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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?"
I, for one, do not want to have to explain to some thugtastic DEA jackboots that "hash-based currency" can be acquired by legitimately doing a bunch of math, as well as by other means...
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.
Nothing like using a hash to score some hash.
Hire me...
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.
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.
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.
Drug usage dropped here in Portugal when it was decriminalized.
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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.
But are there more messed up families due to drugs than there are due to drug prohibition? I doubt it.
"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?