What’s the best conspiracy you heard about the Las Vegas shooter?

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The Mandalay Bay Hotel/Casino has an estimated 2,000 cameras on the property.

There isn't one video of Stephen Paddock killing anyone...

There were also an estimated 22,000 fans at the festival.

Not one cellphone video of Stephen Paddock killing anyone exist...

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Paddock, Serco and Death Pool Betting An In-Depth Conversation

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Serco is the biggest company you never heard of. Are they somehow connected to Stephen Paddock? Did this multinational conglomerate play a role in the Las Vegas massacre of October 1? Are there shadowy groups of wealthy elites who finance assassinations through evil "death pool" betting syndicates?

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Behind the Sordid World of Online Assassination Betting

Jamie Bartlett
6/01/15 11:35am

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I have heard rumors about this website, but I still cannot quite believe that it exists. I am looking at what I think is a hit list.

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There are photographs of people I recognize—prominent politicians, mostly—and, next to each, an amount of money. The site’s creator, who uses the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, thinks that if you could pay to have someone murdered with no chance—I mean absolutely zero chance—of being caught, you would.

That’s one of the reasons why he has created the Assassination Market.

There are four simple instructions listed on its front page:

Add a name to the list
Add money to the pot in the person’s name
Predict when that person will die
Correct predictions get the pot

The Assassination Market can’t be found with a Google search. It sits on a hidden, encrypted part of the internet that, until recently, could only be accessed with a browser called The Onion Router, or Tor. Tor began life as a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project, but today exists as a not-for-profit organization, partly funded by the U.S. government and various civil liberties groups, allowing millions of people around the world to browse the internet anonymously and securely.

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To put it simply, Tor works by repeatedly encrypting computer activity and routing it via several network nodes, or “onion routers,” in so doing concealing the origin, destination, and content of the activity. Users of Tor are untraceable, as are the websites, forums, and blogs that exist as Tor Hidden Services, which use the same traffic encryption system to cloak their location.

The Assassination Market may be hosted on an unfamiliar part of the net, but it’s easy enough to find, if you know how to look. All that’s required is simple (and free) Tor software. Then sign up, follow the instructions, and wait. It is impossible to know the number of people who are doing exactly that, but at the time of writing, if I correctly predict the date of the death of Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, I’d receive approximately $56,000. It may seem like a fairly pointless bet. It’s very difficult to guess when someone is going to die. That’s why the Assassination Market has a fifth instruction:

Making your prediction come true is entirely optional

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Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

It was in this heady atmosphere that the radical libertarian Jim Bell first took the promise of online anonymity to a terrifying conclusion. In late 1992, a group of radical libertarians from California called the “cypherpunks” set up an email list to propose and discuss how cyberspace could be used to guarantee personal liberty, privacy, and anonymity. Bell, a contributor to the list, believed that if citizens could use the internet to send secret encrypted messages and trade using untraceable currencies, it would be possible to create a functioning market for almost anything. In 1995, he set out his ideas in an essay called “Assassination Politics,” which he posted to the email list. It made even the staunchly libertarian cypherpunks wince.

Bell proposed that an organization be set up that would ask citizens to make anonymous digital cash donations to the prize pool of a public figure. The organization would award the prize to whoever correctly predicted that person’s death. This, argued Bell, wasn’t illegal, it was just a type of gambling. But here’s the ruse: if enough people were sufficiently angry with a particular individual—each anonymously contributing just a few dollars—the prize pool would become so large that someone would be incentivized to make a prediction and then fulfill it themselves in order to take the pot.

This is where encrypted messages and untraceable payment systems come in. A crowd-sourced—and untraceable—murder would unfold as follows. First, the would-be assassin sends his prediction in an encrypted message that can be opened only by a digital code known to the person who sent it. He then makes the kill and sends the organization that code, which would unlock his (correct) prediction. Once verified by the organization, presumably by watching the news, the prize money—in the form of a digital currency donated to the pot—would be publicly posted online as an encrypted file. Again, that file can be unlocked only by a “key” generated by whoever made the prediction. Without anyone knowing the identity of anyone else, the organization would be able to verify the prediction and award the prize to the person who made it.

The best bit, thought Bell, was that internet-enabled anonymity safeguarded all parties, except perhaps the killer (and his or her victim). Even if the police discovered who’d been contributing to the cash prizes of people on the list, the donors could truthfully respond that they had never directly asked for anyone to be killed. The organization that ran the market couldn’t help either, because they wouldn’t know who had donated, who had made predictions or who had unlocked the cash file.

But Bell’s idea was about more than getting away with murder. He believed that this system would exert a populist pressure on elected representatives to be good. The worse the offender—the more he or she outraged his or her citizens—the more likely they were to accumulate a large pool, and incentivize potential assassins. (Bell believed Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini would all have been killed had such a market existed at the time.) Ideally, no one would need to be killed. Bell hoped the very existence of this market would mean no one would dare throw their hat into the ring at all.

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What’s the best conspiracy you heard about

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CONSPIRACYDROPPINGS

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