Silk Road 2.0 Pledges To Compensate Users For Stolen Bitcoins

An anonymous reader writes "Online black market Silk Road 2.0 has pledged to pay back more than £1.7 million worth of bitcoins stolen from its servers during a heist last week. Speaking in a post on Reddit, Silk Road 2.0 moderator Defcon said the website would refund the more than 4,000 bitcoins stolen during the heist, and would not pay its staff until users had been reimbursed."

Comments

In other news

[Chas]

Silk Road 2.0 employees desert after they learn they are not getting paid.
Several turn turn over information to law enforcement...

Re: In other news

[HornWumpus]

Doesn't even have to be. The government runs most of the large TOR nodes and is doing traffic analysis. It's been known for years that someone with deep pockets was running large TOR nodes. It was an open secret that it was the feds, now it's just a known fact.

Anybody repeatedly, regularly using TOR is the NSA's bitch.

Re:If they make good on this.

[bobbied]

Yea, not paying your employees is *always* a good idea in situations like this.

Can ANYBODY else see how this might not be a good thing, nor is it a viable promise?

Re:Criminals with honour!

[bobbied]

Seriously? You actually *think* SilkRoad is going to be able to not pay it's employees and stay in operation?

What if Target claimed they'd take 100% of their profits and 100% of their payroll to pay off some debt that was bigger than a year's worth of sales? Do you figure that would be a good thing too?

BTW, Target's liability for their lapses *will* be dealt with. End users will NOT be held accountable for charges they didn't authorize. One of the few protections of Credit Cards.

Re:If they make good on this.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

He didn't say they weren't accruing money. And if it's Bitcoins, well, their appreciation is driving many legitimate businesses to accept them out of pure speculation. Want $500 now or a Bitcoin next month?

Re:If they make good on this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Want $500 now or a Bitcoin next month?

$500 now, thank you

Re:RESULTS

[TheCarp]

I know nothing really about their operations but, little bit of thinking on it. They can't be very big, for a whole host of reasons aside from not needing to be. Their "Employees" are likely all part owners, with a stake in making it work. This would not be unusual in a company comprised of only a handful of people. It is a mistake to assume they have employees like a larger company would. They might, but, I think it is unlikely.

Re:we know where from

[SleazyRidr]

When the Mt Gox collapse(s) didn't make it to /. I thought that the flood of bitcoin stories was over, but it seems that it was only the shills who were submitting the stories and only submitting positive stories.

Re:RESULTS

[viperidaenz]

Or it's one last grab to get more bitcoins before taking off with them all again.

Re:Criminals with honour!

[Kichigai Mentat]

Are the SR2 operators in it for the con, or are they in it for the future?

I think they're in it for the profit, because I highly doubt they're in it for altruistic purposes. These aren't monks sitting in a monstary, eating only food they grow themselves, running the site off donated servers and bandwidth powered by solar cells and batteries. These are people living in the industrialized world, who buy groceries and pay for electricity and hardware.

Drugs are a high-margin business. If they wanted to prove the economic viability of a marketplace that exists independently of any government, then why weren't they focusing on selling the kinds of things purchased more openly and by a larger segment of the population, like a BTC-powered Etsy or CobornsDelivers, and put it up on the open Internet where anyone could find it, instead of hiding it on the darknet?

I mean, if it was all about proving the viability of such a market, then do your proof-of-concept first, and then start pushing the point once you have some clout. If you're just in it to be a prophet of Bitcoin, then what does it matter if someone else beats you to the punch and sets up their own marketplace of illicit goods?

Besides, the story seems flakey. There have been allegations that this was an inside job from the beginning, where they first claim to have been robbed as a result of transaction malleability, and yet there's a lot of controversy over whether or not transaction malleability can even be exploited at this scale. There's certainly a lot of theory that points to these guys not being entirely on the level, but they sure aren't altruists.

Re:If they make good on this.

[lennier]

Of course but, if you really need financial stability, I don't recommend being in on the ground floor of a startup.

Especially a completely illegal one based on experimental, buggy technology under ongoing cyberattack, selling products that ruin people's lives, are supplied by organised crime, and are actively targeted by high-level federal and international prosecutors with access to military espionage technology - and a complete dump of your predecessor's transaction databases.

There's high-risk, and then there's unethical high risk, and then there's completely stupid, unethical high risk, and then there's... whatever this is, it's pegging the scale.

I'm not going to say "good luck", but I would advise even the rubberneckers to stand well clear of the impact crater.