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Popular Dark Web Market Disappears, Users Migrate In Panic (vice.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on Motherboard: Like the changing of the seasons, a natural stage in the dark web marketplace life cycle has once again manifested. Nucleus market, which primarily sold illegal drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and cannabis, has disappeared: The site is unresponsive, and the market administrators have not made any announcements about planned downtime. This has forced vendors to migrate to other sites and panicked users to figure out where to go next, all amidst a whirlwind of rumours and speculation of where Nucleus -- and its cash -- has gone. 'Nucleus is an awesome market. One of the best. Hope all the admins are ok and nothing serious happened,' someone identifying themselves as a vendor wrote in a comment on the news site Deep Dot Web. At the moment, it's not totally clear why Nucleus' website is unresponsive. It could be an exit scam -- a scam where site administrators stop allowing users to withdraw their funds and then disappear with the stockpile of bitcoins.
And nothing of value was lost.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Dark as in darknet means the participants are thoroughly anonymized. What good is a market that's hard to find? Thats the brilliance at work, you can do something completely illegal, at a spot easy to find, and hide behind your computer thanks to freely available software.
That doesn't make much sense to me - a law enforcement agency could certainly afford to transfer $500 to the market if that's all it takes to earn trust.
They earn trust in the sense that if they don't deliver the $200 worth of goods they promised, or violate the site's rules in some other way, part or all of that $500 deposit held in escrow will be forfeit. The deposit is a "hostage" to guard against fraud and minor infractions of the rules by normal members of the community; it says nothing about whether they're acting on behalf of law enforcement. For protection from law enforcement the site relies on the anonymity of its operators and members and encrypted, onion-routed communications, not deposits.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Nope, big city, born and raised.
Nice straw man though, I am glad you made him for me. See the vast majority of drug users have never committed a single B&E. In fact, the best evidence we have is that, even the few that do, mostly wouldn't if not for bone headed drug laws that are entirely ineffective at anything but filling prisons and increasing crime.
Hell, even Heroin users have been found to be able to hold down jobs and not require or seek out illegal income when they are able to get high at reasonable prices with safe product.
All in all, there is little to no evidence supporting any real benefit from drug laws, unless you consider jobs for white suburban guys in the prison system to be a benefit. In fact, going back to the arguments in congress about marijuana in the 1930s, its pretty clear that job creation was one of the primary motivating forces at the time; the biggest and most well known proponent of marijuana laws, for example, was the head of what would later become the DEA. His main motivation was fear for his own job after the end of alcohol prohibition.
Then we have the Nixon years were drug laws were actively pushed as a way to attack grass roots political campaigns and to oppose civil rights.
But seriously, thanks for bringing out this straw man, he is one of my favorite to set alight
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> hydromorphone is higher quality, much more potent, and overall safer than street heroin
Even worst.... "Krokodil", that nasty "street drug" that has been killing and disfiguring people in the most horrible ways.
Turns out that is because of impurities in home manufacture. The actual drug is much much safer than many other opioids , and making it available in a grade fit for human consumption would actually save lives.
That is what really gets me.... how inhumanely callous prohibitionists are. Their policies have been nothing but harmful, yet they just sit back and smug over their victims suffering.
No houses burned before meth was made profitable. Now half the burn units are idiots who tried making meth. How is that not an atrocity? How do you blame that on the idiot addict and not the politicians who should have known better?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"