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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."
I've never seen nor participated in Silk Road. But, you'd have to be an utter moron to participate in the Silk Road "Phoenix"! It is sure to be either an FBI honey pot or a scammer looking to steal BitCoin.
Go ahead, prove me wrong.
Lots of silk roads have opened up since the original one was raided. Some have taken orders, collected the money and done a runner with it. Some presumably are still operating. Some will be fronts and honeytraps set up by various law enforcement bodies around the world. Some will be real genuine marketplaces. Nobody knows for sure which ones are the genuine ones.
Long Live The Silk Road.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...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.
of course it's not a honeypot. What would ever make you think that?
Other have already taken over. It might not yet be as trusted as Silk Road was, but there are alternate platforms that were just waiting for the big one to go away and took over without a problem. Too much money to be gained in a fairly secure market. Just don't be from the US but from Russia or somewhere where they don't bother going after someone mostly facilitating sales in the US and Europe.
People have a product to sell.
Other people desire this product.
Person A sells this product to person B.
This is capitalism. it's not evil. Nobody is directly harmed in this transaction, and both parties got what they wanted. This is a good thing!
note, I said "directly harmed." it is possible somebody may have been indirectly harmed by violence perpetrated by deranged criminals who are involved in the supply chain due to the fact that this activity is currently deemed illegal. note, it's not illegal because it is run by criminals, no it is run by criminals because it is illegal. There's a big difference.
Bitcoins went way up shortly after Silk Road was shut down because the Chinese took interest, so that's extremely risky. Do not assume that Bitcoin value is tied to availability of politically incorrect drugs sold for bitcoins.
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is very happy to hear about that.
On teh intarwebs, no one can tell you're a FED.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Bitcoin was at $130ish when Silk Road shut down. Then there was hand waiving about a "crash." It "crashed" all the way to $100.
As I write this it looks like Mt. Gox is $265.
You're whole posit is bullshit.
Well, that depends on the details of what the transaction actually was. SilkRoad was involved in a lot of things besides harmless recreational drugs, including quite a few products and services that were intended to hurt people.
Just like being illegal does not automatically make something unethical, being illegal but in demand does not automatically make something ethical either.
It could be a honeypot, but since everything done through a site like Silk Road is anonymous except receipt of delivery of items, the only users of the site the FBI would catch would be the drug buyers. Sellers, provided they're not using an OS or browser with the vulnerabilities that the FBI has used to de-anonymize TOR users in the past, and provided they don't do something dumb when they mail a package like reveal their identity, are safe. And since when is the FBI interested in going after drug buyers? Typically they only bust such small-time participants in the drug trade to get them to rat on their dealers, but that obviously won't work when your dealer is anonymous.
Or am I missing something here? My understanding was that Silk Road did things entirely through TOR and Bitcoin, meaning that those ends of the transactions are (excepting user stupidity) completely anonymous.
Liberty in your lifetime
This is capitalism. it's not evil. Nobody is directly harmed in this transaction, and both parties got what they wanted. This is a good thing!
This is debatable, at best. Modern capitalism is theoretically founded in modern economics, which, guess what, uses utilitarian ethics for value. The utility A and B derived from the transaction may or may not offset the utility lost to everybody else. If it doesn't, then the transaction is not efficient, and rational actors should not perform it.
Of course, this is where libertarianism falls flat on its face. Your transaction incurs costs on others, and you are irrational if you do not take those costs into account.
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.
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.
Does cyanide have no uses other than poisoning? I don't know, but I presume someone who does know and is interested in playing with the stuff would rather pick it up black market than try to procure it legally and be added to a watch list somewhere.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Your point is so nuts that the only appropriate response is to hold it up to the light for people to observe exactly how deep the well of objectivism can go.
Leeches never really left the drugstore. They evolved into the strange lifeforms we now call "Health Maintenance Organizations".
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
key resource in many street level recovery industries - cheap, dangerous and dirty, unfortunately.
There already exists recreational drugs without addiction or health issues... they are also all illegal.
It's attached to perceived market conditions.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
there are plenty of things that a market exists for that are immoral
plutonium. child sex slaves. ricin. RPGs
just because a market exists for something does not justify it
you may say that you can't shut a market down, it will just go underground
yeah, and making rape, murder, and robbery illegal hasn't stopped them either. but we still do not legalize or accept rape, murder, or robbery
some things civilization will always be at war with. permanently
it's simply a maintenance function
you yourself are involved with a "war on trash". if you take out the trash once, do you never have to take out the trash again? no, you have to take it out every thursday, or it accumulates and your house becomes unlivable
because you can't take out the trash once and be done with it, you stop taking out the trash altogether? because you can't guarantee 100% no trash in your apartment you must accept high levels on unlivable filth?
no. you minimize it. as a constant function. trash will always be there. and a constant effort at minimization is the best you can do
and that's completely ok. and normal
and so it is with "the war on {X}"
simply because you can't stop it, that all you can do is minimize it, is no argument against the effort
for the simple reason that just because something is possible, doesn't mean we accept it
the concept you are missing in your thinking is called right and wrong
and if you form a world view without the concept of morality, your world view will fail and has no validity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, exactly like tulip bulbs, gold or US dollars.
Why am I reminded of the people who turn the talk to child molesters when talking about homosexuality? Could it be that you're doing something similar here?
Mind-altering substances are unlikely to be amongst those. The very fact that you felt the need to provide a fallacious appeal to emotion above implies you don't believe it either and thus tried to give your argument weight it doesn't carry on its own. Some people use psychoactive substances, other people ignore it, and the moral busybodies who make it their problem don't really have any arguments besides circular reasoning ("only criminals do drugs!") or thinly veiled appeals to some vague concept of purity.
The only question is: how many victims does this particular form of puritanism demand before people like you will get off their high horse and stop trampling others underhoof? And how much human potential is wasted by making it harder to examine the workings of the mind and how it can be altered?
So is it moral to decide for other people what they may and may not do to their own minds and bodies? And enforce your will through violence? Because it doesn't seem very moral to me. In fact it sounds suspiciously like you claiming ownership on them and declaring yourself their master.
Also, I find it hard to believe anyone would format their messages like you do yours unless they were under the influence of some rather potent substances, so is this just a very inefficient way of seeking rehabilitation?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Right, they sell it on SilkRoad for those who want to make other people dye.
Bitcoin value isn't attached to anything.
Actually, if you understand political-economy, neither do the various fiat currencies we have today. All we have is a shared psychological conditioning that attaches a value to something (pieces of artistic paper) that have no inherent value of their own. When a fiat currency goes bad, you don't see people burying it in the backyard hoping it will have value again in the future. OTOH, you do find precious metals, gems, jewelry, sometimes other works of artistic value, and the odd person with some Swiss Francs. Now I'd add a flash drive with a few bitcoins.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Collective might of what? There's nothing wrong with creating a new currency, even one that is digital. The fact that gold has real world applications has no relevance to its value as a currency, despite how people keep insisting on finding some 'intrinsic value' in the currencies they use. The intrinsic theory of value was the theory people held before Adam Smith, and the economic equivalent of the Ptolemaic system in astronomy -- the ancients thought so, but they were wrong.
We now believe that objects have subjective value, and that it is determined by the market forces of supply and demand. And we also believe that currencies exist because they facilitate transactions, so that their demand does not depend on any use they have other than as a medium of exchange for other goods (I include here being a store of value). Some important characteristics that make up a good medium of exchange are:
You see that under these conditions, bitcoin is equivalent to gold (except for the size of the market - a lot lot more gold is traded daily). This is because what makes fiat currency fiat is the fact that its scarcity is artificial. The dollar is scarce because the Federal Reserve has promised not to print too many, and we have faith (fiat) in it. Gold is scarce because if we want any more, we have to dig it out of the gound with increased difficulty, and bitcoin are scarce because it takes computing effort to find more. Practical uses for these things do not even come into consideration here.
Finally we come to the size of the market. If a currency is useful only as a medium of exchange, then the more people you can trade with in that currency, the more useful and valuable it is. This is the reason for the dollar's supremacy, as for 50 years it was the currency of the largest market in the world, and so it got established as the basis for international reserves. Because of this, the dollar maintains its primacy even now that it has been demoted to the second largest market. But this does not mean that it has intrinsic value, only that its demand as a medium of transaction is further boosted by transactions at the nation level
My point is that there is nothing wrong with bitcoin as a currency. It is as good as gold, as good as the dollar. But it just has a smaller market for now, which gives it the flaws people point out here. Any new currency would have the problems bitcoin is having. It may fail in the end, but that does not mean it was a bad idea.
One of the big uses of bitcoin is the ability to send arbitrary amounts of wealth anywhere in the world with fees amounting to a few pennies. Need to send $10? No problem. Need to send $10,000? No problem.
For merchants, accepting bitcoins has zero fees, or if you want to use a merchant service and get the cash value deposited directly in your bank account, it's about 1 percent. Also, there is never any possibility of chargebacks. It is extremely attractive for merchants for these reasons.
These are a couple of the perfectly-legal uses of bitcoin, that do not get into the whole Austrian/Anarchy philosophical world.
Something to think about: bitcoin as a black market tender is useless unless real-world people can accept it.
Bitcoin is a doomed currency by definition. At around 21 million bitcoins, no more bitcoins can be created. This inevitably means the value of bitcoins will rise and rise and rise and rise and rise. Another word for this: deflation. As any economist will tell you, deflation is extremely harmful for an economy. Why: the value of money increases, but the value of real (tangible) products DECREASES. On top of that, delfationist economist run the risk of its people to hoard all the money (since it will become more worth with time), instead of spending it into the real economy.
He means that cocaine is not physically addictive. Cocaine is psychologically addictive, because it enhances the mood when taken, and leads to depression during withdrawal.
Cocaine withdrawal cannot kill you, the body does not physically depend on it for its continued functioning... Compare to alcohol, which is physically addictive, the changes your body undergoes to compensate for it mean that sudden withdrawal can cause death.
Neither cocaine, meth or heroin are physically addictive substances. Benzodiazepine and alcohol are though.