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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."
You know, generally speaking, the underground only thrives when there is a vacuum to be filled.
I wonder how many violent drug cartels, gun-toting dealers, and drug-related shootings there are in countries where it's legal to buy from a pharmacy or dispensary.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
This thing has got to be loaded with narcs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Same on Ebay.
Still run into problems with deficient sellers.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm quite confused by this:
"Most surprising, perhaps, is that buyers rate the sellers on the site as relatively trustworthy, despite the fact that no real identities are used."
Why on earth is that surprising? No one will give their real identities on SilkRoad for obvious reasons. Feedback as "trustworthy" is as simple as "did you receive product as described? Yes/No". Why would a buyer require anything else?
You decide.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps we should have a press-blackout on any undesirable or criminal element of society? No more news about terrorist strikes, deaths in military action, political protests which disrupt traffic, the homeless (vagrancy), or the actions of members of congress. Thus we could all live in a happy carefree world where inherently good people never succumb to famous degenerate modeled behavior?
Should we be surprised that the feedback is overwhelmingly positive? The owners of the site make money when the feedback is good; the site could die if the feedback was bad. They control the forum, including the ability to delete feedback. Connect the dots.
You wouldn't trust a company that self-reports; a company that controls the forum for user reports has the same underlying power to censor negative anecdotes as any other company that regulates from within.
But...But...bitcoin is going nowhere. Nobody uses it and it's worthless. This story contradicts my brainwashed grey matter that's been given the meme that virtual currency will never amount to anything!
Drug war between opposite drug clan are relatively rare , and when they do happen they usually only impact seller, not buyer. This is a business you can only advertise by "mouth to ear" so most seller understand that if they screw up, their business will drop. That's why you get so many positive rating. In fact, you get a more likely good relation ship with your dealer to which you are a known face and source of money, than for an anonymous corporation for which you are a blimp in a statistic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Drug dealers are the resistance in The War on Drugs.
If you can't trust the resistance who can you trust?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I am most interested in the question asked in the summary: "Most surprising, perhaps, is that buyers rate the sellers on the site as relatively trustworthy, despite the fact that no real identities are used."
Maybe it's somekind of "team spirit" thing, like the Anonymous from 4chan, always looking for trouble, but at the same time very capable of working together towards a common goal.
Tor is anonymous, so is silk road et. Al. If I am making large sums ofmoney, bitcoin or otherwise, wouldn't it behoove me to spend 2 hours a week buffering my ratings? Even if I never deliver product?
Silence is a state of mime.
Has this ever happened?
So far the only such case I know of was poisoned illegal booze during prohibition and it was the government doing it.
Dead men are not repeat customers, so doing that is not a good way to make money.
Not really, there is no way to inspect the shear volume of packages shipped. There are containers made for this that block the smell and even hide the product inside normal looking products.
Sure the postal service might use dogs on occasion, but there is no practical way for USPS and UPS and Fedex to inspect every package.
Every transaction there avoids a transaction on the street that potentially includes gun violence and harm to bystanders.
I'm not hip on druggie lingo, I used rat posion as an example of something that would definitly kill the user. Sometimes peopel do die I hear from overly potent stuff. What one druggie can handle might kill the next depending on the cut of cocaine/ heroin/ pixie sticks/ marshmello fluff/grannie wiskers.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
How about a direct link to the PDF? W3C Web site
Mt. Gox, which purports to handle 80% of the entire bit coin exchange business, reported about 2000 bit coins exchanged per day last month. That's 60,000 coins, at a generous valuation of $10 apiece, which is $600,000 US Dollars. The article claims the Silk Road is doing $2 million / month business. So either a lot of people buying are generating their own bit coins, and the sellers mostly aren't exchanging them, or the numbers in the article don't add up.
Counting the number of feedback posts in the forum seems like a particularly bad way to measure number of sales. Particularly when the forum is anonymous and both the site operators and the dealers have a vested interest in there being lots of positive feedback.
And a wireless money transfer between separate currencies without paying the crazy rates banks/western union/etc... charge.
And taking considerably more risk in the process. There is no escrow or trusted neutral party ensuring everyone gets the right amount. Basically you are trusting that the other party is an honest broker. In principle you are doing the same thing with a bank but there is actually oversight of the bank. You pay a middle man a fee not just to facilitate the transfer but also to reduce the risk to you. You are reducing the transfer fee but hugely increasing the risk.
This is a meaningless stunt. The estimator for business volume was the customer feedback, which happens to be completely unverifiable and may be 100% bogus because sellers are trying to fake themselves a reputation. Unless this "scientist" bought goods himself, he does not have a single verified sale. In addition, 100% of sales could be fraudulent, if there are any.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I know someone who's considered using this site. He already owns test kits, capable of testing pretty much any common recreational drug for purity. They're apparently not too hard to find. And yea, I know, the average drug user isn't going to go buy test kits -- but they're also not going to be buying off Tor, are they?
It is also an example of something no one would use for cut just for that reason. Unlike what DARE taught you, drug dealers are just working folks trying to make a living. Killing customers cuts into the bottom line.
Yes, people do die from high dosages. That is the result of a drug war that means users can never be sure of the purity of the product they buy. You will of course notice that all alcohol and pharmaceuticals are labeled as to their strength. I am not sure how you can blame anyone but those who support the War on Some Drugs for those fatalities.
The vast majority of drug consumption in the USA is not done by "druggies". It is done by white collar workers who no one would suspect of such.
A UN report said "the global drug trade generated an estimated US$321.6 billion in 2003."
... and that was a decade ago.
$2 million doesn't even register.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Have to ban half the reality tv shows on, too. So much for '16 And Pregnant', 'Jersey Shore', 'Real Housewives', etc.
Mebbe that'd be a good thing...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
In the 70's the government would spray fields with Paraquat, an herbicide. The growers reaction was to cut the plants down immediately before they started to die, and sell them. I'm sure smoking herbicide is safe.
I would imagine most sellers go to some length to keep the product safe. After all, if somebody higher in the supply chain found out about one of their underlings poisoning his product and damaging not only his reputation, but his boss's reputation, and inviting law enforcement investigations into sudden deaths, what do you think the reaction would be?
Well, then you criminalize the actual CRIME - driving while impaired
When has criminalizing something actually stopped it from happening? Criminalizing and sentencing only exists to give victims some sense of justice, after it's all over and can never be undone.
This is about *prevention*.
Criminalizing something doesn't prevent it by way of disincentive. Swift, public punishment of perceived transgressors, however, does.
The intent of the penal system is to demonstrate to the rest of society that those who transgress societies rules will be punished, and therefore deter future events by people other than the people being punished. It's kind of lost its value as a deterrent these days, at least in the U.S., since punishment is neither swift, nor is it public, and we take great pains to protect the rights of the accused, rather than the purpose of the process, which could care less if you occasionally string up the wrong person.
We've also been steadily eroding available punishments for a while now, since anything you ban for a little bit is suddenly the "unusual" in "cruel and unusual", and enacting an "unusual" punishment is therefore "cruel". Depending on which side of Rousseau's argument you come down on, there's probably a certain level of "oops" that should be tolerable for the benefit of the larger society: "Bummer of a social contract you got there, Hal, thanks for fulfilling it for us, though...".
Lest you think corporal punishment is no longer alive and kicking...
In the rest of the world, it's pretty much alive and well, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore which is a punishment on a par with public stocks in colonial U.S., or "birching", which was used as a punishment in British prisons through 1962 (and continued on the Isle of Man through 1976), and still in use in Trinidad. Jusicial Corporal Punish is still in use in 33 nations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_corporal_punishment , and caning was still in use in schools in Britain and Wales until 1987 - 5 strokes for poor exam results. Paddling is still in use in schools in 22 U.S. States, 24 if you include Ohio (school board procedures require; parents may refuse) and Utah (with prior written permission to act in loco parentis - in place of the parent).
And we seem to have no problems with waterboarding, although we try to do it under the cover of extraterritoriality.
1) Illegal drugs fund the CIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US). No possibility of corruption there, of course.
2) Illegal drugs finance the banks (http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/29/us-banks-laundered-mexican-drug-money/), even helps them weather financial crises (http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims).
3) Last, but not at ALL least, illegal drug money finances congressional campaigns (http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/10/18/gordon-duff-how-drug-money-is-buying-our-new-congress/).
Illegal drugs! They feel good, taste good and they're so good for you! ...if you happen to be part of the world's money/power elite. This is why they'll never go away, and they'll never be legal.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"The market can stay inefficient longer than you can stay solvent." -- Keynes
If they could somehow fit Raspberry Pi and the DMCA into it, it would be the Perfect Storm of /. articles!
So again it is the government not the illegal drug sellers that are poisoning users.
It's not a viable currency, even for this particular illicit use.
Total 2003 was $321.6 billion/year in illegal drug trade:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/06/30/un_report_puts_worlds_illicit_drug_trade_at_estimated_321b/
So $1.9 million/month works out to just under 0.07%, less than 7/100ths of a percent of the total drug trade. That's presuming that the current economic climate hasn't resulted in higher drug use in the 9 years intervening since 2003. Judging by the increases in cigarette smoking and alcohol sales, I'm going to go out on a limb and say other drug use hasn't remained stable at 2003 levels.
After all, if somebody higher in the supply chain found out about one of their underlings poisoning his product and damaging not only his reputation, but his boss's reputation, and inviting law enforcement investigations into sudden deaths, what do you think the reaction would be?
Even more sudden deaths?
Try asking a dealer in the street if he takes bitcoin and see what happens...
You and I have a pretty different definition of the word "stop". That's 1million arrests per year, of drunk people. Can you imagine the numbers of incidents not ending in an arrest? Staggering. The laws are basically just cash cows for the states/etc. They really do nothing for prevention. People like to talk about the reduction of deaths but if you look at the stats they follow right along with non-alcohol related vehicle deaths, which probably means it has a lot more to do with vehicle safety features than any meaningful reduction in DUI occurrence. Making "drink and drive" (bars, restaurants, etc) establishments illegal would do a ton more than the purely punitive laws we have. Like smoking and everything else, as far as the states concerned, the bottom line is income. Safety is the guise.
Every transaction that avoids the official banking records and prevents flow of data to the government is even better, because it prevents the data from being used against the individuals involved.
After all, Capone was thrown to jail not for crimes but because of income tax evasion.
You can't handle the truth.
Yeah and most alchoholics work a full time job. They're still alcoholics. People who use drugs recreationally to their detriment are also addicts, druggies, what ever you'd like to call them and also come in all shapes and colors.
The point is simple. Only people who survive the products can post ratings. 0% of those killed do. That could be due to the rat poisin, heroin cut, mafia hit,suicide, "suicide", police sting operation, asteroid hit, heart attack, fatal waterballoning, spontaneous combustion, terminal cooties, or the bubonic plaugue.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I also don't understand how anyone trusts this. Sure bitcoins can be rather anonymous with laundries and easy to use taint detection on addresses. But the buyers are giving physical addresses. Unless there's some anonymous package remailer service it seems like delivery without being known would be difficult. I'd be concerned about a long term sting operation by some letter agency selling things on the site and let it coast for a year or so and then hit everyone you sent a package to.
If it starts getting too profitable the drug companies will step in and take it over.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Cthulhu 2012 - Why vote for the lesser evil?
Unfortunately, he isn't on the ballot, and I can't decide which candidate is his logical substitute.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's great to see a whole new way to enact civil disobediance against prohibition laws, which seek to fulfill an objective that is neither desirable nor feasible.
One counter to the hypothetical the article proposes:
If fewer people smoke, more people are healthier, longer. If they don't look for some other means of slow suicide. Sure, that's given.
But does that necessarily mean longer time in nursing homes?
If more people over 65 are healthy enough to keep working, we can raise the mandatory retirement age and let them keep working.
We do know that, statistically, retirement itself is bad for the health, and in the specific way that tends to send people to the nursing homes.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Sadly, also not running this year are General Zod nor Senator Kelly (although I'm sure some think that Obama and Romney are both mutants).
I am officially gone from
Huh? Everyone has already quit smoking?
A projection is always a hypothetical.
What I'm saying is that their projection makes a number of limiting assumptions. (Projections can't avoid that.)
One assumption they seem to not assume is the optimistic possibility that I mentioned, about moving the the mandatory retirement age back. Retirement, for people too poor or under-motivated to go out and get involved in charity work, starting a new business, hobbies that can now be done full-time, or whatever, is bad for the health in a way that is very expensive for society with mandatory health insurance.
That's just one variable that has a reasonable probability of changing.
Another, which i did not mention, is the pessimistic probability of people turning to other drugs as they quit tobacco, and committing delayed suicide that way. (It appears the more realistic one, but I don't like pessimism.)
And that ignores the whole question of how we are going to re-invent the economy as we go, a variable that is continually changing. The evolution of the means we use to care for the elderly is another. (Assisted care, as opposed to medical incarceration, is a growing trend.)
The problem is not how to kill people off before they become a drag on society, the problem is how to help people remain able to add value to society. And how to make sure enough of the added value can be translated to making the necessities of life available.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Those responsible for executing the executors of the people executed...have just been executed.
...
Nowadays, illicit drugs are being manufactured in quantity
Some of them rent vacant factories in 3rd world countries, set up all the required machineries and produce those drugs in tonnage
Many of the raw materials needed to produce those drugs - especially those in the "designer" category, - can be easily acquired in the open market, come in 200kg drums (if they are in liquid form) and in skip bins or in jumbo bags (if they are powder / solid)
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When I read this article, there were 420 comments.
Coincidence?!?
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Drug dealers now accept virtual Monopoly money.
All money is virtual monopoly money. With BitCoin there is a fixed amount in the monopoly box, with USD the government can keep printing more and giving it to themselves and their bankster pals thus constantly devaluing the USD you hold.
Ok for folks who considers prohibition is the problem, please help me understand how it can be implemented, and if there's any line that needs to be drawn.
Most don't use them to their detriment.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I can see why they don't advertise, i also know why they don't need to, if your stuff is good, you'll have people crawling out from between the cracks in the floor in no time, offering you their mother and their sister if need be. Word spreads like wildfire when it comes to that I can also see why most wouldn't sell bad shit. It's no use killing your customers since they won't come back. At best it's cut up to make more from the same amount bought. To cut it up with rat poison would give you a surefire way to get the law on your ass and moreover less people to sell to. I can also see how this, sadly, creates a giant whipping stick for something great like the torproject to be brought down. Other than that, it's considered smart not to poke your nose into places where your head might get cut off. So that's really all i feel like saying. Never visited, never will. Those days are over and if were to feel the need i wouldnt really need to get it online either. The centre of europe has more foreign traffic everyday passing through than you get people here going back and forth to work i think.
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
"Corporal punishment remains legal when used by parents, except in Scotland, which has legislated to ban parental corporal punishment."
http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/corporal-punishment
How dare you claim your country is not OK with corporal punishment?
I think you're trying to argue with me. You want room 500 down the hall. This is the apathy room.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It lies in the difference between "penal system" and "corrections system". Here's a good quote by Mary Stohr which reflects this: "Earlier scholars were more honest, calling what we now call corrections by the name penology, which means the study of punishment for crime." [reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections%5D
The terminology change came about in the 1950's, when psycho pharmacology had reached the point that we believed everyone was capable of being rehabilitated, and insufficient study had gone into the sociopathy and psychopathy to discover that the conditions are in fact not (yet) correctable by any known means.
It's ridiculous, but most prisoners in the U.S. are there for non-violent offenses, including drug use, and other that legalization, which I think is a nonviable approach for economic power reasons related to acquisition and distribution. It has been suggested that criminal organizations and cartels actively lobby against legalization efforts in order to protect the profitability of the drug economies in which they operate (just as I suspect you will never see a Jacksom Hewitt or H&R Block lobbyist in favor of a flat tax).
I think my bottom line is that (a) there are in fact people who can not be fixed, no matter how much effort is expended, and (b) there are powerful economic interests in favor of not fixing their customer base or reducing the economic value of their products by keeping a fraction of their customer base from going to prison.
Raising the mandatory retirement age is raising the age at which the government's employment rules say, "Move over, get out of the way, let the younger kids have their turn at having fun!" It's the age at which the government comes after both the employer and the employee and starts denying tax breaks, issuing fines, etc., if the employee won't quit working full time.
I think you're thinking about the age at which a non-full-timer can start drawing pension funds and retirement benefits.Before you raise that age, you have to look at the average life expectancy, the general state of health, etc. in the last n years before people die, etc. You want to set that age so that the non-existent average person has a reasonable expectancy of a reasonable amount of time to enjoy retirement.
And then you get into definitions of "enjoying retirement", and "a reasonable amount of time" and such idiocies.
In an ideal world, the government would not be collecting or paying pension or insurance, and would not be having to draw either line. Leave it up to the individual. Sure, the average twenty-year old is going to do stupid things like buying sports cars and tobacco instead of saving.
No, the average twenty-year old will not. Some will, but by the logic of letting the tobacco smoker just die early if he wants to, we should be willing to let the person who doesn't want to save responsibly die early for lack of pension, too.
Of course, there will usually be family and friends who will pick up the burdens in both cases. And they are the ones who should.
If they can and if they will. Which is the whole problem here.
Anyway, the government, if it's going to get involved, should constantly adjust the regulations so that people who want to do right things aren't getting too many roadblocks in their way.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.