On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#121

Post by azernik » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 11:26 AM UTC

rootsudo wrote: post #103

azernik wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of why I'm so up on pot legalization - locally grown, conflict-free drugs.

Conflict-free? I never understood that. Is Sugar considered conflict-free?

The comparison being to conflict diamonds (and conflict-free diamonds) - a lot of wars are fueled and escalated by revenues from natural resource extraction, and a pretty simple kind of ethical consumption is to decide to not buy diamonds from, say, the DRC. The market will adapt somewhat, especially if the good is a commodity whose origin can be obscured in the supply chain, but substituting a whole different good avoids that problem. Buy gems other than diamonds, for example.

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#122

Post by azernik » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 11:28 AM UTC

chisleu wrote: post #102

azernik wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of why I'm so up on pot legalization - locally grown, conflict-free drugs.

IMHO, It's only conflict free if you grow it yourself unfortunately. I don't smoke myself but I plan to summer in Colorado in 2018 and grow a crop to give to oncology patients and the like.

Commercial pot growing in California comes with some serious illegality (especially when it comes to environmental regulations), but as far as I know the level of violence involved is relatively low.

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#123

Post by ByThyGrace » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 11:33 AM UTC

chisleu wrote: post #102

azernik wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of why I'm so up on pot legalization - locally grown, conflict-free drugs.

IMHO, It's only conflict free if you grow it yourself unfortunately. I don't smoke myself but I plan to summer in Colorado in 2018 and grow a crop to give to oncology patients and the like.

Not to be nitpicky, but why would these patients (who will be depositary of your good will) think any different from you as to "it's only conflict free if you grow it yourself"? They may as well use this moral standing to reject your crop.

There has to be trust at some point right?

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#124

Post by Wingman4l7 » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 11:40 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #14

> For instance, on eBay less than 2 percent of all feedback left is negative or neutral. One explanation is that dissatisfied customers are substantially less likely to give feedback. It means the most important information, the negative reputation data, is not being captured. Can negative feedback on eBay be cancelled? Because if it can be, then I'll give you a much more plausible explanation - sellers bribe custome…

This number is meaningless in today's (and the past several years') eBay -- sellers cannot leave negative feedback for buyers.

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#125

Post by nofilter » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:17 PM UTC

Not sure if completely on topic, but I know of a few friends who every now and then when they go to party do some Ecstacy and they told me a site like https://www.pillreports.net/ is invaluable to them in that they can check the quality of the stuff before they actually buy it, because a bad batch can actually kill you. In such a case, reviews can actually save your life and, I guess, guarantee you a good time.

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#126

Post by stordoff » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:44 PM UTC

popinman322 wrote: post #72

zxcmx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero. There can be huge negative externalities involved with drug use, as anyone with a family member who has a drug problem could tell you. Even in the most enlightened societies one would have to acknowledge that support and rehabilitation for the small percentage of users who have p…

Proper drug education would likely go a very long way towards ameliorating addiction problems (the main contributor to negative externalities in drug markets). Why are people using heroin? Are they depressed? In pain? What about amphetamines? Do they have ADHD? Moreover, how many first time users actually know how to/understand the importance of properly titrating up, or even safe dosages of the substance they're usi…

> even safe dosages of the substance they're using?

Can anyone, even experienced and properly educated users, truly know the safe dosages when the potency (and potentially even the substance itself -- see, e.g., the fentanyl analogues used in heroin) of the drug in question are unknown?

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#127

Post by stordoff » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:47 PM UTC

15155 wrote: post #49

rz2k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish you could have personal blacklists of sellers so they don't appear in your own search results. Many years ago I avoided leaving negative feedback on a seller that agreeably accepted a return on stuff that was obviously counterfeit. A couple years later I felt like an idiot when I received garbage again, then realized that it was the same seller that had tried to quietly scam me before.

> Many years ago I avoided leaving negative feedback on a seller that agreeably accepted a return on stuff that was obviously counterfeit. I would've never sent it back. Explain this situation to your credit card company. If it isn't illegal by statute to send counterfeit goods, it's certainly against policy. All financial institutions have policies against moving these goods around if you can prove to some very low…

It's also against eBay policies to require the return of counterfeit items:

> If a buyer suspects that an item is counterfeit and there are strong indicators that the item is counterfeit, the buyer isn’t required to return the item to the seller. The buyer agrees to cooperate with us to ensure the proper disposal of the item. In such cases, we refund the buyer for the full cost of the item and original postage, and the seller reimburses us for the refund. The buyer may not sell the item on eBay or elsewhere.

https://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/money-back-guarantee....

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#128

Post by etherael » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 2:57 PM UTC

chisleu wrote: post #95

This article is total bullshit. Reviews on SR were rarely negative because the venders didn't do "some bad business". They did really good business, followed by really bad business and disappeared. It was common for vendors to cash out ESPECIALLY on the 4/20 sales and various other sales. They would offer incentives to FE (finalize early, ie release funds from the arbitrage) for months. Then, they would have a big sa…

On a long enough timeline, and with enough at stake, everything is an exit scam.

The only way to fix it is to reduce the stake and timeline. You design ventures around limiting exposure to both and you won't end up getting burned by them when the balance tips, because the balance will never get to the point it could.

One of the hard lessons I've learnt from my many years in crypto.

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#129

Post by jiggunjer » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 3:24 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #99

zxcmx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero. There can be huge negative externalities involved with drug use, as anyone with a family member who has a drug problem could tell you. Even in the most enlightened societies one would have to acknowledge that support and rehabilitation for the small percentage of users who have p…

Alcohol has some of the worst negative externalities of any drug of abuse. It's a causal factor in a huge proportion of road traffic accidents and domestic violence. It kills about 88,000 Americans annually due to overdose, accidents and chronic illness. Typical recreational doses are inherently toxic. When we criminalized alcohol, the negative externalities got worse. Gangsters murdered each other in the street for…

Your argument is not correct. You shouldn't argue that criminalizing kills, if you are against it you should argue it kills/harms more than regulating. That is harder to prove with the prohibition period data.

Re: On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything

#130

Post by AlwaysBCoding » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 3:56 PM UTC

Posibyte wrote: post #63

Somebody in the comments of the article brought up a good point. What happens when the site gets shut down? As apparently is the case according to the comment author. I know it's a trope, a huge joke and everything, but this seems like a perfect place to leave notes on the blockchain. It's something that can't be "cleaned" outside of the darknet, it's permanent, and supposedly impossible to forge a private key to man…

I think it would be interesting to build a reputation system like this on top of Ethereum, where each Ethereum address has a reputation associated with it and the darknet markets simply read that reputation into their UIs. That way even if the market gets shut down and loses their database, the vendor reputation system would still persist.