Everyone knew that it was inevitable that assassination markets would quickly pop up on decentralized prediction market platform Augur, but that doesn’t make the fact that users are now betting on whether U.S. President Donald Trump will be assassinated by the end of the year any less jarring.
Yet this market exists, and, though not the most popular bet on Augur, more than 50 shares have been traded on it as of the time of writing. Similar markets, moreover, exist for a number of other public figures, allowing users to gamble on whether 96-year-old actress Betty White and U.S. Senator John McCain — who has been diagnosed with brain cancer — will survive until Jan. 1, 2019.
Some decentralized application (dApp) browsers are filtering out these markets from the user interface, hiding them from bettors. >However, there’s no way to remove them from the network, making them available through any overlay that does not engage in front-end censorship.
The core issue stems from the fact that, in addition to the pure revulsion that these markets should engender in any decent human being, >they also create a financial incentive for someone to place a large bet that a public figure will be assassinated and then murder that person for profit. Consequently, the mere presence of these markets makes it more likely that these events will occur, however slim that increase may be.
In any case, at this point, the debate is largely moot. Augur is an open-source project, so even if the developers did find a way to block these markets, it’s likely that a splinter group would fork the platform and remove whatever restrictions they had put in place.
ccn.com
Looks like racewar just became profitable.
