As Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) observed, “it is the business of the future to be dangerous”. It is undeniably interesting, and undeniably a commentary on human nature, that discussions about the future of money and the inter web tubes and such like often drift toward the negative as we begin to imagine the horrors that await. Crime is exciting and interesting and payments are not, so there’s a natural media focus on this dark side. But sometimes, that dystopian lens provides a wholly appropriate view. In which context, I observe that (somewhat predictably) its now a couple of years since assassination markets appeared on Augur, a decentralized protocol for betting on the outcomes of real-world events that launched on Ethereum.
Now, in case you are wondering what an assassination market is, I wrote about them here on Forbes last year. As I said then, if I can get enough bets put on someone, then I don’t even have to take the risk of hiring a hitman. I can use anonymous bots or friendly trolls to coordinate a social media campaign to get a million people to put a $5 bet on the date of the tech CEOs death and then leave it to an enterprising hit man to make their own bet and kill them. Imagine being a tech CEO waking up in the morning a couple of years from now: the first thing you check is no longer the share price, but the price on your head.
(If anyone wants to turn this into the cinema sensation of the year, I’m still available.)
One interesting nugget from Apple’s recent filing: spending on Tim Cook’s security which has been rising steadily for the past few years jumped by a third to $630,000 last year. This is a fraction of what some other companies pay (Meta’s spending on Mark Zuckerberg’s was more than $13 million in 2020). Still, the amount Apple pays to protect Cook has been steadily rising for the past few years.
And this is before cryptocurrency-powered sons-of-Augur (particularly those manipulated by agents of foreign powers) enter the mainstream.
Snippings 