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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.
I need some technical background here. You hear about exit scams a lot - my question is, why do users deposit funds into an account controlled by the market? Outside of escrow, Bitcoin seems to remove the need to have anyone but you hold your money. And I'd imagine that escrow is very short-term and for relatively small amounts. So what is the technical reason that people hand their money over to a market?
Coincidentally, I just came across this Ted talk from Alex Winter the other day. It was most excellent. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) He made a very compelling argument for the value of privacy in the marketplace, why Dark Web vendors such as Silk Road (which he made a documentary on) and others are battling to protect it, and why privacy needs to be protected.
Are you happy right now with private businesses, credit bureaus, banks, and the government all logging, monitoring, and referencing your entire financial history? Would you like it any more if any of these institutions were hacked, and all your data was made public? If you aren't, then you should be mourning the loss of a private marketplace.
Riiiiiight....and we've all seen how well the "cut taxes to the bone" model has worked in Kansas and Louisiana. Both states are nearly bankrupt, are deeply in debt, and can't afford to pay for basic services like schools, police, roads, and other "socialist" infrastructure.
No one like paying taxes, but they're a necessary thing in a modern society. It's a fact, and no amount of voodoo tax-cutting theory will change that.
Some people complain that everything was great 100 years ago where there was no taxation. Yeah, there were no taxes 100 years ago, and you know what else we didn't have 100 years ago?
A standing army, the FDA, the EPA, clean, drinkable water coming from every faucet, 24-hour emergency rooms, fully-staffed hospitals waiting to give you life-saving care, fire departments, 12 years of public education, child-abuse investigators, controls on what toxic chemicals can be poured into your drinking water, nationwide 911 service, a national highway system, social services, drug treatment centers, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, community colleges, public schools, water and sewer systems, parks and recreation services, food inspection, electrical utilities, gas service, a National School Lunch Program, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, foster care services, School Breakfast Programs, State Children's Insurance Programs, Unemployment insurance, Worker's Comp, Senior Community Service Employment Programs, street lights, mass transit, zoning, planning, building permits and inspection, housing and development programs, road maintenance, the State Board of Health, building inspections, building and fire codes, disaster relief, FEMA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the FBI, flood mitigation, pollution inspections, drug treatment centers, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the Library of Congress, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and on and on and on.
Frankly, I like those things. I I like knowing that the medication I take has been tested. I I like knowing the food I eat has been inspected. I I like having 911 to call for help. I I like roads and sewers and electrical service. I I like Social Security.
I'm no fan of taxes, believe me, but that's how things are paid for- the roads we drive on, emergency services, the Post Office, libraries, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, etc etc. Taxes have enabled this country to be able to pay for the things that make it a good place to live.
If you don't like taxes, from the list of things above, which one(s) should be cut or eliminated? Seriously, which ones would you do away with?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
My guess is that it's "down for maintenance" while the feds move the server(s) to their offices.
Once that's done it'll be back in business, with a little extra "oversight" *cough*.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
And yet, in a Libertarian society, the existence of unions to protect workers from abuses would be completely legal and just as effective, if not more so. There is nothing about that solution that required any government intervention at all. Indeed, the original unions and strikers were opposed by governments and law enforcement which turned out against them at the behest of large business owners.
And once government became the "friend" of organized labor, you started to see the abuses from the other side as well from those parts of the government that were attempting to ensure the union vote on their side.
Even though I don't think that perfect anarchy is ever going to work, there are options with a more limited government. You need government for a lot of things, I just don't think we need it for everything and that is where it is going.