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Bitcoin Used For the Narcotics Trade
An anonymous reader writes "A story on Aljazeera tells how bitcoin is being used to pay for cocaine, marijuana and other drugs at various eBay style drug websites. From the article: 'Two US senators are asking federal authorities to crack down on an online narcotics market that accepts "virtual" currency. The "Dark Web," an anonymous and secretive online community that trades in heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines among other drugs, has been operating unhindered for months.' Who said bitcoin is not used in the real world?"
Also, at what point did it become a good idea to buy illegal drugs over the Internet? What exactly do you plan on doing when your 10k in Cocaine doesn't show up at your doorstep?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Most of these alternative-currencies (Bitcoin, e-gold, etc) find themselves on the shady side of things pretty quickly - especially money-laundering and the like. This is not at all surprising, really.
It's going to be that way until we finally repeal the idiotic War on Drugs and admit that in a so-called "free country" it is wrong to ever tell consenting adults what they may do with their own bodies in their own homes. War on Drugs is a total failure anyway. Anybody who wants drugs can get them. It has done nothing to stop them.
Bitcoin has the feature, that it can't be inflated (claimed by their proponents). However, that's very good reason, why government might want to outlaw it: you're avoiding a tax, the "inflation tax".
They just need some stories about some drug dealers, pedophiles, terrorists who use Bitcoin, and it will be pretty easy to crack it down.
Dealers sell drugs to users using local currency, Senators pass a law to outlaw the $100 bill.
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Last week it was about an imaginary bust of a Bitcoiner "miner" who may be using too much electricity, making law enforcement potentially believe that it was a grow-op.
Today is a story about virtual currency that is barely used anywhere to be used on online drug trading. Not Bitcoin specifically. Paypal most likely ...
Honestly. Having a video "story" is bad enough. Having the story linked to Bitcoin on a vague premise is pretty bad.
Let's create a Bitcoin /. filter, so I can exlude these stories from my profile. Not sure how this relates to "Privacy". I'm thinking that there is a group of Bitcoin proponents working hard to get any publicity.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Right, because its the currencies' issue. Its not like I've ever bought bags upon bags of pot with dollars and euros.
What would be surprising would be currency that wasn't ever used for illicit things. It doesn't and will never exist. Especially with conservative philosophies that don't let us decrim or legalize mostly safe things like pot or ecstasy.
Open your eyes, all these guys are doing is playing up "War on Drugs" bullshit so they can get larger budgets next year so that a SWAT team can no-knock your home and shoot you when you try to defend yourself thinking you're being robbed.
it's obvious that Slashdot is being pumped full of Bitcoin articles by Bitcoin promoters.
Well, duh. Slashdot is also pumped full of Linux articles by Linux fans, pumped full of video game articles by video game fans, and pumped full of science articles by science fans. News for Nerds, remember? Nerds are interested in BitCoin, because it's an interesting bit of software.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
How does this work? Bitcoin is anonymous right until you receive the contraband. If you're making anonymous drug trades with someone on the internet, there's even less guarantee that they're not a cop than if you're working with someone you know. If you have to receive the drugs in person, the extra anonymity doesn't help you.
And at this point, why are drug dealers the first to get on board with Bitcoin? Bitcoins are only valuable if you can trade them for something useful. If you can buy drugs with Bitcoins, that makes them valuable to the cusomer. But what will the drug dealer do with the Bitcoins?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There are bitcoin currency exchanges where you can trade for $US.
Money -- ALL money -- is only worth anything because people mutually agree it is. All of it is nothing more than a medium for exchange that is more convenient than barter.
Backed by government can mean zilch in a very short order if no one trusts that government any longer. See Wiemar Republic and Zimbabwe for example.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What would be interesting is if you can find an actual example of someone willing to sell drugs for bit-coin. This story offers no examples at all.
My brother-in-law was 16 when he was murdered by an acquaintance who was high on drugs at the time.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
More importantly, bitcoin isn't that cool anymore. The initial wave of guys got in and generated hundreds of bitcoins an hour. Last week, I set up my work laptop crunching via one of the more popular co-ops. Over a week, I generated 1 bit CENT. That's about 7 cents real money. I tried to transfer that bit cent, and was told that I couldn't, because there's a one bit cent tariff for all transactions. I know GPU is much, much faster, but we're looking at sinking multiple real-world cents worth of electricity into every bit cent that's generated, and there's a finite quantity to mine, most of which is already in the hands of BC's founders. Why exactly is this a good thing? Count me out.
And at this point, why are drug dealers the first to get on board with Bitcoin?
From what I've seen, a lot of the time, a drug dealer is what happens when a problem with authority meets get-rich-quick gullibility, and a smalltime drug producer is where those things intersect with geeky techno-enthusiasm.
Bitcoin itself is rather shady in nature. Essentially it is an obfuscated pyramid/ponzi scheme (here are some tokens in a database: they are redeemable for nothing -- but you should be willing to trade goods, services, and real money in return for them being transferred to your account because we're requiring people to waste more and more computer resources and electricity to have them added to their accounts out of nothing!).
It's only natural that it should attract a shady element, especially a gullible, anti-authority, geeky techno-enthusiast shady element.
It's not about the users. The users typically become addicted to whatever substance they are using. It's those that control the supply, they control the users. In other words, it's power. No matter what side you look at..
It boils down to power and who is going to wield that power. You find a way to decouple power from narcotics and then you can have a free society in which people make their own choice. In any other situation the lever of addiction will be pulled to the greatest effect to line the pockets of the one who's hand is on that lever. More often than not, the hand on the lever is in reality placed on a gun with somebody else having to deal with the receiving end. Police officer, drug lord or middle man; they are all fighting for that power.
In any case the person consuming the narcotic is giving power to somebody. The addiction drives them to get it however they can which means that power goes indiscriminately to whoever provides the quickest/cheapest fix. The casual user is capable of making more informed decision on how they obtain but it still eventually gets to a drug lord; exception being home grown stuff, which is a very small portion of the opiate trade.
To say the least I'm tired of the mantra "have you ever seen a dude high on some drug fighting." Set aside PHP for a moment and then have you ever seen some dude wanting to get high fighting, stealing, murdering...? If you haven't just open a news paper of your nearest metropolitan area.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
They'll trade the bitcoin for actual currency. The extra step here is that there's an organization that buys and sells bitcoin that can give them anonymity. It's essentially like using baseball cards instead of cash: the baseball cards' value fluctuates, but it's stable enough to get you close to what you want and there's a third party willing to buy and sell the cards when they're not being used in a drug transaction.
While the two points are extremes of both sides, the 97% in the middle is still a large number. There are countless numbers of messed up families, kids, parents, etc, due to the direct result of drugs. Even if the drug trade were legal, we'd still have a large number of so-called consenting adults not hurting anybody but themselves actively hurting everyone and themselves.
"People are bad enough with alcohol and cigarettes. I'd hate to see what happened if you let people have unrestricted access to harder drugs. Most people can barely look after themselves as it is, let alone the children that those type of people tend to churn out, Idiocracy style."
Except that it doesn't happen that way. Places that have decriminalized some drugs (like the Netherlands) and even all drugs (Portugal et al.) have experienced NO significant rise in drug use! Further, there are a lot of societal benefits: lower crime rate, dramatically lowered costs for courts and incarceration, no need for as many police, etc.
Your comment reminds me of an elderly woman I know. She plays Bingo with friends regularly. She tells me that whenever she talks about decriminalization, she gets shocked reactions from all the other old ladies. Once, one of her friends said, "But if drugs are legal, everybody will start taking drugs!"
She looked at her friend calmly, and said "Really? Which ones would YOU take?"
Shut her right up.
Meanwhile, entire populations of foreign countries are buried in mass graves, if they're lucky, dissolved in a barrel if they're not.
A factory I work with has a customer in Monterrey, Mexico. They had advised the factory's sales director not to visit the city because the violent crime rate is so out of control. For all intents and purposes, Monterrey is a developed city, and it has gone backward very rapidly largely due to the funds and weapons flowing from the U.S. government. The nation is at war with itself and we feed the fire with our abolitionist laws.
Certainly the death of your brother-in-law is a tragedy in itself, but the fact that it occurred supports the argument that the drug laws don't work. It always has been and still is easier for young people to get illegal drugs than legal ones.
But on the flip side, what about the Iraq veteran who was recently killed by a swat team who thought he was a drug dealer, when in fact he was a working class husband trying to survive? That family is devastated and the kid is going to suffer terribly for the rest of his life. Without a doubt this is a family that would still be together, the father alive, the kid some semblance of normal, if we did not have a 'war on drugs'.
I know we want to believe that passing a law solves a problem, but in this case the drug laws create far more problems than they solve. The violence worldwide, the violence at home. I have a friend who went through college with a guy who ended up becoming a public defender. He tells these terrible stories of people hopelessly addicted to meth (he's in a rural area), with terrible health, no teeth; visibly, clearly in a state of helplessness, sentenced to 1 year or more for possession of a drug. This is solving problems? Making people's lives better? Improving our society? Even Pat Roberston is beginning to see the failure of these policies. Surely you can, too?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Sure you would, but at least if drugs weren't illegal, we could save the billions and billions spent on prisons, and enforcement and redirect some of it to helping those who do want help (and wouldn't be as fearful of coming out of the shadows for help), and also go towards paying off the US debt....not to mention, if you take that much profit out of criminal hands, violence should decrease accordingly.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Drug use is a family problem. Making it a criminal/family problem only makes it worse for everyone involved and does nothing to address the core problem.
Being pro-war on drugs is to be pro slavery, sex trade, murder, empowerment of the biggest pieces of shit the world can create, and actively encourages the militarization of our police forces. Absolutely nothing good comes from the war on drugs aside from eroding constitutional rights, wasting billions annually, discarding billions in taxable revenue, and training police to be as big, if not bigger thugs, than the thugs they are supposedly fighting.
Percentage of State and Federal prison inmates who reported being under the influence of drugs at time of their offense, 1997
Not sure what you're saying here - looks to me like the majority of people said they weren't on drugs.
The logical conclusion to this data is that not being on drugs should be outlawed, no?
I always love these comments:
War on Drugs is a total failure anyway. Anybody who wants drugs can get them. It has done nothing to stop them.
Nicotine and diacetylmorphine (heroin) are both of roughly equal addictive potential. One can get cigarettes in any corner store, they are legal. Heroin? Not so much.
How many people do you know that smoke? How many people do you know that do heroin?
MDMA is safer than most forms of entertainment. You are much more likely to die in the car on the way to a rave than dying from MDMA at the rave.
Also, "weeds" aren't necessarily safer than "research chemicals". Jimson weed, for instance is far more dangerous than that unapproved synthetic (but totally non-toxic) research chemical LSD.
I don't usually complain about moderation, but the above post needs to be modded down.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No ecstasy isn't perfectly safe. It's about as dangerous as horse riding though.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7876425.stm
One is encouraged, celebrated even, the other can land you with jail time. Doesn't seem right to me.