Ashish Sharma: Agent Orange prefers dollars

Bitcoin lost 40% of its value in a single day

At hire-a-killer.com, there is no cookie-cutter approach to killing. The standard offer costs upward of $8,000. The double-hit plan comes with a discount, a pre-selected assassin — Agent Orange — and starts at $12,000 (you may select an execution style, you may select another assassin, but then you lose the discount, “buy one get one half off”). The VIP section covers celebrities, tycoons, and politicians, but the bump-off doesn’t come cheap — $24,999.95, at the very least. 

Um, isn’t killing people immoral? ” The truth is, in any relatively free society, if there’s a demand for a service, a business is going to emerge to meet that demand. In the US, there is a demand for contract killing and Hire-a-Killer is trying to meet that demand in a friendly and professional manner,” says the hitman forum. The site even claims to understand the risk involved in taking out a contract on someone’s life, which is why it encourages use of cash or wire transfers, “because they are the safest, most untraceable methods of transferring funds”. But wait. Where is the counter for digital currency bitcoins? And how are cash or wire transfers “the safest, most untraceable methods”? I thought bitcoins combined anonymity and convenience. Not only me, some very unattractive characters on Deep Web find bitcoin a very attractive currency. Silk Road was the first Deep Web site where one could buy and sell illicit goods using bitcoins, till the FBI seized it on October 2, 2013, and the currency lost 40 per cent of its value in a single day. Now, let’s put that crash in perspective: if the purchasing power of dollar, as measured by inflation in the US, fluctuates by more than three or four per cent in a year, Agent Orange sees that as lousy work on the part of Janet Yellen, the currency’s regulator and US central banker. But 40 per cent in a day?  

Going back to Hire-a-Killer above suggests people like Agent Orange have little interest in what the government has to say: they can choose whatever money they like. But when it comes to business, even wildcat entrepreneurs such as Agent Orange choose government currency over the rebel one. Reason: compared with unregulated bitcoin, the dollar has consistent purchasing power over time. If Agent Orange decided to take payments in bitcoins on January 4, every $12,000 received under his double-hit plan, “buy one get one half off”, would fetch 10.5 bitcoins at that day’s exchange rate. Fair enough. But an e-currency crash of 20 per cent the next day would reduce his 10.5 bitcoins to $9,300, much less than the original $12,000 received to take down a husband and his agreeable secretary, under “buy one get one half off”. No wonder, the assassin doesn’t take bitcoins for hits in real life, because he knows they bounce all over the place. 

Photo: Reuters

Let’s hear him out: “Hi, I am Agent Orange, former sergeant major of the Marine Corps, ‘by the books’ professional. I can’t give you my real name, because I am wanted on both sides of the US-Canada border. I kill people, I take bribes, I distribute drugs, using internet. But when I get paid, I don’t like bitcoin. I like only fiat currency — that’s fancy for dollar. It’s easy, dependable, and accepted everywhere. And thanks to Janet, the Inflation Fighting Superwoman, it has stable purchasing power. Superwoman doesn’t resemble anyone from our league: she is no buxom adventurer Lara Croft, she is no pillow-lipped Angelina Jolie, she is not even Angel of Death, my ever-watchable fellow assassin who brings grace and class, even to murder. Body-hugging spandex or not, X-ray vision or not, Superwoman still has me covered — with her interest-rate-manipulating super powers, she is all that stands between stable prices and bitcoin-powered madness.” 

Okay, I made that up. Call me chicken, but I don’t have the courage to interview Agent Orange over his currency preferences. To the larger point, this fake campaign for the dollar may still not be enough to win Agent Orange’s counterparts on Deep Web who had set up a generous bounty for Janet’s predecessor, Ben Bernanke. Seen as regulating the dollar, hand-holding the economy, and not allowing market forces to kill jobs and firms in 2008 financial crisis’s wake, “interventionist Ben” earned himself the hatred of Deep Web’s libertarian bitcoin-lovers on Assassination Market. In November 2013, the nutjobs set up the site’s biggest endowment for Ben’s would-be killer at 124 bitcoins. Going by November 2013’s exchange rate, that’s $75,000 offered by guys sitting in underwear in a basement, or worse.  
 

ashish.sharma@bsmail.in