Would you be prepared to kill for a small fortune in Bitcoin? Well, that’s the reward on offer over at a new website called the Assassination Market, a sick and twisted take on crowd-funding that lets people donate the cryptocurrency anonymously to bring about an early demise for various political leaders.

The existence of Assassination Market first came to light in Forbes, when Andy Greenberg received an encrypted email from someone going by the pseudonym of Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who claims to have established the site within the so-called “Deepweb”.

For those who’re not familiar with the term, the Deepweb, (also called the DarkNet or DarkWeb) is a secret corner of the web that remains inaccessible to the majority of netizens, and can only be accessed by anonymizing protocols like Tor. Most of the sites that exist in the Deepweb operate on the very fringes of legality, such as sites like the Silk Road, while some are downright illegal, such as those belonging to terrorist groups that solicit funds for their violent aims.

The Assassination Market has been up and running for four months now, claims Sanjuro in his email. To date, six targets have been submitted for assassination, including Gen. Keith Alexander (with a bounty of 10 Bitcoin on his head), President Barack Obama (40 BTC), and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke (124.14 BTC).

Terrifyingly ambitious

If Sanjuro is the real deal (and that remains questionable), the Assassination Market is terrifyingly ambitious. As Greenberg writes in his article, Sanjuro is hoping for nothing less than total anarchy:

“[The Assassination Market will] destroy all governments, everywhere. 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.”

It’s not clear how serious Sanjuro really is, but Greenberg hasn’t taken any chances, contacting the FBI and the Secret Service to inform them of the Assassination Market’s existence. Mysteriously, neither agency would comment on the story.

An online ‘assassination market’ is not an entirely new concept. The idea was floated as far back as 1992 by a former Intel employee called Timothy C. May, who wrote a “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” that spelled out how anonymous donations combined with encrypted messages could give rise to such activity. A second essay in 1997, by another ex-Intel employee Jim Bell, describes how such an online marketplace might be implemented.

• Faith in cryptography

Obviously, Sanjuro is putting a great deal of faith in the power of cryptography, claiming that with it “all activity that can be reduced to information transfer will be completely out of the government’s, or anyone’s, hands, other than the parties involved.”

That’s a bold claim, but it was only recently that the world’s most infamous Deepweb site was cut down to size. Even with all of the cryptography, the Feds managed to take down the Silk Road and its founder, Dread Pirate Robers. Nevertheless, Sanjuro remains confident, claiming that he’s taken additional measures to “prevent the effectiveness of such an arrest. Naturally these will have to be kept secret.”

To learn more about the emerging world of Bitcoin-fueled assassinations, check out Greenberg’s article over at Forbes.

photo credit: Ben Northern via photopin cc