Slashdot Mirror
The Silk Road Is Back
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Silk Road is rising from the dead. After the FBI seized the deep web's favourite illegal drug market and arrested its alleged founder Ross Ulbricht last month (for, among other things, ordering a hit through his own website), the online-marketplace-cum-libertarian-movement has found a new home and opened for business at 16:20 GMT this afternoon. In the wake of the original Silk Road's closure, everything became a little turbulent for its users. First, they had to get used to not getting high-quality, peer-reviewed drugs delivered direct to their sofas. (Though presumably they didn't stop getting high, instead forced back to the 'mystery mix' street dealers and surly ex-Balkan war criminals who have spent years filling cities with drugs at night.) Some users were pissed off that they'd lost all the Bitcoin wealth they'd amassed, or that paid-for orders would go undelivered, while small-time dealers freaked out about how they suddenly lacked the funds to pay off debts owed to drug sellers higher up the food chain."
...is that this instance is run by FBI.
I don't see other reason why anyone would take the risk without - at least - a massive security technology change.
True. The freakiest thing I saw when taking a look at SR was large amounts of cyanide from one vendor. I haven't heard about mass-poisonings, but making it that easy for a crazy to hurt a lot of people is very worrying. Other black-market sites I researched were worse, with guns available to anyone in addition to the poison and dangerous drugs.
It seems to me that we shouldn't be banning reasonably safe in-demand products because having products that mainstream people want only available though the black market, enables the terrible things that also go on there. A drug should have to be really destructive like Meth to be banned.