Roger Ver launches Bitcoin Bounty Service

Bitcoin magnate Roger Ver, known as “The Bitcoin Jesus”, has launched a new site designed to help catch criminals by offering anonymous cryptocurrency bounties.
He was a victim of a hack attempt in May of this year. Swift action on the part of Ver and one of his associates deflected the hacker, and he then decided to post a significant bounty for information which led to the capture of the hacker. Last week, Satoshi Nakamoto’s email account was hacked by an anonymous hacker who threatened to release his identity for a price. And after a bit of investigation, Roger Ver deduced that this hacker is probably the same guy who hit him. At this point, he reminded the community that the bounty on that hacker’s head was still open.
But that didn’t stop there. Ver’s new service, Bitcoin Bounty Hunter, has created a crowdfunding platform for those who want to place a bounty.
As far as the bounties allowed, anyone can post any bounty for “a person who has committed a crime in which there is a victim.” Anyone can anonymously add to the prize of a bounty as well as collect a bounty.
To collect your bounty, you must assemble a dossier of evidence, get it digitally notarized using a nifty bitcoin blockchain hack called Proof of Existence, and forward it to law enforcement. Then you wait—possibly a very long time. Ver’s website pays bounties only upon conviction.
Currently on the site, three bounties have been posted. One for the Satoshi/Roger Ver hacker, one for “whoever is responsible for the missing 600K BTC from Mtgox”, and one for the thief who stole tens of thousands of BTC from Bitcoinica, in that hack Ver lost 25,000 bitcoins.
Bitcoin operates like cash on the internet—there’s no such thing as a chargeback—so once hackers get their hands on your money, it’s generally gone for good. That has encouraged bitcoiners to take things into their own hands—whether it’s protecting their bitcoins from theft by using paper wallets, or paying out bounties to help track down the criminals.
The idea of anonymous bounties has been around for close to two decades.
It dates back to the cypherpunk movement of the mid-1990s, whose adherents dreamt of using encryption tools to weaken the government and empower individuals. Former Intel engineer and Cypherpunk Mailing List founder Tim May argued that uncrackable secret messages and untraceable digital currency would lead to assassination markets in his “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” written in 1992.
A few years later, another former Intel engineer named Jim Bell proposed a system of funding assassinations through encrypted, anonymous donations in an essay he called “ Assassination Politics.”
And just last year, someone tried to bring those ideas to life with a dark web-site called Assassination Market— which Forbes’s Andy Greenberg described as a “Kickstarter for political assassinations.” But currently Assassination Market is offline and perhaps not existed ever.

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