>outcome shaping markets
I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations.
When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the bet by default.
Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. But I have to wonder about the model itself.
I often thought about an inverse Kickstarter. Where you post an idea, people fundraise the idea, so the idea itself is validated. And then worthy contenders step forth to build it. (I guess donors could vote on who ends up getting the money to actually build it, or if there's enough they could even get divided between them for prototypes.)
For example, there seems to be a lot of interest in e-ink laptops, and a successor to flash. People have been complaining for decades, but not much gets built. How much interest is there? Well we can measure that objectively! You vote with your wallet.
Right now, it's a "pull" system. You have to hope and wait for a small number of highly motivated people. You have to hope they will launch something you're interested in. But what if you could push?
I think we could do a lot more proactiveness on the crowd side of things. As a recent article here mentioned... people actually do know what they want.
And of course this idea isn't just limited to products and services. I think there's a lot of potential for this idea in government as well.
> But what if you could push?
There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.
> Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors.
polymarket has an @died tag, which I assume is for betting on people's deaths (I never used the site, and it's currently inaccessible) given apparently someone recently made half a mil betting on Khamenei's death, and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran https://www.npr.org/2026/03/01/nx-s1-5731568/polymarket-trad...
> and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran
Oh, trump made some money?
I actually really like that inverse Kickstarter idea, makes a lot of sense especially if you did some kind of enter some pain/problem, search through existing idea markets and you can throw money towards ideas that would solve whatever pain point you have. Builders would essentially just have a market of validated ideas and could submit a ‘bid’ before a set deadline and the finders would vote on which is best then the funds would resolve to whatever builder made the best product.
You are describing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
Not acknowledging a problem doesn't make it go away. Isolating people decreases the problem, but alienates them from the wider economy. I'd rather live in a world with open, regulated [0] , assassination markets even if that increases the amount of money behind assassinations.
Of course I'd rather live in a world with no muder and death, but seriously, grow up.
[0]the value of a human life is $xM + $yM for their occupations, so now payout for hits below that amount
Kickstarter exists. The real problem is most things cost more than the average person should dare risk. Some widget today is worth more than the same tommorow. Most people should not back your eink laptop even though if it existed they would pay more for it.
Yeah it's about trust and risk.
I'm not sure how to align the incentives on that.
For the consumer the ideal case is that the money is not released from the escrow until their product actually arrives.
But that would be overly restrictive, and limit development to companies with significant funds.
Kickstarter has a balance where, you only pledge money after deciding you trust the company.
I think we could do it so the initial fundraiser is provisional. And then everyone would know that some portion of that would fall through. Over time you would learn what the ratio is. If a million is pledged, maybe you can expect 200k to be committed in the final round.
We could even divide it further. There is some portion of users which are more open-minded and enthusiastic. They might be happy to fund a round of crappy prototypes. So in this way smaller players could gain trust and credibility.