I’ve got a story idea for a cyberpunk dystopia. Imagine a world almost identical to ours. In that world, some inventive person creates a darknet website that allows anonymous donations to put bounties on corporate executives. Now, this site’s creator wants to make sure their site isn’t misused, so they implement guardrails like “Targets would be required to have over $10M in assets” and “each crypto wallet may contribute a maximum of $5 so it better reflects the will of the people.”
Then, the site admin adds betting options like “who reaches a $1M bounty first”, over/under odds, betting on which target gets whacked first, etc, in order to draw traffic to the site. Maybe there’d also be a percentage of the bounty that’s paid out to organizations working to heal the damage caused by the target, so for example if a fossil-fuel exec gets whacked then that percentage goes to orgs working to stop fossil fuels.
How do you think it’d play out in this story? Would the site properly incentivize people to shoot up boardrooms rather than schools?
It’d be fun to watch, it’d be engaging to the crowd, and it’d terrorize capitalists. Especially with real-time updates, imagine a CEO doing a press release and then having their bounty skyrocket as people hear the news.
It’s also the reason prediction markets have been so heavily regulated (until recently), because they can easily incentivize assassinations while adding plausible deniability.
I’ve got a story idea for a cyberpunk dystopia. Imagine a world almost identical to ours. In that world, some inventive person creates a darknet website that allows anonymous donations to put bounties on corporate executives. Now, this site’s creator wants to make sure their site isn’t misused, so they implement guardrails like “Targets would be required to have over $10M in assets” and “each crypto wallet may contribute a maximum of $5 so it better reflects the will of the people.”
Then, the site admin adds betting options like “who reaches a $1M bounty first”, over/under odds, betting on which target gets whacked first, etc, in order to draw traffic to the site. Maybe there’d also be a percentage of the bounty that’s paid out to organizations working to heal the damage caused by the target, so for example if a fossil-fuel exec gets whacked then that percentage goes to orgs working to stop fossil fuels.
How do you think it’d play out in this story? Would the site properly incentivize people to shoot up boardrooms rather than schools?
I think that site would be fulla feds but then again what site isn’t?
That’s got some real deathnote vibes. I’d watch it
It’d be fun to watch, it’d be engaging to the crowd, and it’d terrorize capitalists. Especially with real-time updates, imagine a CEO doing a press release and then having their bounty skyrocket as people hear the news.
So…black mirror bee episode, without the bees. Hated of the nation? Something like that.
Only way schools start to see improvements is when it’s rich kids getting capped, forcing lawmakers to, you know, make laws.
There was a dark web site kinda like this (just a regular assassination market; not sure if it was real or a honey pot): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
It’s also the reason prediction markets have been so heavily regulated (until recently), because they can easily incentivize assassinations while adding plausible deniability.
Shades of Spooks S8E03, but that had a voting system instead of an active bounty.