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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.
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?
That seems like a perfectly reasonable response... If you are batshit crazy.
And fuck you if you support the DEA.
ONE can hope that.... it wont be THIS ONE.
THIS ONE hopes it was shut down in time to avoid any of that for anyone. The only people who deserve death sentences are the ones who made darknets like this necessary for free people to exchange goods between consenting adults.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nothing batshit crazy about it. We have to preserve our precious bodily fluids!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Which was very unfortunate. Making cocaine illegal is what created the Mexican drug cartels, and subsequently made them crazy rich and extremely powerful. Which they still are.
If we made cocaine legal, not only could we tax it, but we would pull the rug right out from under the drug cartels. They would dissipate from a simple inability to compete with the legal market. History has proven this to be true. People sometimes imagine that the illegal vendors could offer lower prices than the legal vendors, and hence the drug cartels would remain just as strong as ever...this is patently absurd and has been shown to be false in practice as well as in theory.
I don't "do" cocaine or meth, but here in Washington State, I buy my weed at the store and smoke it on my front porch as the cops drive by and wave.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Well, advocate for single payer healthcare first - because dealing with multiple insurance agencies costs a lot of money. In Canada, the average doctor's office spends about $30k/year dealing with the government for medical service payments. In the US, it's roughly triple that. These are costs - staff mostly, who do nothing but all that.
Second, denying even the poor medical care is actually very bad economically - because the poor then have to use the ER (which by law is free). ER is the most expensive medical treatment available - you'll spend three to four times as much money treating someone coming into the ER for a medical condition that could be treated at say, a doctor's office. So yeah, having the poor be able to go see a much cheaper doctor at a walk-in clinic saves a ton of money over having them see the doctor in the ER.
Of course, since they're poor and can't afford medical insurance, WE ALL PAY THROUGH THE NOSE for their care because they can only use the ER.
And of course, because they can't pay for followup care (not covered since it's not emergency) they go back to whatever their miserable lives take them, get ill again, and again, we pay top dollar for ER medical care for them. Heck, we could probably get them really good care for the money spent healing them in the ER.
You give ignorant people a bad name.
Please fix your chatbot, Microsoft. This thing is spazzing the fuck out.
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.
"Totes Legit. We Swear."
Name me a single cartel previously that could pay off the entire debit of a nation.
The Dutch East India Company. At their height in the 1600s, they were worth the equivalent of $7.4 trillion today. Not quite enough to pay off the US debit, but more then enough to pay off almost any other country's debt.
The (1/10 of one percent) rich have what at most 500 billion dollars in assets? You could kill all the undeserving rich, take all their assets - and how long would that last 2 months? Yah. Feel the Bern.
You're way off in your calculation. The top 1% in wealth starts at > $15 million (this was in 2007, it's certainly higher now). So, even assuming a totally flat distribution above 1% (which is *definitely* wrong), we're talking 15,000,000 * 0.001 * adults_in_USA. I don't know what population number they use for these calculations, but plug in any reasonable number for the USA and you're looking at a minimum of several trillion dollars.
You're absolutely bonkers if you think the top 0.1 % of the the wealthiest Americans only have combined assets of $500 billion. You could probably get to $500 billion *easily* with the top 100. That leaves a few hundred thousand left to go.
That being said, I do not endorse killing and taking the money of anybody, be they rich or poor =)
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
This is only because of prohibition, prices are artificially inflated because of artificial scarcity and risk. Even without insurance, one can buy a supply of hydromorphone at a pharmacy for far less than one can buy heroin on the street - even though the hydromorphone is higher quality, much more potent, and overall safer than street heroin. Millions of Americans walk around hopped up on legally prescribed opiates and amphetamines and don't suffer from any of these apparent evils that we hear about in the endless government propaganda. Fuck, do you have any idea how many elderly people walk around with a morphine pump keeping them doped to high heaven 24/7? And when was the last time grandpa robbed you to pay for a refill? Oh, and most illegal drug addicts would suffer withdrawal before robbing someone, because they're not shit bags - some shit bags are drug addicts but by no means are all drug addicts shit bags. Drug use and a lack of decency are totally unrelated. And yeah, fuck us white libertarians who hate a system that disproportionately cages minorities, while destroying families and creating poverty. If you seriously think locking someone up for nothing other than using drugs is OK, you're a fucking twat that lacks any human decency or morality.
The poor have no estates to sue to recover the costs of disposing of their bodies when they die in the gutters. The public pays one way or another.
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...
I've been to countries where taxation is almost non-existent, and most of them suck. Most of them are NOT places you'd want to live unless you were fairly well off in comparison to the rest of the population, and often not even then.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Well, advocate for single payer healthcare first - because dealing with multiple insurance agencies costs a lot of money.
No. Multiple insurance companies aren't the source of increased costs. A dysfunctional relationship between the companies and the government is. Industry standard practice is also dysfunctional.
For a model of an insurance system that works relatively well with multiple companies involved, see car insurance.
Most health insurance isn't even insurance. It's a badly run buyers club. If you get a fender-bender with your car, the insurance company will generally pay for repair at any shop. Compelling you to use a particular shop, aka "steering" might even be illegal. In health care it's just the opposite, and that's part or the reason why costs are so ridiculous. The mechanic also has rates for labor, and parts costs are something you can look up. There are still too many places where you can't do that for health care. Also, when was the last time you dealt with your car insurance for simple maintenance like oil changes, tires, and brakes? All that paperwork. Claims for routine care. Why?
Single-payer is a monopoly, and if you think that's actually going to lower prices you're flunking econ 101.
The problem is corruption, plain and simple. Single-payer works in other countries because they are not as corrupt as we are. Full stop. If you implement single-payer in the US, you'll get corrupt single-payer and it will be expensive and it will suck.
A public option along side private insurance wouldn't be bad; but fix the corruption first, and let the free market providers stay in business so we can have some competition and innovation.
Another white "libertarian" who lives in the suburbs. Idiot.
Llibertarians are basically anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. I'm always amazed at their childlike gullibility as to how their libertarian society would function primarily to their benefit. Libertarianism just helps conservatives pass off a patently pro-business political agenda as a noble bid for human freedom.
“Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer!” -- Michael Lind
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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"
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...
> 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"
All that stuff you mention can only be supported by a modern, industrious capitalist society.
Again, people put the cart before the horse, while calling the horse an evil useless asshole plague.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There are no taxes because there is no economic dynamism to tax. You need to protect property rights from both thieves...and the corrupt who go into power to demand kickbacks.
Once you do that, and a farmer (or industrial equivalent) can feel safe investing in long-term projects without fear of seizure by thieves or corrupt officials, only then do you get a more powerful economy and higher employment with better jobs (compared to dirt floor existence) and only then can you generate enough taxes to do pretty little leftist projects.
The problem is stopping the projects from charging so much they are no different from corrupt officials in wrecking the expected success of an investment. "Pay us 50%, or your factory might get...broken. Shame if that happened." Where 50% is the combined taxation and regulatory burden. "Shame if the burden went to 62%."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And the problem with letting them keep it all is that sooner or later we're going to run out of everyone else's money.
You can't have a 1% without other people having money.
Most of the wealth of the rich is in things like stock, which has a variable value and isn't actually durable goods. Without the stock price being maintained at a certain level, they deflate like a dry rotted tire.
You can't have the rich in the current economy without people who buy things. There is no economy if there are only robots making things that no one else can pay for. If that is the case, they sit in the warehouse and become a net expense.
Former drug user here, have never committed a B&E. Never robbed anyone. Never committed any crimes other than buying illegal plant-derived products. I am however, highly educated, well compensated in a great career, and living happily. Even during my worst drug abusing days (when I was regularly using a laundry list of different drugs) I was able to maintain 2-3 different part time, and then 1 part time and 1 full time job, in addition to being a full-time student. It is absolutely possible to use drugs and be highly functioning. The biggest impact I had was on my grades - cocaine makes you incredibly over-confident, which is a VERY bad thing for testing in school.
Actually, the countries that Bernie Sanders loves are the size of US states. So why couldn't a US State manage its own program? It might actually work better.
Putting everything through a large Federal government considerably increases the waste due to administrative costs and makes health care into a permanent Federal level hot button issue that we really shouldn't be having at that level. You want to be talking about foreign relations, defense, and global trade at that level, and it would help if you could kick the health care issues down to a level that would be more responsive to begin with. In that way, we have Federal candidates who we can hold to task for a much less generalized set of responsibilities.
Also, creating a good health care program in a state could induce large economic growth in that state, thus providing incentives to less interested states to do the same thing.
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.
Waste of time to argue with someone who starts by mis-defining his opposition. The next time you feel the urge, just punch yourself in the nuts.
In other words: 'Never answer a false premise.' It's old advice, but still good.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
and you know what else we didn't have 100 years ago?
...the aqueducts?
It's the liberal BS that states that Blue States are supporting Red States.
Except those pesky numbers and facts disagree. Red states use more than they give back, and this is not hard to substantiate. Blue states produce more than they take, also not hard to substantiate.
Blue states generally higher per capita of people with college degrees, lower teen pregnancy rates, lower incarceration rates, higher per capita of home ownership, lower infant mortality, better "neighborhood advantage scores", higher personal incomes, and so on. Blue states invest much more in education, investments in education result in better educated kids, and better educated kids go further in school. Blue states, not surprisingly, also have higher graduation rates.
States that consistently vote Republican and against their own best interest suck more money from the federal government than Democratic states. Again, these figures are not hard to find.
American poverty is concentrated in the south, from Arizona all the way to the East Coast; additionally, Michigan, West Virginia and Kentucky are high-poverty states. With the exceptions of Michigan and New Mexico, these states are exclusively conservative-leaning. Conversely, on average, more progressive/Blue states, particularly in the northeast, tend to be the most well off states in our nation.
Income mobility and the ability to “work your way up” (or down) is closely tied to the state in which you are living. All but one (Utah) of the states which have higher than average upward income mobility rates lean progressive/Blue, while all of the states with low upward income mobility rates lean conservative/Red.
The right wing’s southern stronghold is composed of states that have, far and away, the worst life expectancies in the United States. This isn’t a purely a partisan issue, and involves a mixture of culture and bad policy.
The south is home to extreme poverty, a lack of accessible health care (ex. Texas leads the nation with 25% uninsurance), lax worker/environmental protections, and a culture that consumes massive amounts of fatty fried foods. These factors create a perfect storm of bad health that severely erodes the life expectancy of huge portions of the southern population. The health care systems of the Deep South and southwest are the worst in the nation, while those in the northeast and north-central regions are the best. This defies a purely partisan divide (ex. a lot of rural states suffer from low hospital accessibility), but the fact remains that the most conservative states in the nation tend to have the worst health care systems.
I could go on, but facts are facts, and the fact is that Red states do poorly in almost every quality-of-life metric when compared with Blue states.
This isn't my opinion- do some searches for "red state versus blue state" and you'll find plenty of studies that make this abundantly clear. When you look at all of these statistics in totality, you're left with the inescapable conclusion that Red states are correlated with a less developed society.
If you can find me stats which state the opposite, I'd be glad to look at them. But you won't, because they don't exist.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The Dutch East India Company was running drugs in the 1600s. They were huge in the opium business.
If you believe what you just wrote, why not move to Somalia or Nigeria? It would be your paradise on Earth. But you don't really believe a word of what you wrote, do you?
The problem most libertarians have is they never think that they'll be the ones getting fucked. It's never YOUR wife or YOUR child who'll die from some untested medication or contaminated food or unsafe electrical appliance. It'll always be the other guy whose wife or kid dies, and then the Magical Invisible Hand Of The Market will punish that company and force them out of business, so you'll be safe, right?
But it won't be your wife or your kid, no way. And if it IS your kid or your wife, well shucks, you can just take them to court for damages, right? Because that will bring your child or wife back to life, right?
Fuck you, I like the EPA and the FDA. I like public education and parks and recreation services. I like the idea of a School Breakfast Program for kids. I like all the things that make this a great country to live in. It's why people want to come here, fool. How many people in the US want to emigrate to Nigeria or Laos or Namibia or Somalia? NONE, that's how many.
My wife comes from a very poor country in SE Asia, and she's blown away by things like 911, public schools, food testing, public libraries, and all that stuff that you think is wasteful. She appreciates them and is more than happy to pay taxes. Unlike you, she realizes that these things are what make this country so great and why so many people want to come here, and not, for example, to emigrate to Somalia.
Her family had no money for schooling, so tough shit for her, is that it? Let the poor among us fail so that we may climb over their bodies on the way to our penthouses, right?
You selfish, ignorant fucks grow up swimming in these kinds of services and yet still find a way to complain about them. You'd likely be dead of a childhood disease if not for the publicly-funded health initiatives this country has. After all, what did this country ever do for you?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...