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After Silk Road 2.0 Bust, Eyes Turn To 'Untouchable' Decentralized Market
apexcp sends this article from The Daily Dot:
Following a wave of Dark Net arrests that brought down the famous anonymous drug market Silk Road 2.0, all eyes have turned to a marketplace called OpenBazaar that is designed to be impossible to shut down. Described as the "next generation of uncensored trade" and a "safe untouchable marketplace," OpenBazaar is fundamentally different from all the online black markets that have come before it, because it is completely decentralized. If authorities acted against OpenBazaar users, they could arrest individuals, but the network would survive. "If you're thinking about OpenBazaar as Silk Road 3.0, you're thinking about it much too narrowly," said OpenBazaar operations lead Sam Patterson in an interview last night. "I actually think it's much more powerful as eCommerce 2.0."
You're connecting directly to people's IP addresses! For fuck's sake, guys! Are you even trying to make it anonymous anymore?
Since it's decentralized, they'll have to go after the actual users. Maybe throw some of them in jail. And since the network will survive, they can generate a steady stream of arrests, rather than shutting down the network and having to find out where all the users have buggered off to.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'll wait for silk road 4.0
said OpenBazaar operations lead Sam Patterson
Should he get banged up too, for facilitating criminal activity or something? Are these people really that fucking stupid?
This is missing one of Silk Road's major features of "washing" your BitCoins through a central pool. Without the laundering facilities available, it becomes a lot easier to track sellers down.
I suppose a decentralized eBay-ish thing could be handy, but without the money laundering, it's a lot less useful.
This looks great in concept but, having everyone run it on their own machines and host their own store means encouraging lots of people to be vulnerable to every security issue that comes along. Oops one remote exploit and anyone's anonymity can be compromised.
Now, I am not fool, I realize that many of the bigger players will take more steps will protect themselves with dedicated servers rented under false identities etc....but the vast majority are being encouraged to leave themselves exposed to every vulnerablity that comes along because they don't have the sophistication to play the game that they are being encouraged to play.
This is one of the reasons I really liked the concept of freenet....sure everyone is hosting but, there is author anonimty beyond simply "you can't find my IP", there is actual separation between hosted data and how it is published.
Of course, I haven't tried it in years but, the problem always more seemed to be speed than anything since it is funadamentally a storage and retrieval mechanism and not a transport layer.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
After watching the video with the guy from OpenBazaar, and from things I've read lately about where capitalism is going, I have to wonder, where is the end game in all this?
AirBnB threatens the hotel/motel paradigm, Lift and Uber threaten taxis, now OpenBazaar threatens online commerce, bitcoin, etc;
These new services appear to be starting a crack, albeit a small one, in the current model of how money is made and by who.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
dark wallet will be integrated, I'll be using the open bazaar for legal transactions, selling to people without asking ebay for permission and having to use that paypal crap
Seriously, if you're running across someone else's network and/or on someone else's hardware, you can't keep this anonymous.
Even if you're running on your OWN hardware, you still have to interconnect. And there just isn't a good, reliable way to remain anonymous.
If someone can get in and see your wares, the feds can as well. At which point, you take up residence in FPMITA prison and they liquidate your life for cash.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I don't see why that can't be a completely separate service. It should be perfectly legal to trade one coin for another, and it is legal to value your privacy. Suspicious, perhaps, given that everyone's been giving up all their personal info left and right, but legal. Am I wrong?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
A decentralized free market like that is good for many reasons. The way to get something like that established is to focus on uncontroversial business. If it primarily becomes a tool for illegal dealings, merely having the software on your computer might be construed by courts as evidence of illegal activity.
That would be hilarious and I quite frankly think that the governments of the world have heard enough from content owners that this is probably the case.
Yes, legal. It will also be used as an excuse to trigger an audit once the powers that be connect IPs to taxpayers.
People give up their liberties when government cries "ILLEGAL". The problem is, there is no crime between two willing people.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Federal prosecutors in February accused two of the biggest US honey processors - Honey Solutions of Texas and Groeb Farms Inc of Michigan - of buying illegal Chinese imports of the product in order to avoid being assessed tens of millions of dollars under the anti-dumping duties. The companies were fined a total of $3 million but, under deferred-prosecution agreements, won't face further penalties if they don't repeat the conduct alleged.
Also charged were five individuals, including four US honey brokers, who prosecutors say took part in a scheme that led to the evasion of more than $180 million in duties and the sale of honey containing an antibiotic not approved in the US.
China Daily USA 07/01/2013
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
will kill a big part of site users
The problem is, there is no crime between two willing people.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. There's a whole class of crimes that involve willing, if misinformed or deceived, people: fraud.
And while the definition of "willing" is debatable, the impact of consent is also subject to reasonable (IMHO) constraints, as with minors or people of otherwise diminished capacity (drugged, intoxicated, or mentally retarded). Once you start accounting for the nuances of reality, your maxim doesn't have quite the same truthy ring to it anymore.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Nope, that's only because you follow the feminist religion (you are a piece of trash that should be killed btw, as with all feminists).
Old Testament allows men to have female children as brides, so does Islam, so do the Vedic religions.
It is only your Feminist religion that disallows men female children no matter what (no matter if the girl and man both want it).
It seems like OpenBazaar is off to a good start, but there is still a long way to go before users can use it with confidence. Some issues I can think of that the current implementation doesn't yet solve
Privacy/viewability of content between "open" nodes and "darknet" nodes. If OpenBazaar is to be equally for people selling homemade handicrafts and those who want to sell or trade in substances their governments find illicit, its going to be a big issue to have both of them displayed side by side. How do you browse for sellers of what you want and what sort of search algorithm do they have? After all, if "Etsy Jane" goes online and says "Show me all current sellers", and a percentage of what comes up includes the illicit, she's not going to be likely to want to transact on the same site. Likewise, "Silk Road Sam" opens up the marketplace and sees a whole bunch of people who are not there looking for his illicit wares, he's not going to be comfortable selling knowing that any busybody or "do-gooder" could see, call attention to, and otherwise make trouble for him. Unless they go with the very restrictive "You have to know the specific identity of the user or group of users in order to see their sales/buy from them etc.", a la say..RetroShare etc.. this will be a problem. The other option for them to have specific "groups" so to speak - connect to Node X for Y Goods etc.. but this could be a point of failure as well, as whomever manages/monitors "Node X", could be in control and thus vulnerable. Maybe there's something I've not seen yet that deals with these issues, but it is important to facilitate good usage. In a related discussion, there's a big difference between "Accessible optionally to those using TOR" and "Only accessible to TOR or other darknet users". If connecting is only optional, then its possible that clearnet connections could be leveraged to gain more information about obfuscated traders and the like. Ultimately, figuring out who sees WHAT buyers and sellers will be important and what qualifications are deemed necessary, who deems them so, and who manages them. This goes double for the transactions of funds via Bitcoin. If there is not an in-built coin-scrambler, that means its going to be a lot easier to track some transactions than others. I''m not sure that it is good enough to give the people the "option" of better security and privacy - it needs to be mandatory. If this means you HAVE to log in via i2p and/or TOR. So be it. ALL transactions all over the network have to go into a coin-scrambler of some sort etc.. yet it has to be built into real-time transactions, so that it isn't as though there's a big Bitcoin account owned by "the network" where the jumbling takes place, thereby creating a point of failure (who manages this bitcoin account? If it is compromised, everyone loses their coins etc... the same issues with many current darknets etc)
Lets not forget that this platform is going to be targeted - by scammers, by governments and corporate stooges etc. How are you going to deal with bad actors, if this becomes an "ebay" level scale for "normal" users. Darknet users dealing exclusively in illicit goods or those that are unlikely to be sold elsewhere for whatever reason may put up with the chance of scams because its much better than the alternative, but standard users will say "Why should I use this when I can get Buyer Protection from Ebay, Amazon etc.." Yes, "reputation" systems can be built up over time, but Bitcoin doesn't have any sort of "chargeback" system. Imagine the amount of people who could scam, create a new node/identity, scam etc... all without much repercussion if there isn't any authority to provide chargebacks, bannings and the like. Some may say "then only buy from high reputation sellers and vice versa", but that limits the growth of the marketplace because nobody is going to want to transact with newcomers. Either that or scammers will work with their friends/networks and build up "just enough" rep to look legit, before scamming. T
... Tor isn't a big help here.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Old Testament allows men to have female children as brides, so does Islam, so do the Vedic religions.
The old testament also allows for stoning people for being "a stubborn and rebellious son". That does not, to my mind, make it a good idea.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
A businessman and governor can certainly come to some sort of mutually willing and beneficial agreement regarding the management of, say, coal fly ash on the property of said business, perhaps in the area of how well all those expensive regulations and inspections are carried out, and Governor Pat McCrory did work for Duke Energy all those years. Oh, your downstream water is now a little polluted? Whoops, tee-hee! No crime, just two willing folks who came to an understanding, uh-huh.
"Old Testament allows men to have female children as brides"
I need chapter and verse for this "allowance" I've not ever seen it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You win today's dumb comment award.
Deuteronomy 22 28-29 in hebrew.
Rape an unbetrothed young girl (this is what the hebrew says), keep her, pay father money, never send her away.
Read the Hebrew word by word.
You've never seen it because you read censored/unclear english bibles.
And if we move away from black letter law and into historical preferance, who did the moses' men kill and who did they keep for themselves. Well they killed the men. They killed the women. They killed the goats. Killed the sheep. Killed the calves. Killed the bulls. Kept the women children for themselves.
But I'm sure none of this means anything to you.
Marry young female children. They're the best for men.
Why have you spared the life of all the women...? So kill all the male children. Kill also all the women who have slept with a man. Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves". Num 31:7-19.
Interesting that they be unbetrothed (Implying marriageable). Additionally, the implication is that it was mutual consent (they be found). Lastly, it is implied that they would be "married" at that point.
The context of the entire passage is about rape, but rather about sexual purity. So, no, this doesn't mean mean can rape girls. Nice Try though.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Nope. Not general counsel to rape girls. Or even have child brides. Age is not actually mentioned in any of the so called passages, and clearly the passage above Deut 22:28-29 implies females of marriageable age (in the midst of sexual purity laws).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Blimp net involves obtaining a helium filled balloon. Stick aerial to balloon. Paint balloon black.
Run blimp into sky from kite string. Best on dark nights avoids detection. You run the internet
in bits of info, over citizens band radio, ham radio, fm or am, analogue. Blimp net was
limited to local in phase one, about twenty or thirty miles. Then users thought could connect
to entire net, from any point in seven nearest towns. You would have seven suspect towns.
The officials could track you down to regional level, but needle in the haystack, the haystack would
be seven towns big. Blimp net is tiny, however officials have never never compromised it.
With dongle swapping, the officials track "somebody" down with the greatest of ease. It's just
that they sold their dongle to a complete stranger. A Cash only deal in a pub car park, a chap in blue jeans with brown hair.
The stranger could be caught when he tops up the credit, or the account could be frozen. Dongle swap
is hardly ideal but it certainly does make life difficult for officials. Dongle swap is hardly used on it's own, but as an extra line of distraction.