Users Bet on Celebrity Assassinations on Augur Prediction Markets 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
Users Bet on Celebrity Assassinations on Augur Prediction Markets
2 min read
Updated: Jul. 25, 2018 at 1:41 am UTC
Photo by Yang Miao on Unsplash
Publicly launched on July 9, 2018, Augur prediction markets are using Ethereum smart contracts to allow users to bet on almost anything. Taking it to the extreme, Augur users created the first assassination prediction markets prediction on the platform.
A decentralized prediction market, Augur’s open-source protocol gives users complete control over which markets they create and trade on – letting people bet on anything from weather predictions and election outcomes to the life expectancy of the current U.S. president.
Assassination markets are inevitable on a platform with uncensored flexibility. Although not the most popular, similar markets have emerged. Augur users are gambling on whether U.S. Senator John McCain and actress Betty White will survive until 2019 – stirring legal and ethical controversy around the unregulated prediction market platform.
The obvious danger in illegal assassination markets is that users could bet on the death of a public figure and go on to instigate or actually murder that person for profit. The mere existence of such markets may perhaps cause these events to be more likely to occur, even if only incrementally.
A few decentralized application (dApp) browsers are removing search results for markets related to celebrity deaths, but the decentralized nature of Augur’s mainnet makes it impossible to truly remove these markets from the network.
Augur ‘Kill Switch’ and ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’
Until July 23, 2018, Augur’s developers held a network “kill switch” that could lock up all contracts under dire security breaches or technical failures to save the platform from further hacking. However, the successful launch of the platform gave developers the confidence to transfer ownership of the kill switch to a burn address, decentralizing control over the network.
Happy two weeks! ? Ownership of the escape hatch has been transferred to the 0x000..0001 address.
— Augur (@AugurProject) July 24, 2018
With the removal of the centralized kill switch, some question whether Augur is avoiding liability for the potential illegal outcomes of assassination prediction markets among other illicit betting schemes.
Foreseeing the possibility of such behavior on the network, Augur has enabled users, called “Reporters,” to flag specific markets deemed unethical and prevent further betting on them.
However, the network relies on a “wisdom of the crowd” principle that entrusts reporters with such powers without any real incentive to do so. In fact, reporters can be penalized for flagging markets as unethical if done so incorrectly.
How Augur will maintain its decentralized immutability and user control while remaining an ethical, legally-compliant platform is yet to be uncovered.
For more information about Augur, including price, market cap, founders and technical information, visit the CryptoSlate Augur coin profile.
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