a (presumably) competent central bank.

  152. 152.

    Phoenician in a time of Romans

    @MikeJ:

    I seem to recall a Reason (sic) article a few years back saying that political assassination wasn’t really all that bad because you could always just get another politician and there was no downside to society, even if we had to admit it was sort of a bummer for the public servant who was targeted.

    It’s the ultimate Tea Bagger veto – if one person objects to the democratic preference of the majority, they can block it by killing everyone who might implement it. Kill a few politicians and the ones left won’t want to do anything that might upset anyone – meaning anything.

    Which means there’s no way a government can function. The nation collapses, and society is left in a glorious anarchy of all against all. What could possibly go wrong?

    Now, if the assassination veto was more democratic and people had skin in the game, it might be interesting. Say, if you “push the button” on a politician, there’s a 0.1% chance of them getting killed – but a 100% chance of you dying.

  153. 153.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    Looks like the run-up in BitCoins was ‘cos of people needing to buy BitCoins to pay the ransom from the particularly evil piece of MalWare called Cryptolocker.

    But that’s OK, because BitCoin will save us from the Fed’s rampant inflation of 1.2%!

  154. 154.

    Phoenician in a time of Romans

    @Roger Moore:

    I assume it’s payment on delivery.

    So assume Bernanke gets assassinated by a hopeful who sent in his encoded date on a bitcoin – and the anonymous owner of this anonymous service doesn’t pay out, pretending that it had nothing to do with him.

    What’s the hitman going to do – sue an unknown person in a court for failure to deliver on a non-existent contract to commit murder?

    It’s the perfect scam to get hold of bitcoins.

  157. 157.

    Matt McIrvin

    @srv: There’s an absolute limit on how many bitcoins the NSA could mine… but they could corner the market, I suppose, and either accelerate the eventual deflation/hoarding crisis by sitting on them, or try to burst a bubble by dumping them all at once.

  158. 158.

    Andrey

    @Matt McIrvin: If the NSA decided to throw computing resources at Bitcoin, they wouldn’t just hoard or dump – they would, with enough computing power, gain total control of the currency. Bitcoin’s protocol guarantees this.

  160. 160.

    fuckwit

    Oh shut the fuck up, Forbes.

    The huge, vast, massive, overwhelming number of assassinations, terrorist attacks, smuggling, and other illegal shit, is funded WITH FUCKING UNITED STATES DOLLARS. US Dollars are the global universal currency of crime, and has been for a generation, possibly more.

    That people are now using Bitcoin for that is NOT FUCKING NEWS, douchebags, because they use DOLLARS for it and nobody says “hur hur hur, dollars are for assassinations and terrorists, hur hur hur”. Though they are.

    I hate our media.

  161. 161.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Cargo: I made some sweet coin on the gold bubble a few years ago but I don’t exactly run around blogs defending gold as a medium of exchange. Really, given its myriad uses, it’s kind of a waste. And silly.

  162. 162.

    Cargo

    @Another Holocene Human: I dared tilt at the windmills of conventional wisdom, and was roundly chastised for my trouble. Ah well, I’ll console myself with my multi-thousand-percent profit margin, made off the very same Paulbots none of us have much respect for.

  163. 163.

    mclaren

    @Roger Moore:

    For those who need reminding what a bunch of loathsome creeps these people are.

    I would remind you that our beloved oh-so-liberal progressive president of the united states is also in the business of assassinating people. Girls. Young children. Described by the New York Times articles as “looking like high school yearbook photos,” those are the picture layouts president Obama uses when deciding each morning which 17-year-old kid to murder as a “suspected insurgent” in Pakistan.

    Folks, you’re still not getting it.

    This is what happens when we dispense with the rule of law.

    When we throw out courts and trials and verdicts and evidence and lawyers and say, “Aww, fuck it, just kill the guy,” and when the president of the united states becomes just another Al Capone ordering hits on random U.S. citizens because he feels like it, then everybody else starts to say, “Aww, fuck it, the president of the united states is killing people at random, so why the hell shouldn’t we?”

    This does not lead to a good destination.

    Can you people not see that?

    Can you truly not see what dangers erupt from the ripped and torn fabric of what used to be a civilization when you throw out the rule of law?

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