Comment by gpm
2 days ago
You're asking why someone hiring a hitman would be willing to part with their money?
Because that's what money is for, to purchase things, like hitmen (apparently).
2 days ago
You're asking why someone hiring a hitman would be willing to part with their money?
Because that's what money is for, to purchase things, like hitmen (apparently).
OK so its much a shallower thought than I anticipated.
Why go through the "prediction market" at all then? The hitman still killed someone, payments are not anonymous in this market, and its certainly not clean. Further, you share the pot with however many are involved, proportional to the allotted bets on each side and presuming binary prediction. And if the winds change on the market for the bet proportional to the "hitman's" side, you lose out on dollars that would otherwise be paid to you (the hitman).
And it'd be so easy to stiff the hitman just by equalizing the positions by timing it.
All that risk for something that's far simpler to just pay directly?
> Why go through the "prediction market" at all then
It's there. It's not actually easy to find hitman for hire. This is a publicly advertised market for it.
Plausible deniability. We weren't paying for the witness to be murdered, we were expressing our confidence that no one would murder the witness.
Price discovery. The market tells you how much you need to pay a hitman (if you overpay hedge funds swoop in and take the difference, telling you for next time. If the hedge funds underestimate the cost they end up paying a significant penalty to the people who they prevented from hiring a hitman).
Crowd funding. The market means that every can chip in however much they want towards paying the hitman, and they only end up paying if its enough. In fact the middlemen who accepted the bets in the meantime may promise to pay some small amount of damages if enough isn't collected.
It is impossible to stiff the hitman, and there is no risk for the hitman that the "winds change". The hitman takes out the entire "yes" position before committing the murder. If it's not enough, they don't commit the murder.