An "assassination market" for Donald Trump has popped up courtesy of Augur, a decentralized protocol for betting on the outcomes of real-world events and that launched two weeks ago on Ethereum.
Created by the non-profit Forecast Foundation, the open-source Augur protocol launched on July 9, reports Mashable.
Prediction markets are exchange-traded markets created for the purpose of trading the outcome of events.
According to Mashable, while the idea of a prediction market is itself not new, creating a decentralized version of that market on the Ethereum blockchain is. Theoretically, it means that whatever markets users decide to create are out of the control of any one organization.
In other words, once the markets are up, they cannot be taken down.
"Decentralized technology means decentralized control," explains the Augur site, "no one person can single-handedly change Augur or shut it down."
Assassination market
The assassination market takes bets on whether Donald Trump will be killed by a certain date.
This potentially incentivizes a crime, as anyone who could accurately predict the president's death would stand to gain financially.
The market "Will Donald Trump (President of The USA) be killed at any point during 2018" had some takers at the time a Mashable reporter came across it.
But this problem likely did not catch the Forecast Foundation by surprise. There is a mechanism built into Augur which allows so-called "reporters" (people who are designated to officially say how the predicted event turned out, and are incentivized to tell the truth via the Augur REP token) to call a market "invalid." If that happens, at least in theory, no money will be paid out.
In other words, one cannot make money from the assassination bet —even if they call the death accurately. This should, in theory, render the assassination market aspect of Augur void.