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Silk Road 2.0 Seized By FBI, Alleged Founder Arrested In San Francisco
blottsie writes The FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall, a 26-year-old in San Francisco, who the agency claims ran the massive online black market Silk Road 2.0. Benthall's FBI arrest comes a year after that of Ross Ulbricht, also from San Francisco, who's the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road and still awaiting trial. The largest of those reported down is Silk Road 2.0. But a host of smaller markets also seized by law enforcement include Appaca, BlueSky, Cloud9, Hydra, Onionshop, Pandora, and TheHub. Also at Ars Technica.
You need a form of currency that cannot be tracked that is accepted by the receiving party. Bitcoins are one kind of currency that fulfills that requirement
Bitcoin is absolutely not anonymous. It's more anonymous than a direct bank-to-bank transfer, but every transaction is recorded publicly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
they got Slik Road 1.0 the site but not anything like a customer registry or order history.
That's not true. The FBI had full admin access to Silk Road 1.0 for several months before they shut it down. People around the world were arrested.
Most of the Google results are this new 2.0 arrest. Here are some articles about sellers from SR1.0 getting arrested.
http://www.law360.com/articles/479177/8-more-silk-road-arrests-reported-in-us-europe
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/silk-road-merchant-arrested-over-sale-drugs-guns-cash-n35691
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-09-05/news/bs-md-silk-road-sentencing-20140905_1_dread-pirate-roberts-ross-william-ulbricht-jacob-theodore-george-iv
There's another reason why selling drugs online is a bad idea. After SR1.0 got shut down, there were a bunch of forum posts from people who had been fronted large amounts of drugs to sell online. The drugs had been sent out, and then the resulting bitcoins got seized by the Feds. Now they owed very unpleasant people huge amounts of money that they didn't have.