Augur, a platform for generating predictions, launched the "Assassination Markets’. Users can now create forecasts (and sell bets on them) on the chances of celebrities being killed. For example, in the screenshot to this news, we are offered to bet on whether Donald Trump will be killed before the end of 2018.
Augur operates under the Ethereum blockchain, but the rates, including the fact that someone will die early, are accepted by Ethereum (ETH/USD), bitcoins (Bitcoin) and the project’s own tokens — REP. Users can vote for or against the event happening in the forecast.
In the list of "victims" Augur platform offers, there is not only the U.S. president. There is also, for example, Warren Buffett, the CEO of the American holding company Berkshire Hathaway.
Augur has been described as a gambling platform by some, but predictions are made in a decentralized and transparent environment. Basically, you can either bet on one of the existing predictions in the system or issue your own and let other users vote using your own prediction as a benchmark. The system will reward those who correctly foresaw how the future unfolds.
"Assassination Markets" on Augur may not be such a fun idea as it might seem at first glance. Reddit users point out that if the murder prediction pool is large enough, there may be a killer who will want to earn at that rate.
Note that the first similar market of assassination forecasts was launched in 2013. Using the Tor browser, users could bet in bitcoins on the possibility of killing President Obama and the economist Ben Bernanke, who at that time was the head of the Federal Reserve System. This resource lasted until 2015.