Slashdot Mirror
DarkMarket, the Decentralized Answer To Silk Road, Is About More Than Just Drugs
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket', a new system being touted as a Silk Road the FBI could never seize. Although running in a similar fashion on the face of things — some users buy drugs, other sell them — DarkMarket works in a fundamentally different way to Silk Road or any other online marketplace. Instead of being hosted off a server like a normal website, it runs in a decentralized manner: Users download a piece of software onto their device, which allows them to access the DarkMarket site. The really clever part is how the system incorporates data with the blockchain, the part of Bitcoin that everybody can see. Rather than just carrying the currency from buyer to seller, data such as user names are added to the blockchain by including it in very small transactions, meaning that its impossible to impersonate someone else because their pseudonymous identity is preserved in the ledger. Andy Greenberg has a good explanation of how it works over at Wired. The prototype includes nearly everything needed for a working marketplace: private communications between buyers and sellers, Bitcoin transfers to make purchases, and an escrow system that protects the cash until it is confirmed that the buyer has received their product. Theoretically, being a decentralized and thus autonomous network, it would still run without any assistance from site administrators, and would certainly make seizing a central server, as was the case with the original Silk Road, impossible."
"Is About More Than Just Drugs"
But really...it's about drugs. You don't need to sell Beanie Babies anonymously.
Welcome to the age of illegal software, illegal protocols and the cops busting down your door when your ISPs DPI heuristics make a pattern match against something they don't like. Oh well, we knew it was coming some day.
but I don't realize that the transaction is "I'll buy 6 of your kidnapping victims for my snuff film," then my public key that allows them to rate me as a fine arbiter for the transaction also links me right in as an accessory to murder.
And? If there's no middle man then ultimately someone (in this case it sounds like the buyer) has total control over the transaction. It doesn't matter what UPS says, if they don't want to release the funds they don't have to.
In a dark market like this the ONLY protection you have against fraud is the other party's reputation.
And? If there's no middle man then ultimately someone (in this case it sounds like the buyer) has total control over the transaction. It doesn't matter what UPS says, if they don't want to release the funds they don't have to.
In a dark market like this the ONLY protection you have against fraud is the other party's reputation.
Did you even read the article? It describes how a third party (arbiter) is agreed to by each party. It takes 2 out of 3 signatures to finalize the transaction (minus arbiter fee).
That's not what I meant.
Well, if the FBI were smart, then it would have been them writing that software. Or asked the NSA to do it for them. As a bonus, they get all other information on the participant's computers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It has an escrow functionality, with an arbiter chosen by consensus between the buyer and the seller. The buyer and the seller can both provide the tracking number to the arbiter, and the arbiter decides who gets the funds: the buyer (effectively reversing the transaction) or the seller (completing it).
There are a number of things that the Slashdot community - full of nerds and techies - is just stupid and naive about. This is clearly one of them.
So, defenders of this idea. Mr. "Well, you wouldn't shower in public, so why should your transactions be public," and all people with similar viewpoints - What are the circumstances where you feel that something like this would be useful/necessary?
And it's not enough to say "I want the gub'ment out of mah bidness!" Because you are not stupid, and you know just as well as I do that there has never been a "black market" in the history of the world that was a force for righteousness and truth. You don't buy a black market gun in the US because you're law-abiding. You know, just as well as I do, that the main reason people will use this is to buy things that are illegal, for uses that are likely to cause harm to someone. So it needs a reason for a reasonable society to allow it to exist.
This is an honest question and I'm really interested in the discussion. Why should this exist?
So let me get this straight:
There is this site. A site designed for illegal activities...
And all I need to do is load their software onto my computer? Gosh, where do I sign up.
I mean, I always trust software from shady characters. That sounds totally safe.
If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket'
Can we get some editors to remove this crap? It's just a stupid marketing gimmick -- "What, you haven't heard of [PRODUCT_NAME]? You must be living under a rock! Everyone who's anyone knows about [PRODUCT_NAME]!"
I doubt there will be any "legitimate" uses of this particular technology.
However, it may be a model on which we can base future online retail. The existing model is utterly broken: I really don't want databases all over the world holding my username, password, credit card details and billing address waiting for the next SQL or SSL vulnerability to vomit the information into the hands of criminals. Nor do I want to trust, use or respect services like paypal.
View this as an iteration towards a more secure and decentralised system for legitimate commerce which keeps credit card and escrow companies out of the equation. Surely that is a good thing?
Testiculos habet et bene pendentes.
I mostly agree with you but given the explosion of laws and regulations in the last few years, and the spying, data aggregation, and just general surveillance, many things that were assumed to be private are not.
http://www.threefeloniesaday.c...
http://thehill.com/regulation/...
We are moving toward and not away from totalitarian states. Freedom is decreasing in the world, both personally and economically.
T.H. White’s totalitarian principle: “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”
That is why stuff like this is good, even if it may be used for bad things (just like a gun, knife, rope, car, brick, rock, club, axe, or a sharp pointy stick...).
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Devil's advocate - what about "Dallas Buyer's Club"?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
It seems like this could the kind of market where anyone who wanted to avoid regulators could exchange goods. I could see people using this for way more then drugs.
I like Cuban rum and cigars, and I disagree with the outdated embargo law that prevents me from getting them at the local rum and cigar store.
Having watched Dallas Buyer's Club a few weeks back, it comes to mind that one could want to purchase medications that are arbitrarily banned by the FDA because corporate interests have a large lobbying arm.
I agree with your point that the majority of U.S. users will not be engaging in "legitimate" business dealings, but I doubt there has been a government that has never banned a substance/item/idea because of pressure from special interest groups. A system like this could be used by people in [OppressiveCountryName] for something as honest as buying a book that has been banned.
Nice, Bodhammer - that's a really interesting example. But the thing is, it's still an example of a "harmful illegal drug" that some people want to opt out of the regulations of, and assume the risk of any damage that happens. So it's not that different from pot or LSD, for instance - and while I'm in favor of legalization I'm generally not in favor of large black markets. Or dudes whose goal is to circumvent FDA trials because they think they can make a quick buck off of a bunch of desperate and dying people. (Remember, if AZT was in trials during the time period - if it had been found to have fatal side effects, there wouldn't be an oscar-winning movie about the guy... or if there were, he would be the bad guy. He wanted to make money, he got lucky. It happens.)
Unless, of course, you meant the MOVIE Dallas Buyer's Club - you know, the one whose owners are trademark trolling and actively looking for venues with judges who don't understand modern IP law or the internet so they can most effectively push their MPAA tactics... THAT I would buy over a digital black market rather than paying them :-)
You disagree with a law doesn't give you a moral right to break it.
I like that you're not even bothering to argue that the law is unjust or unfair - just that you don't like it. While I appreciate the honestly, I don't think this counts as a legitimate use.
Plus, it's not like either of those things are even vaguely difficult to get.
Also, I seriously doubt you actually like either Cuban rum or cigars.
Historically, black markets have not been used for banned books. Tell me honestly - do you think "purchasing banned books" will be a thing that will ever happen on DarkMarket?
Yawn. "Should be" is not a recognized scientific or legal term.
If the law is wrong - and the Embargo is - you sure as fuck bet you have a moral right to break it!
Granting the illegal bit, illegal does not equate to "causing harm to someone". Would that it did -- that would be so very rational. However, there are plenty of things one might want to spend money on that are illegal but harm no one but arguably yourself. Drugs is one obvious example, but in many parts of the world buying pornography or sexual toys/aids is illegal, all the way up to being a capital crime. In China or much of the Moslem world, an enormous number of things are illegal that don't harm anyone or anything but the nominal reputation of Islam or Mohammed or Allah, or that represent freedom for repressed majorities like women. We're not really talking only about the relatively permissive US or Western Europe, in other words.
Of course people will use this to do some things that are directly intended to harm others in non-victimless-crime ways: Steal/pirate and resell IP of various sorts, fence stolen goods, arrange for a hit on your alimony-hungry ex-wife (maybe, dunno if that is a "commodity" it can handle), engage in human trafficking, sell arms. But some people will use it to buy freedom from oppressive governments that have made a whole lot of things that harm no one illegal because they violate some statement made in a piece of pure scriptural crack if you squint your eyes just right when you read it. Because there is rarely any percentage in prosecuting crimes of this sort once one cannot detect them or stop them for long enough for violations to become commonplace, it might even motivate social change.
To me personally, the tool is not going to be terribly useful. I'm heterosexual and married, my primary vices are at least quasi-legal and tolerated where I live, and I consider buying stolen goods of most varieties to be unethical. It isn't clear that I'd resort to it if I lived in e.g. a Moslem country and had a thing for porn -- no matter how nominally secure, the penalties are pretty horrendous. But I'm guessing that there are those who will value it who aren't planning to use it to hurt others.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
A little hint: A fair load of people who know how to use disassemblers didn't start out in the IT security business.
Do you think this piece of software existed for more than a few seconds before it was fed to a DA and analyzed 'til it croaked?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Citizens of the former East Bloc would disagree that there are no legitimate and righteous reasons for a black market. Mostly, whether a black market is "morally ok" depends on how morally corrupt your laws are.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ok. It is nobody's business, and if someone makes it their business, they're wrong.
Better?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you get busted this would make excellent evidence...
Maybe I'm confused, but it sounds to me like what 'DarkMarket' is doing is irrevocably marking some transactions as being associated with DarkMarket. That strikes me as much like writing 'I was used to buy drugs' on a $50 note except that someone can check the entire transaction history of the $50 note back to the beginning of time.
I guess it will be interesting for researchers assess the proportion of BC that is being used for dubious purposes (unless you actually believe things like 'banned books' are going to be traded on DarkMarket except at the very margins), and feds who want to find people selling drugs (because BC itself is not anonymous).
And what happens if the Arbiter sends both replies to the block chain? Who 'win's?
Bye!
You're that guy who gets in the carpool lane and drives at exactly the speed limit, aren't you?
I've always thought the banking systems should be replaced by decentralized servers, where each individual has a banking server. So instead of going to a central bank for processing, transactions would be issued to the server for the "account" instead.
I figure the government wouldn't like that much.
And most people wouldn't like it because you wouldn't have guaranteed deposits with such a system.
But you could just as easily shift the focus of the banking cartels to being the hosts for such decentralized servers, taking on the responsibility for security and backups on behalf of the account owner/holder.
Just as a for-example, imagine GNU Cash with a remote access protocol that lets other people's GNU Cash instances post transaction pieces to your box. So when your employer issues a direct deposit, instead of going to a bank, it goes to your server and gets deposited directly to your personal server and account using protocols along the line of Bitcoin.
I figure it's the only way to break the US stranglehold on the global banking systems.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Considering how hard it is to find "accidentally leak a couple of bits of your private key" bugs when you've got the original source code, I don't know if that improves the situation. I'm too lazy to click around and find out, but I assume they published their protocol so there can be multiple implementations of the client.
Wow, what a flawless system! Except...
You show up in person to buy or sell drugs and it's a sting. You mail them and it gets seized or the target and/or sender gets arrested via tracking. Or you mail them to a central escrow hub that also gets traced and arrested and shut down. What a great set of 3 options.
You are naive. This piece of software has probably not seen one single competent analysis even now.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Considering how long it too to find Heartbleed and that it was found not by source-code analysis but because some people noticed extra bytes in the keep-alive messages, people feeling secure using this thing are likely just kidding themselves. And if there is any real crypto in it, the typical ordinary "hacker" with a big ego and rather pathetic skills does not stand a chance to find or understand anything.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I did not mean the pirated movie, I meant the concept of buying something that was forbidden by the laws at the time. I watched DBC in blu-ray from Redbox for $1.50 plus tax.
As I said, Devil's advocate here - There are way too many people, organizations, and governments that want to tell me what to do and how to live my life and I would like a way to "just say no", and do what I want to do with my body, my mind, my money, and as long as it does not infringe on anyone else, its my business and should be free from view.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
it could also be guns, credit card numbers, or exploits
Whichever one is received first. The escrow portion of this is the easy and simple part, and you guys are over-complicating it.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Why, and why? You raise questions and jump to conclusions, but all without answers. Why is this not anonymous (more or less), and what is wrong with the code? Have you reviewed it? Just blind suspicion?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
That this site will be used for selling sex toys in "Moslem countries" and maybe unauthorized copies of "Star Wars" or where people in Muslim countries can share Dutch Cartoons or where people in Christian countries can share copies of "Of The Origin of Species."
Then again, maybe it will be like the previous "Silk Road" and be all about opium and kitty porn and services to kill people.
Your heart is in the right place, but your post is a bit of joke in the sense you don't go visit mafia thugs to share free speech except in funny 1980s movies.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
"You show up in person to buy or sell drugs and it's a sting. "
You mail them and it gets seized or the target and/or sender gets arrested via tracking.
It's ALL GOOD as long as it is YOU!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
You say that as if they aren't behind all of this already? Who's to say that Silk Road, Bit Coin, TOR etc aren't all just honeypot projects for the NSA? I mean if I was in charge that's the way I'd do it. Let all the small players continue doing business on you Darknet until someone gets too big for their boots then you take them out. I know it sounds a bit Hollywood, but it would the most effective means of control.
You are naive. This piece of software has probably not seen one single competent analysis even now.
You'd be surprised. The union of people who are competent with IDA Pro (and similar tools) and people interested in Bitcoin is a surprisingly large set. Find a provable backdoor in an application like this and you've got yourself a very good candidate for at least a DEFCON talk, maybe a job at Matasano.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I wouldn't know because I've been fortunate to live in a country that doesn't suffer from fundamentalist, totalitarian rule. Maybe there are some christians in North Korea that would want to buy a bible?
You're obviously struggling to disconnect the tech from what it could be used for though. You're question was why this tech should exist. I gave you a very benign purpose that one could use it for as an example, thinking you could extrapolate on what other uses you might take for granted that not every person in the world is allowed. The medication example I used was meant to be the more compelling argument.
As soon as you decided to trade with someone else, you potentially infringed on someone else, and that's why we have a society with laws to govern it. If you truly don't want to interact with anyone else, you'll have to go find a log cabin somewhere.
So put it in a VM with a firewall blocking anything except what is precisely expected.
Plus, they have more to lose (their entire market) by exploiting their members than they have to gain (a functioning black market of their own design).
I hate printers.
Because the people involved in some of them are all well known non-Government types, especially Tor. Besides, even if it were an NSA honeypot, the code is thoroughly understood and vetted, the protocol openly implemented and the actual servers are controlled by a very large number of disparate people and orgs.
Even if it DID start out as an NSA honeypot, they can't be getting too much from it as it does deliver well on its promise.
I hate printers.
A law has to be very, very wrong to have a moral mandate to break it. Most people breaking laws out of "principle" are just doing it because they find the law inconvenient. Laws and rules are the oil of social machinery. Don't be the sand in the crankcase.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
You disagree with a law doesn't give you a moral right to break it.
I'm rather glad the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party do not share your beliefs. The thing is, there are just laws and there are unjust laws. At the end of the day, as a thinking individual, it is up to you to decide personally which is which and to further decide whether or not you will obey it. And if you choose not to obey it, to be prepared for the consequences flowing from it.
History is full of examples of people who chose to disobey unjust laws, such as Ms. Rosa Parks who decided that the race segregation laws at that time were unjust and refused to obey it.
Laws are the creation of ordinary flawed men, often to benefit a particular class or segment of the population at the expense of others. Just because something is "the law" does not mean that it is just, right, immutable or unchallengeable. The more we humans learn to think critically for ourselves instead of blindly following "the law" like sheep, the better it will be for humankind.
If you found anything that could remotely point to a hint of something that could resemble anything like this, you can tour the cons for at least half a year.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't want colleagues or (future) employers to know what music I listen to, what my political preference is, where I go for entertainment, what kind of kinky fetishes I might have and such. I don't like targeted ads, since they tend to target me in any situation, private or not, with ads that are also based on my *personal* preferences.
Even if all I do is legal *now*, it may be illegal in the future and frowned upon when people watch logs.
Keep in mind that every person commits two felonies and dozens of misdemeanour's every day. If everything you do is tracked, you will get penalized for all af them, putting *everyone* in prison. Laws are there so that if somebody really crosses a boundary that society won't accept, there is a fair reason to put them trough court. If we start to automatically punish everyone for every crime they commit, because we give up privacy, our world stops functioning. We need privacy to remain the default in order to function as individuals *and* as a society.
Yes, privacy isn't the same as anonymity but in order to remain private in the current society you almost always need anonymity if you're doing it online, so in practice they are synonymous.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's a python app, so there is no binary.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The DarkMarket daemon incorporates a library of commands for peer-to-peer networking known as ZeroMQ, which allows the user’s PC to become a node in a distributed network where every user can communicate directly with every other user.
At the moment, DarkMarket displays only a bare IP address for every user, but the system’s creators say it will eventually show a pseudonym for each one and also allow product searches.
They do mention in the article that this isn't done yet, but this feature - an anonymous buyer being able to reliably, securely reach an anonymous source and transfer real money in exchange for products - seems somewhat central to the whole idea.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
That's probably how it'll end up. Cryptography software is now drug paraphernalia.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
While I agree in principle on the black market concept, you should also not forget about one small detail about the War on Drugs:
It's a failure
The target is right, but the method isn't. It's got all kinds of problems, but the most important one is that it has utterly and completely failed to reach its goal. Or even come close to it. It's like waging a war against terrorists hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan by bombing Iraq... oh, wait...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
A rule of law system is based on the assumption that 'everyone kows the law'.
The simple reality today is that there isn't a person alive who can honestly say he 'knows the law'.
There are simply to much laws on the books, it is flatout impossible for any one person to even approach 'knowing the law' (hell, even if you make reading up on the law a fulltime job for the rest of your life, by the time you die there would be more laws you dindn't know then when you started, the current system is that insane)
the legal profession sepperates laws in 'malum in se' and "malum prohibitum",
'malum in se' are laws that can be argued from first principles, things that are bad in of themselves (e.g. rape, murder, assault, theft)
'malum prohibitum' laws are illegal merely because the government said so, they're just a subtle form of mob rule
If the powers that be are out to get you you're screwed, no matter how hard you try to color within the lines.
Consequently I respect malum in se laws, malum prohibitum laws get no respect at all.
Drugs don't hurt anyone? So you think drug cartels who kill thousands of people every year to feed our western need for drugs don't hurt anyone? And you don't think the cost to our health systems to deal with substance abuse "hurts" or at least costs our society money (the victims being the ones who loose out because resources are instead spent on dealing with the problems caused by drugs)? The expression "there is no such thing as a victimless crime" is correct in almost all cases...
You are confusing the cost of the drugs and the cost of the prohibition of drugs. Its a bit like molesting someone and then complaining that they aren't stable later in life.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
That's true. But I think there would be a few Swiss bankers interested in this. And - perhaps on the more principled side - some people who are trying to send cash to their families in Botswana (for example) from their place of employ in Dubai (for example) and enthusiastic about avoiding charges from Western Union (for example).
So I too see ID Cards in that very "papers please" light. They are a tool that gives power to the Gov and adds nothing to the people forced to carry them. Just Say No!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Why do we need prescriptions to buy drugs?
Drug resistance, drug abuse, personal danger taking some drugs with out any sort of warning or medical intervention?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Seems to me that your "but" implies that "harm no one" is false.
Now, arguably, harming yourself is not anyone else's business. On the other hand, leaving society to clean up after you is society's business....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
A law has to be very, very wrong to have a moral mandate to break it. Most people breaking laws out of "principle" are just doing it because they find the law inconvenient. Laws and rules are the oil of social machinery. Don't be the sand in the crankcase.
Quite the opposite. Lawbreakers are going out of their way, taking a huge risk, to make a point.
The mindless drones who equate lawful with moral are the ones taking the easy way out, avoiding the inconvenience of having to use reason and logic and truth and reality to factor into their decisions.
Laws and rules are the oil of social machinery.
You can keep your machines, I prefer my human beings. You shouldn't be mechanizing anyone. That's not your job as a person. It is your job to side with the human spirit.
I might be missing something, but isn't it usually easier to get a back door into software than to seize a server? Reading the articles it's using or piggybacking on P2P, but you have to get the software from -somewhere- initially, and I assume there will be updates. Even if those updates are pushed out via the integrated P2P network, I'd imagine there's still ways they could compromise it. And wouldn't the tracking of user names make things more dangerous should the software be compromised?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
"Oh, crap. This site was actually seized by the FBI. So come on."
Well, duh, Slashdotters. I guess that the Silk Road is 1.5x worse than the strongest storm last year (Haiyan).
Remember, if AZT was in trials during the time period - if it had been found to have fatal side effects, there wouldn't be an oscar-winning movie about the guy... or if there were, he would be the bad guy. He wanted to make money, he got lucky. It happens.
Woodruff WAS the bad guy who smuggled non-effective medicine. He SHOULD have been the bad guy of the movie: "Worse, the real Woodruff rejected the one truly promising drug at the time, AZT, as hopelessly toxic and instead smuggled drugs like Peptide T, which never panned out. " (from Science Based Medicine).
Points a) and b) are not as prevalent as you'd think - Americans don't all 'live on credit'. You do see a lot of card-based transactions, but they're either debit transactions or credit transactions of convenience. I'm not sure what the UK equivalent is, but funds I spend via my debit card (looks just like a credit card; even has Visa on it) come directly from my bank account linked to that card. It's like a card-based check (cheque to you). Debit card volume in the US exceeds credit card usage.
The other thing you see is people using their credit card to make purchases to get 'points' or other rewards. Personally I don't bother with that, since the CC companies are betting that you'll 1) forget to pay off your balance on time, 2) let the points expire, or 3) earn fewer points than the yearly cost of the card. I only have CC's with no annual fee, and I don't have time to bother with balance-juggling.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The original question was "Why should this exist?", so direct your complaint to the GPP.
Several things:
1) If you are spending large amounts of money, picking up a 2-300 netbook or websurfer as a burner PC isn't really a big deal. You only use it for that activity. Bonus is you can lock it down with encryption etc... without interfering with your normal PC.
2) It may be about illegal activities, but not all illegal activities are illegal everywhere. Not all illegal drugs are cocaine or meth. Maybe you want to buy a generic cancer treatment drug from India that costs 200$ rather than 5,000$ dollars, but it is illegal because it is patented in your country of residence...
Do you think this piece of software existed for more than a few seconds before it was fed to a DA and analyzed 'til it croaked?
Yes.
I'm also in Europe, but probably not exactly the same place as you. But having been to the US many times, I agree that there are a lot of cultural differences, and I suspect most Europeans are much more aware of these differences than most Americans.
At least in Norway, which is my home country, debit cards are the norm when paying for things - the only places I generally pay cash is when I get a beer from the beer-fridge at the room of the student orchestra I'm sometimes hanging out with in the basement of my university. Basically everything else is plastic. These cards are *not* expensive to use. They are also the main form of ID for people without a driver's license - which includes *a lot* of young people in the cities, as cars are (due to taxes) very expensive to buy, own and run, but public transport is quite good.
France, where I currently live, debit cards are also very common. You use cash when buying a coffee at a café or a beer at the pub or a bread at the bakery, but not when getting groceries etc. Public transport isn't so good tough, but cars are cheap, so people drive almost everywhere.
Switzerland, which happens to be 1-2 km from where I live - I cross this border multiple times per day, often on a pedal bike if the weather is nice as it takes less time than going by car + a nice free exercise to get me going in the morning - is a bit different. Here a lot of places don't accept cards, so you need to carry a lot more cash. Public transport is, again, quite good. Speaking of ID, I've only once been asked for it at the border (having crossed it probably thousands of times).
And since you mention it: Neither places are armed robberies considered a big problem. The whole "needing a gun to protect yourself" culture is extremely alien to us. It's not that guns are rare - both Norway and Switzerland is quite high on the statistics of gun ownership - but they are used for hunting, by the military, and for target shooting. Thus pistols and similar "concealable" weapons are rare, while hunting rifles, shotguns, and often full-auto military rifles (now usually without some small but hard to manufacture and vital piece) are common.
Yea, remotely possible, but there are just too many eyes on the Tor project to make it realistically likely.
If we can't trust even the most thoroughly reviewed projects, then we really can't trust anything except burning brands and pitchforks as tools of political change.
I hate printers.
"As soon as you decided to trade with someone else, you potentially infringed on someone else" - I don't understand, please elaborate about how two parties trading infringe on a third party.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I specifically said "Maybe the laws regarding drugs are great." The use of perscriptions wasn't something I was arguing. I was arguing that we have become a little too trusting of those in authority when we don't even question such laws.
Look for a reason to smile you jaded #*^ *(%$
In an era where segments of the population would refuse to take The Chip for religious or political reasons, they would have no choice but to turn to something like Dark Market to conduct daily commerce, find work, and otherwise function on a barter system.
"You disagree with a law doesn't give you a moral right to break it." Civil Rights would have died a quiet death if this was true; we have an obligation to ignore or break immoral laws, unjust legislation, and government oppression and over reach and we should do so through peaceful means until that option is untenable and the moral requirment to invoke the 2nd Amendment comes to play.
I was pointing out that I could name a few reasons off the top of my head why authorities control drugs the way they do.
I agree, question authority. But there are stupid questions, and often too, stupid answers.
There are some things that should be pretty goddamned self evident as being good ideas. Child labor, safe food and drugs, etc.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Well, I don't agree with you on the drugs. They should be legalized - if for no other reason than to quit spending valuable resources on victimless crimes. Plus legalizing drugs will reduce violence, make them safer (with regulation), and generate revenue through taxes.
Look for a reason to smile you jaded #*^ *(%$
I was thinking of drugs as pharmaceuticals. I don't think though that all drugs are victimless.
Meth, cocaine, heroin... incredibly addictive substances that really fuck with people's brains in the short to medium term. Tobacco might be highly addictive and destructive in the long term, but a pack of smokes isn't likely to drive you to break into someone's house and steal their valuables to pay for your habit.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
i was talking about pharmaceuticals. The war on drugs is horse shit, although I think that keeping some drugs like meth and crack if not illegal, then somehow regulated, is generally a good idea. These are not kind drugs.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Did you mean intersection?
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Well you gotta take the good with the bad with the DarkMarket. Sure, maybe a Dallas Buyer's Club scenario might seem more legitimate to the average person (or a market for any legitimate pharmaceutical drugs at lower prices because a huge markup in Europe / North America). But what about all the other nasty, illegal stuff will this be used for? The creators of this can't control the goods and services that are sold any more than the creators of bittorrent can control the files being transferred around.
Sure, maybe some drugs seem harmless and you can argue they're a victimless crime or whatever. What about all the other insidious shit out there that this will be used to peddle? CP, hit-man & assassination services, weapons, slavery, identity theft and stolen credit cards... surely the concept of DarkMarket opens up a new market for all these types of transactions too - you can't expect these services to be somehow excluded. In my utilitarianism-based opinion; this is a far greater harm than good for the world; the benefits of being able to buy some recreational drugs or make purchases anonymously is heavily outweighed by giving the rich the ability to put out a hit some some journalist with a dissenting opinion (with a much lower chance of being caught than without this service), or a new market for CP, etc..
I wish the creators of this project would realize this. Maybe this is just somehow acceptable in the worldview of the anarchist or the libertarian-leaning types. Or maybe it's morally rationalized by some thoughts on the lines of "Hey, I didn't kill those thousands of people! I only sold those guns to that corrupt African warlord" or "I only helped create the software that assist people making illegal transactions, I didn't actually sell or make that CP" and somehow absolve themselves from guilt because they're not the ones making the transaction. I might not agree with the current laws on drugs, but I certainly don't support this project.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
then we really can't trust anything except burning brands and pitchforks as tools of political change.
sarcasm:
But what if the NSA has bugged the pitchforks in some vast conspiracy with the pitchfork industry? I also heard from [source of dubious credibility] that they were putting a backdoor kill-switch in burning brands. And don't get me started on the homemade devices crowd, they're just [NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.] front men.... wake up sheeple! end sarcasm
Seriously. Either you have to believe that the government secretly runs everything or else you have to admit that something might just be genuinely homegrown and therefore not a government plant. I can't say I know everything about the inner workings of the NSA etc. I can say that if they are as organized and efficient as your average DMV (who are also a government organization with access to massive amounts of computer technology), we're all gunna be just fine.
But hey, that's just my opinion as dictated to me by the chem-trails I inhaled this morning. Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to cash my check from the [insert name of your favorite world-controlling organization here].
I can attest -- Lawdy, Lawdy -- that the drug prohibition laws are far more expensive than any possible effect of the drugs themselves. Marijuana, for example, is in no way as bad for your health as being arrested for possessing marijuana. Its direct cost to a user -- once all of the artificial price increase associated with it being illegal is removed -- is orders of magnitude less costly than the complex mix of legal expenses to the user and the state, the cost of enforcing the law, and of course the cost of punishing (usually incarcerating) the user if they are caught with anything less than a tiny amount of the substance. The cost of drug laws worldwide is credibly estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars -- say half a trillion. One could feed the hungry and bring about World Peace if one diverted all of this insanely spent money to other purposes and just let drug users use drugs, with fairly benign restrictions on what they can do while they are doing so.
Even the really bad, scary, truly dangerous drugs are in some sense self-limiting in proportion to their danger. Heroin is mighty bad, and extremely addicting. Like tobacco, only not quite as addicting. But if heroin were inexpensive and legal, instead of being horrendously expensive and illegal, an entire shadow government and underworld would be instantly starved for money and would wither and die, and heroin addicts would be no worse off trying to work and manage their lives with a daily fix of cheap heroin than they would be with a daily fix of expensive methadone. They'd have about the same chance of getting tired of it and deciding to kick the addiction, or maybe even a greater one if we spent a tiny bit of the money we wouldn't be spending in the war on heroin on free addiction treatment programs and public education.
People who end up fond of much worse combos -- PCP plus cocaine plus heroin -- well, I'm sure that it is really bad for them, but for better or worse that sort of thing will very likely kill them quickly, and even that is comparatively cheap compared to the lifetime costs of arresting them, putting them into prison for decades where they contract HIV and come out real criminals with a whole lot of anger and a expensive chronic diseases to manage while still not being over whatever it was that cause them to be a hard core addict in the first place.
Drug cartels, my friend, exist because drugs are illegal. Legalize pretty much everything, and "cartels" vanish overnight. We've already been through this once -- Prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to organized crime in the US, at least until drug prohibition came along with an even higher profit margin. Lose the prohibition, empty the prisons of all drug offenders who don't have an associated violent crime tagged on, and watch crime rates, murder rates, the number of police in our police state, the number of lawyers (drug laws being a huge boon to lawyers, of course) and courts, all plummet. There isn't any real money in drugs without the prohibition -- anybody can grow pot in their back yard, cocaine would cost a few dollars a pound if it weren't for drug laws, heroin ditto. And most people would still avoid both of these, because both of them are pretty dangerous and addiction or life problems associated with them would be expensive and embarrassing, just as they are now for smokers and alcoholics.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
No real argument, but next we're going to be referencing "The Tragedy of the Commons" and "The Tyranny of Democracy" and related works. Human society works because we all make certain trade-offs of our personal freedom against our security. If we were rational, we would actually do a cost-benefit analysis of our legal system to determine whether it makes more sense to eliminate (for example) intellectual property laws, making it perfectly legal to copy any work or produce anything we know how to produce, or maintain any variant of the existing IP laws. Sadly, we're not. But a lot of the drug laws -- pot in particular -- are low hanging fruit. There is really no question that it costs far more to keep pot illegal than it ever could cost society legal.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
It's an interesting idea, but if you could do that then the transaction information attached by DarkMarket would not be valuable/useful because it would be possible to forge that information. Otherwise a good idea, though.
Was the goal of the SR bust to get the individual dealers though? Tumbling is an interesting way of obscuring the source, although I don't imagine it will be terribly long before you start seeing tumbler operators going to gaol for money laundering (which is exactly what they are doing). There are also a range of limitations to tumbling: it is only effective if there are BCs from numerous sources, and no individual has a disproportionately large number of BCs in the pool (otherwise he/she will just wind up with a disproportionately large number of their own BCs).
It isn't impossible to track a transaction through a tumbler, although it is difficult (which is how it is possible for people like this to hunt BC thieves, but that needs real-time intervention).
But yeah, tumblers can provide some level of anonymity to those who do use them.
I think you are getting the time-line wrong here.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Taking mind altering drugs is normal human and animal instinct. You mentioned you take legal mind altering substances so that's pretty hypocritical to say illegal ones are any different considering the basis of their illegality is not based in logic or science.
What if those well known anti-Govt types are double agents? What if those disparate people and orgs mostly have the same paymaster? I appreciate I'm venturing into tinfoil hat territory here, but prior to Edward Snowden if you told me what the NSA were capable of I would've have laughed in your face. It's not that hard if you have the resources. Setup a few thousand high bandwidth TOR exit nodes and analyse everything that goes through them. Run a few BTC wallets/exchanges/mixers, and setup a few dealer accounts on Silk Road and collect all the transactions and addresses you are sending illegal contraband to. Based on what I've seen the NSA have the capability to do this with their eyes closed. It's really only a matter of if they have the intent.
There are plenty of guns in Europe. Austria you only have to be over 18 to buy rifles. CC is less common but i know of several people that had CC and did carry. I am now it Switzerland and well i know of quite a few gun owners here to.
Gun crime is not related to gun ownership from the statistics anyway.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
South park never lies.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?