...[Bell] calls his idea assassination politics: An anonymous prediction market in the deaths of political figures. In a prediction market, participants place bets on events, and collect if their predictions are correct (the players who arent correct lose their money).
Simply put, Bells idea is that anonymous, untraceable digital money will allow the enforcement of good behavior on politicians. A politician who pisses people off will find his or her name listed in the assassination market. Once enough money is in the pool under that politicians name to make it worth the risk, someone will bet on when that politician is going to die, kill (or arrange the killing of) the politician at the time in question, and collect the pool money...
...Bells essay took emerging technological developments to their theoretical extreme, but government prosecutors couldnt try him for felony production of essays. Instead, they patched together a crazy quilt of allegations, ranging from tax evasion to stalking a federal employee some possibly true, some probably false, most unworthy of being called crimes even if true.
It would be easy to write off the Bell case as an outlier a rare case of government overreaction if not for the fact that in the decade following his initial prosecution, lots of other people have found themselves confronted by police, and some have even gone to jail, for implementing a non-extreme, but central, element of the package he put together. That element? Outing and identifying bad actors in government...I fully support the idea, even as a Liberal.