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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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?
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.