Jim Bell

Bell was an engineer and prolific poster on the cypherpunks list. In the essay, published in parts in 1995–96, he proposed an anonymous market where people bet digital cash on the date a public official would die, with the "correct guess" collecting the pot. Blind signatures and anonymous remailers would make both payers and payee untraceable.

Tim May and others on the list debated it seriously, mostly as a thought experiment about what untraceable money really implies. The authorities took a less philosophical view. Bell was convicted in 1997 of obstructing the IRS and later of stalking federal officers. The essay is still cited whenever someone wants to show that "cryptography as politics" has a dark end.