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Evolution Market's Admins Are Gone, Along With $12M In Bitcoin
tsu doh nimh writes: The Evolution Market, an online black market that sells everything contraband — from marijuana, heroin and ecstasy to stolen identities and malicious hacking services — appears to have vanished in the last 24 hours with little warning. Much to the chagrin of countless merchants hawking their wares in the underground market, the curators of the project have reportedly absconded with the community's bitcoins — a stash that some Evolution merchants reckon is worth more than USD $12 million.
Don't worry, the invisible hand will soon make an invisible punishment for those responsible.
I do enjoy the feeling of schadenfreude sometimes.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I think I'm going to have a heart attack and DIE from that surprise.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm shocked!
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
... there is no honor among thieves.
People dealing in illegal goods on a site that specialized in black market goods were trusting a 3rd party to hang on to all of their money?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Bitcoin works just like cash? When you hand piles of money to people running illegal markets they might run off with it? The HORROR!
(At least with Bitcoin you can see where your stolen coins are going, give or take, try that with $1000 bills)
How do we know how many bitcoins are lost exactly?
The people who run a black market are dishonest? I'm shocked, shocked!
You get up with fleas
It's no longer funny, it's hilarious. It's hilarious that people still trust an untraceable, pseudoanonymous bit of data that's worth real money to organizations that have no bigger entity breathing down their necks.
I have no love for big banks, but at least in the United States, the FDIC and NCUA do a good job of regulating the banks and credit unions such that the bank cannot simply steal your money wholesale and get away with it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
... I'm off to set up a new marketplace on Tor. Apparently, criminals are really gullible AND use untraceable money! What a great combination :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Well, this is why you should keep your own bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin theft isn't a problem with bitcoin itself. It's a problem with where you're keeping your bitcoins.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Look at it from the point of view of the people running these markets. They have a finite amount of time before the FBI or the NSA crack them like pistachios. The longer they operate the more people will learn who they are. So unless the illegal market is so insanely profitable for them that they can buy sanctuary someplace where the long arm of the law wont reach, betraying the people using the market is just optimal strategy.
"an online black market that sells everything contraband — from marijuana, heroin and ecstasy to stolen identities and malicious hacking services"
And people are actually surprised that they poofed with 12 million in bitcoins? Seriously?
I think a lot of these problems are that it was an illegal market with people probably using a properly secured TOR connection so that they couldn't be traced. They got bored of what they were doing and said "HOLY SHIT, there's 12 million here, untraceable" so instead of the normal walk away, they took the money and walked away. You are going to run into this in any illegal venture, with untraceable currency, where the operator is unknown. Anyone shocked by this needs to give their head a shake. Don't drop a crap ton of money, to someone you don't know, who has no real incentive to help you out. You don't even need a regulatory body, just someone you can hold accountable. You are never going to get someone to hold accountable in a market like that because, well they will be held legally accountable as well.
Hilarious indeed.
... so far, and there's not one Bitcoin defender.
When Mt. Gox went down, the worshipers were everywhere. I know, because I tangled with them then.
Where did those loopies go?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
they all say they have "everything illegal" but not a single one of them has nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, and beleive me i have checked them all
one begins to wonder if weapons of mass destruction even exist man, and i mean all of them, not just the ones in irak :( been looking for ages (i just want to know the prices, i have no enemies)
they dont have human slaves either, but i dont care for them, just havent seen them at all, and i know for a fact these exist, some of my friends have had iphones in the past...
None of the people who actually use the black markets are surprised. It's a gamble; 9/10 times I get military grade shit, 1/10 i lose money. To me it's acceptable. Nobody points a gun at my head on the Internets, only a bunch of dickheads at Slashdot that think we are all gullible. Clueless...
I'm sorry, but are there a lot of cases FDIC or the NCUA not making somebody whole after a bank or credit union collapse? I've never heard of one.
I don't respond to AC's.
Unfortunately, escrow sites like this are one of the proposed solutions to other issues involved with anonymous trades. So there is a bit of a rock and hard place here.
I expect that he's angry because of being hit with overdraft fees, had loans go into default, been denied loans at application, or been mired in credit card debt from a card he got through his bank.
Most of those would be his problem, not the bank's. The bank is not obligated to let the account holder spend more money than they have. I disagree with how the banks will debit against the account largest transaction to smallest so that multiple small transactions each incur their own overdraft fee, but my solution is to not go overdraft.
Otherwise, I also haven't heard of banks' customers' money being lost when the FDIC gets involved. They will force mergers if that's what it takes to keep balance sheets solvent. The banks really don't like it when the FDIC realizes that they're overleveraged and steps in to remedy it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Because bitcoin is secure against government seizure, and it's secure against theft. That is, barring the idiocy of letting someone hold your coins for you. However, I expect these same folks fall prey to wallet inspectors.
Because bitcoin is secure against local fiat hyperinflation. Bitcoin, over the past few months, has actually been more stable than my home currency ($CDN), which has lost 30% of its value in that time.
Because I can bring more than $10,000 of bitcoin into any country I like without needing to fill out forms or risk the government taking a cut of it if I forget.
Because microtransactions are cheap, and big transactions are also cheap.
Because it works just like cash. As a merchant, when you have your bitcoin, Visa won't call you next week and take the money from your account because the payment turned out to be fake. That can never happen with bitcoin.
Because I'm tired of carrying a pocketful of change to put in vending machines, and a walletful of paper bills to pay for things. I'm equally tired of giving the debit company a major cut of every small purchase every time I decide I don't want to do this, or a credit company a major cut of every large purchase.
But yes, one of the big reasons is fuck government, nobody wants to have their money seized because they are rich enough to afford a large cash holiday. But the bigger reason is to have a currency that you can treat like cash, that is secure like cash, but can work on the internet, just like cash.
And, just like cash, when your money is stolen because you left it out in the open, nobody is going to cry for you. Life sucks, move on.
What I don't get is why people blame bitcoin. Did you blame the insecurity of the US dollar when Bernie Madoff conned people out of $65B. Yeah, that's right, $65 BILLION, not $12 million.
That's true, but a currency that can't be held onto safely is not a useful currency, and people figured out a long time ago that they cannot be trusted to hold onto their own money. That's why the rise of banking during the Renaissance was such a big deal and why banks are so heavily regulated today. Bitcoin has banks, but they haven't yet proven that they can be trusted, and with people losing their bitcoins when their hard drives fail or a thief takes their drive, bitcoin needs the stability that regulated banks can bring if it wants to thrive.
It's hard to pay for something while keeping bitcoin in your own wallet, though.
None of the people who actually use the black markets are surprised. It's a gamble; 9/10 times I get military grade shit, 1/10 i lose money. To me it's acceptable. Nobody points a gun at my head on the Internets, only a bunch of dickheads at Slashdot that think we are all gullible.
You're claiming that people who use black market's are not gullible on a thread about the news that people who use black market's just got ripped off to the tune of an (alleged) $12 million US? Curious logic you have there...
I am Jack's complete and total lack of surprise...
Well, this is why you should keep your own bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin theft isn't a problem with bitcoin itself. It's a problem with where you're keeping your bitcoins.
Just like it is a very bad idea to hand cash over to an untraceable investment scheme.
The bitcoins are secure in the accounts they were transmitted to.
Yeah, they regulated it so well it plunged, the world into financial chaos.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Jamal the drug dealer stole my money I had on deposit with him!
END THE FED! DOWN WITH THE DOLLAR!
Did you know that people have stolen dollars before too?
Seems to me that we just have to give up the entire concept of money, since it is a thing that can be stolen from idiots!
Fortunately, bitcoin allows multi-signature escrow. That permits the escrow service to decide who gets the bitcoins (buyer or seller), but doesn't let them run off with them. It's not perfect, as it can't prevent collusion between escrow agent and either party against the other party, but it does prevent the simpler forms of "just run off with the money". Why it isn't in more widespread use yet, I have no idea.
That would be the World's Largest Orchestra of the World's Smallest Violins! :D
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
"Terra" watts?
Crime doesn't pay for everybody.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Your calculations are way off. Per day, 3600 bitcoins get mined. At current exchange rate, these represent about $1 million. For an average price of $0.12 per kWh, that puts an upper limit of about 350 MW on the total mining electricity use.
Users are not gullible if they realize there is a risk of losing their money, and assess that their profit is worth this risk, as AC explained above.
You are seriously going to claim that these guys basically handed an unknown third party what amounted to a pile of untraceable cash trusting that they wouldn't run off with it and that they knew the risk they were taking? They would have to be the dumbest crooks on the planet to do that and you're claiming that they understood what they were doing? Yeah, not buying that argument. This was smart crooks ripping off dumb crooks.
Using bitcoin may still be the most prudent choice, even if it means that there's a chance you'll lose some of your money.
Oh I don't doubt that bitcoin could have some protective value but I very much doubt that all these folks fully understood the risk they were taking.
How would that be any different from any other escrow service?
Paypal locks people's money up all the time, and there's nothing you can do about it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I am sure the risk analysis would show that it would be unwise to insure an entity that wants to hide it's identity.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The historical record strongly implies that the very existence of the FDIC has prevented a lot of banks from collapsing. Just look at the rate of bank failures per year pre-FDIC and post. The idea of a "bank run" was a quaint historical thing for decades after the FDIC came into being, and bank failures for any reason declined enormously until the 1980s.
The most recent failures are sort of a vindication of a deposit insurance and regulation scheme. As people moved from insured accounts to uninsured money markets to get higher rates, they exposed themselves to the possibility of a "run" on the money market. That happened in 2008, and it looked in many ways like an old-fasioned bank run. So it's a bit of a natural experiment. A massive run on money markets didn't turn into a run on insured accounts simply because the accounts were insured.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The incentive to steal increases.
Only surprise for me was that it was *only* $12 million.
And people are actually surprised that they poofed with 12 million in bitcoins? Seriously?
Actually, I'm not sensing much surprise at all around this story. I suppose the only thing that might be surprising is that they actually had that many BTC collected at once to take. I guess they could silently disable transferring BTC out of the service for a few days until they decided to pull the plug, I guess that would help build up the coffers for the big jump (if people assume the site is still working fine and keep transferring to it). I can't imagine that anyone who knows what they're doing would sit there with an account with any decent amount of money entrusted to a site like that though.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Because enough people haven't been bitten by this exact scenario yet for people to realize it's a basic requirement of any mediated market. Black and grey markets will likely be the last place such protections will pop up because the people populating the market are not bitcoin sophisticates, but rather fall largely into the criminals and drug aficionados categories.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I think part of it is a Robin Hood type of mystique. Someone anonymous having something that bypasses the establishment, similar to being able to sneak on the King's grounds and hunt deer without being drawn and quartered as a poacher... but Robin Hood is most often a myth, and most often, it could be someone like O'Brian from "1984" looking to see who dissents... or a mercenary who would then turn right around and hand the people with the deer to the Sheriff for a reward.
BitCoin does have its place. Right now, it is still in its "cool" stage so it gets used for everything... similar to how radioactive substances were put in bath water and soaps until people realized they got cancer and other unpleasant things by doing so.
Criminals stealing from other criminals, no honor among thieves, GASP! Who would have thought.
This is not entirely true, in the United States banks under the FDIC coverage only insure you to a max of $250.000 regardless of how much money you have in your bank account, while C
oinbase for example gives you insurance for the full amount of your bitcoins
Which is why everyone who wants to keep more than that in the bank divides it into multiple accounts, since each account is insured to $250k, not each person.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
I seriously don't grasp why anyone would store coins with anyone. I can personally hold billions of dollars worth of coins a cheap flash drive. So... why?
The whole point of bitcoins was that you don't need a trusted third party.
So why are you trusting a third party?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No, banks were allowed to engage in business other than loaning money based on deposits. Once banks turned into investment banks with excessive leverage and a desire to profit from the market itself then they became a danger. On the other hand, good old fashioned insured deposit accounts (ie, FDIC/NCUA territory) were completely untouched by the crisis in the United States.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Even more importantly, the FDIC works to merge banks when they're overleveraged, so qualifying insured accounts even over the guaranteed $250,000 haven't been impacted. The customer finds that they're now working with a different bank, the bank that absorbed their failing bank.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is why the government needs to step in and start regulating all illegal activity. Perhaps an oversight committee called the Ministry of Honesty.
Because bitcoin is secure against government seizure, and it's secure against theft.
Er did you RTFA? Or follow the Silk Road story? Coins stolen, Govt seized. Next
Because bitcoin is secure against local fiat hyperinflation. Bitcoin, over the past few months, has actually been more stable than my home currency ($CDN), which has lost 30% of its value in that time.
Ok you can't mention the value of currency unless you have a reference. This is why Forex is traded in pairs. So 30% against what? the USD? Maybe the USD rose and CDN stayed the same? Can't possibly tell with the limited info you provided. BTC has swung up and down over 20% in the last two months. So much for that theory.
Because I can bring more than $10,000 of bitcoin into any country I like without needing to fill out forms or risk the government taking a cut of it if I forget.
Because that's an everyday issue for most people. What if you forget to declare anything on your customs form, how does BTC solve that?
Because microtransactions are cheap, and big transactions are also cheap.
Unlike say cash in which it costs... ???
Because I'm tired of carrying a pocketful of change to put in vending machines, and a walletful of paper bills to pay for things.
Your vending machine accepts BTC? Mine accept paypass, no coins or notes and the transaction is protected by the govt.
I'm equally tired of giving the debit company a major cut of every small purchase every time I decide I don't want to do this, or a credit company a major cut of every large purchase.
You want their service but you don't want to pay for it? Would you also like to ride the train for free?
But yes, one of the big reasons is fuck government,
Oh now we see the real reason. An anarchist who enjoys the freedoms and luxuries civilisation provides, but doesn't want to contribute to it.
nobody wants to have their money seized because they are rich enough to afford a large cash holiday.
I can only assume you aren't rich enough to do this? I am, and you tick the box in the form and nothing else happens. You can untwist your knickers now
But the bigger reason is to have a currency that you can treat like cash, that is secure like cash, but can work on the internet, just like cash.
And, just like cash, when your money is stolen because you left it out in the open, nobody is going to cry for you. Life sucks, move on.
An even better thing would be something that works like cash but has governance and insurance built-in wouldn't it? Say just like a credit card for example?
What I don't get is why people blame bitcoin. Did you blame the insecurity of the US dollar when Bernie Madoff conned people out of $65B. Yeah, that's right, $65 BILLION, not $12 million.
Who is blaming BTC? The story mentions that BTC was stolen, but I didn't see anything blaming BTC? It does however highlight the flaws with an unregulated currency, and that seems to have hit a soft spot with you.
Even if we assume that government could solve this problem (which is a big "if"! How much money do, say, 419 fraud victims normally get returned to them? Or eBay escrow fraud victims? Good luck!), it would still be cheaper to the victims to operate in the black market.
By way of example, let's say a vendor does $1000/day in Evolution market sales and let's say that money is typically held in escrow for 14 days (I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass, but they seem pretty reasonable). Let's also assume that these transactions are subject to a 5% sales tax (which is almost certainly very low, considering how heavily intoxicating substances are taxed in the real world!). That would mean that the vendor would expect to have $14,000 held in escrow at any given time, and that they would be collecting $18,250 in sales tax annually. Money that would otherwise go to the vendor. As we can see, government pulls more money out of the market than it is able to provide in protection, assuming that it provided any protection at all, which I doubt it would.
The risks of trading on the Darknets are well-understood and are accepted. Trading in illegal goods carries risk. Film at 11.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
There have been cases of financial institutions demanding mortgage payments for mortgages they did not in fact hold, and at least one publicized case of foreclosure action on a property that had no mortgage. Unfortunately, some courts seemed to fall for the equivalent of "the dog ate my mortgage records". Some lending institutions did indeed push people towards loans they couldn't afford (you and I wouldn't fall for this, but half the people in this country have financial skills below the median). I don't know how many of these institutions were banks or saving & loans, and how widespread they really were.
One big effect of the FDIC and FSLIC (is that still around?) is to prevent bank runs. Banks keep only enough funds on hand to pay a fraction of depositors, should they take their money out. If a large number of depositors want to withdraw their money for whatever reason, the bank is stressed. In the pre-FDIC days, this stress could lead to a bank collapse, and the only way to keep your money during a bank collapse was to withdraw it first. Therefore, depositors in general were faced with the choice of withdrawing their money ASAP, and making the collapse more likely, or leaving their money in the bank and risk losing it. This meant that, once a bank was perceived as weak, it had an excellent chance of complete failure, as more and more depositors would withdraw in a "bank run" or "run on the bank". With the FDIC, depositors have a choice between withdrawing their money ASAP and figuring out what to do with it, or leaving their money in the bank, knowing that if the bank does in fact fail they'll get their money back pretty fast, so there's no reason for a run on the bank.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Silk Road Bitcoin thing was a little more involved than that, as I understand it. The government confiscated the Bitcoins, and asked if anybody had a claim to them. Since nobody did, as claiming them would be very strong evidence of participation in a large number of serious crimes, the government sold them. Of course, that means they could be taken in civil forfeiture proceedings, and that would (in my opinion) count as theft.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What was the "old Saying", "There is no honor among thieves".
1 Timothy 6:10New International Version (NIV) 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.