How Silk Road Bounced Back From Its Multimillion-Dollar Hack

Daniel_Stuckey writes: "Silk Road, the online marketplace notable for selling drugs and attempting to operate over Tor, was shut down last October. Its successor, Silk Road 2.0 survived for a few months before suffering a security breach. In total, an estimated $2.7 million worth of Bitcoin belonging to users and staff of the site was stolen. Some in the Silk Road community suspected that the hack might have involved staff members of the site itself, echoing scams on other sites. Project Black Flag closed down after its owner scampered with all of their customers' Bitcoin, and after that users of Sheep Marketplace had their funds stolen, in an incident that has never been conclusively proven as an inside job or otherwise. Many site owners would probably have given up at this point, and perhaps attempted to join another site, or start up a new one under a different alias. Why would you bother to pay back millions of dollars when you could just disappear into the digital ether? But Silk Road appears to be trying to rebuild, and to repay users' lost Bitcoins."

Comments

Why they're rebuilding.

[ddt]

Their customer base includes hit men?

Re:better than FDIC

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Having money in US banks is risky anyways. If you can't account for a large sum of money, government organizations are known for just outright taking the whole damn thing. Not even taxing, it, just fucking outright taking ALL of it away. I even know people who had the police confiscate cash (in one case, $5,000) and just flat out keep it if they can't provide receipts showing where it came from. I honestly don't blame the super rich for hiding money in offshore accounts; you never know what the government will suddenly and irrevocably decide is "theirs," and public opinion will never be on your side either if you ever made an issue of it (popular opinion seems to be that the wealthy are only wealthy if they steal or inherit, in spite of some 70% of the forbes 400 not having wealthy parents.)

Re:better than FDIC

[Gryle]

Paraphrasing an observation I once heard, the US has a funny way of looking at wealth. If I'm wealthy I made my money fair and square through hard-work, determination, and maybe a pinch of luck, and I deserve to keep my hard-won earnings.. If you're wealthy you're a lying, thieving bastard who exploited someone else and don't really deserve your earnings.