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 accurately picking the date rather than performing the action of the assassin, it is substantially more difficult to assign criminal liability for the assassination.
In 2013 a man by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro created the website Assassination Market. The website is 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.
In 2013 after 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.
Sanjuro's grisly ambitions go beyond raising the funds to bankroll a few political killings. He believes that if Assassination Market can persist and gain enough users, it will eventually enable the assassinations of enough politicians that no one would dare to hold office. He says he intends Assassination Market to destroy "all governments, everywhere."
I believe it will change the world for the better," writes Sanjuro, who shares his handle with the nameless samurai protagonist in the Akira Kurosawa film "Yojimbo." (He chose the name in homage to the creator of the online black market Silk Road, who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, as well Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.) "Thanks to this system, a world without wars, dragnet panopticon-style surveillance, nuclear weapons, armies, repression, money manipulation, and limits to trade is firmly within our grasp for but a few bitcoins per person. I also believe that as soon as a few politicians gets offed and they realize they've lost the war on privacy, the killings can stop and we can transition to a phase of peace, privacy and laissez-faire."
In 2016 a website appeared on the dark web calling for donations to facilitate the assassination of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence.
“The consequences of having Donald Trump and Mike Pence as the leaders of the free world is extremely dangerous,” states the site, which is only accessible through a specialist browser, such as Tor. “The political, environmental and social consequences will change the United States for the worst.”
It's 2018 now and none of the people mentioned in the websites were killed. Their are many similar websites in the dark web now. Most of them might be scammers taking advantage of people's frustrations.
