Meet The ‘Assassination Market’ Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With Bitcoins
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
This story lands at the exact moment Bitcoin is fighting for respectability: the same day's syndicated coverage has CNBC tracking a run to $750 (up 107% in a week) and Bloomberg flagging a Senate hearing where DOJ and SEC plan to note legitimate uses for the currency. Forbes itself set the stage in September with its investigation into how researchers got busted buying drugs via Silk Road, establishing the pattern of bitcoin as untraceable payment for illegal markets.
The Assassination Market report pushes that pattern to its logical extreme — confirmed as a live site using Bitcoin to crowdfund murder bounties — and hands critics of the currency their most visceral example yet, right as policymakers weigh whether to treat bitcoin as legitimate financial infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Law enforcement faces a new category of case: publicly listed bounties on named individuals, funded in small bitcoin contributions rather than by a single identifiable buyer.
- The site's creator and any listed targets are now in open view, forcing federal agencies to respond to threats that exist entirely outside traditional money-transfer channels.
Second-order effects
- The Senate hearing's pro-legitimacy framing from DOJ and SEC now has to compete with murder-for-hire headlines, raising the political cost of light-touch treatment for exchanges and wallet providers.
- Bitcoin businesses courting mainstream users face immediate pressure to distance themselves from criminal use cases or accept tighter scrutiny of transaction flows.
Third-order effects
- If pseudonymous digital cash keeps hosting markets like this one, regulators are pushed toward identity and surveillance requirements for virtual currencies, seeding the compliance-and-tracking layer that would grow up around bitcoin regardless of its founders' anarchist origins.
The trend: Bitcoin's rise is running on two tracks at once — institutional acceptance in Washington and criminal marketplaces on the dark web — and each new abuse raises the odds that regulation arrives before self-governance does.