Assassination Politics: All the ingredients are in place. But political assassination can be assassination of character.
I already upvoted and commented on this and I just want to put some of my thoughts into an actual article.
Assassination can be a purely political thing. In some ways, Wikileaks was the first incarnation of a system like this. Instead of putting out a bounty for someone to murder some nasty evil politician or elite figure, instead the bounty can be for someone to gather and release credible information leading to political scandal that damages one of these figures credibility.
Hell, it doesn't even seem like you have to put up a bounty, some people are already doing this purely for their own satisfaction. But a market in this, this could be like throwing fuel on the fire. The interest and motivation is already there. This could be used to character-assassinate all politicians. They would be in an absolute panic, not knowing which of the fake people they make dirty deals with is not in fact secretly gathering information to destroy them, and profit in the process. Nobody would know who is putting up the bounties, or how many of them there is.
I read the paper about assassination politics back in 2000. I was absolutely fascinated by the idea. But now I see that there is a nonviolent, yet even more effective way to implement this. I hope someone sees that idea and a kind of Wikileaks 2.0 arises, specifically allowing interested parties to designate power elites to dig up and release credible dirt on, allows other people to bid these bounties up, and a multisig system so that all bidders can then sign off on the release of their bid to the one who publishes the information on this market, and then from there... bam. Serious buffeting of public opinion that really could destroy these vile manipulators.
Simply Great Information and Presentation
Imagine a decentralised site or an app like bit torrent with a smart contract backend for people to contribute to existing dirt bounties and post new ones... Bounty takers could sign their submissions with a bitcoin (or other) private key - this would aid them to secure payment. If there's more than one source of dirt, a proper division of the reward could occur by contributors returning to assign percentages to them and 'passing a test' also by signing a challenge message with the bitcoin private key corresponding to the source address of their contribution. Contributors who don't return for this could have that decision made for them by some interpretation of the consensus of those that did return to assign percentages. There would need to be some method to determine that the bounty had been satisfied...
I think that this kind of Wikileaks 2.0 time has come. I don't care if I personally am involved with setting it up or not, but I think that Steemit proves that distribution of information is a potential means of making money, and really, it is just a matter of time before someone sets up a leaks-for-pay system that cannot be shut down, has no significant central figures, and produces very effective results.