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Bitcoin-Based Drug Market Silk Road Thriving With $2 Million In Monthly Sales
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Every day or so of the last six months, Carnegie Mellon computer security professor Nicolas Christin has crawled and scraped Silk Road, the Tor- and Bitcoin-based underground online market for illegal drug sales. Now Christin has released a paper (PDF) on his findings, which show that the site's business is booming: its number of sellers, who offer everything from cocaine to ecstasy, has jumped from around 300 in February to more than 550. Its total sales now add up to around $1.9 million a month. And its operators generate more than $6,000 a day in commissions for themselves, compared with around $2,500 in February. Most surprising, perhaps, is that buyers rate the sellers on the site as relatively trustworthy, despite the fact that no real identities are used. Close to 98% of ratings on the site are positive."
This thing has got to be loaded with narcs.
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Which country allows you to buy cocaine or ecstasy from a pharmacy?
DUI laws stop people from drinking and driving. It used to be pretty common until it became a serious offense with serious punishments.
Making drugs illegal does not prevent their use. Nothing will do that, even in nations with a death penalty for drug crimes drugs are still sold.
I am betting you have never been part of a typical drug deal.
Think less what you see on TV and in movies and more mundane real life. People are doing this to make money, killing the buyers does not help with that.
Well, except for the fact that Mt. Gox's current 30 day volume is a little over 2 million *coins* valued at between US$7 and $10 (Average value of $8.77.).
So $2 million per month through Silk Road is not unreasonable if Gox is doing $17 million per month in transactions....
grnbrg.
How exactly would your theoretical honeypot work? Only buyers need to provide anything remotely identifiable (e.g., shipping address). Do you think the DEA cares about going after kids who buy $100 worth of LSD?
Considering that arresting end users is pretty much the DEA's bread-and-butter, I'd say yes, yes they do.
From above link:
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yes, morphine is addictive. And before it was criminalized, there were plenty of doctors, lawyers and other responsible professionals addicted to it. This interfered with their personal and professional lives no more than smoking does today. The only significant side effect of morphine addiction is constipation. If the war on drugs was renamed the war on constipation it might get the respect it deserves.
A famous study you never heard of - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/background_briefings/smoking/86599.stm
This kind of result is quickly covered up.
We do know that smoking is the greatest single cause of statistics. But if you want your study funded you better be prepared to come down on the side of conventional wisdom.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Even that is not going to make an addict. Where does this free drug myth come from? No dealer is giving away free drugs, it does not happen.
Nicotine is far more addictive, and still requires multiple uses to be addictive.
I'm too young to know whether the punishment and fines changed, but in the 1980s and 1990s the British government successfully reduced the rate of drink driving by making it socially unacceptable. They ran horrific ads:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5ma_Xv7rGM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyzTFdCEXWk
These are more recent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsY_Co-p8Bw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtJqw--DGl8
The stats: http://www.drinkdriving.org/drink_driving_statistics_uk.php
And the penalties; in case you want to compare: http://www.drinkdrivingfacts.com/drinkdriving/drink_driving_facts.aspx
Most addictive naturally-occuring drug, of all drugs it's #3 IIRC behind a couple of anti-psychotics.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's pretty easy to find plenty of evidence that h4rr4r's post is spot on. Google "Portugal decriminalization".
https://www.google.com/search?q=portugal+decriminalization
h4rr4r speaks truth, whether or not you want to hear it.
:(){
Ecstasy might not have been invented then
MDMA was actually invented by Merck in 1912, but didn't find its way into recreational use until the 80s.
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Ecstasy is slang for MDMA and nothing else. The fact that unscrupolous drug dealers and people who know as much about drugs as the average person knows about physics doesn't make it slang for anything else.
Yes, your dealer who just bought a cheap batch of pills with 2C-B + caffeine + amphetamine will tell you otherwise but that's because he's trying to sell his crappy pills. It's sort of like how if alcoholic beverages were illegal, you can bet there would be people trying to sell all sorts of crap as "whiskey", "chardonnay" and other beverages.
Ecstasy isn't "Various euphoric and stimulant drugs these days but originally MDMA", it's just slang for MDMA and nothing else. The problem is that in a lot of places demand for MDMA is a lot higher than supply and dealers will try their best to confuse customers to sell whatever they have in stock. Hell, I've heard rumors of dealers trying to push benzos as "ecstasy" when MDMA has been hard to find...
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