Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#191

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 6:21 AM UTC

atemerev wrote: post #157

jacquesm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People from more or less politically stable countries like the US I would have agreed with that assessment in the past but in the present I really can't.

Come on, if your country can handle _this_ president without collapsing immediately, your political system is really well designed!

Shall we wait until it is over before drawing conclusions? It's already gone downhill a lot further than I would have expected, the degree to which people are apparently willing to enable all this is f'ing scary.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#192

Post by theelous3 » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 9:11 AM UTC

kahlonel wrote: post #26

My vision was distorted for full 30 seconds after reading this page.

Yeah. High contrast is only good for people with serious vision problems.

Awful to read.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#193

Post by runeks » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

panarky wrote: post #162

runeks wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One ideal solution could be a cryptocurrency with on-chain confirmation of the real-world transaction by both parties after the fact. How do you prevent merchants from just creating a thousand fake transactions to make them look reputable?

This is where the web of trust comes in. You give the greatest trust to reviews provided by the anonymous identities you have transacted with. You give progressively less trust to reviews by identities 1, 2, ..., n hops away from those you have transacted with. If a merchant creates 1000 sock-puppet consumers, they won't be reachable from your trust network, so you'll give them little if any weight.

> You give the greatest trust to reviews provided by the anonymous identities you have transacted with.

I don’t quite follow. Consumers deal with merchants. Consumers give reviews to merchants. So the anonymous identities you mention will be customers that I don’t know. Merchants won’t review each other, I presume.

In other words, as I understand it, the “anonymous identities I’ve transacted with” will be merchants, who don’t review other merchants.

> If a merchant creates 1000 sock-puppet consumers, they won't be reachable from your trust network, so you'll give them little if any weight.

What if do a successful deal with this merchant? Will I then trust that all those 1000 fake transactions took place? And will the people who trust me also believe that?

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#194

Post by _archon_ » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #160

omeid2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war on drug has to be one of the top contributors and financiers of crime and criminal gangs. Imagine a world where criminal gangs don't have access to the money they make through drugs and a government that doesn't have to spend huge amount of money on drug laws enforcement because drug trafficking would be much less lucrative in the existence of legal access and you get fewer and very cash-strapped drug gangs,…

There are plenty of illegal activities which can be used by gangs to generate revenue. If certain drugs are decriminalized, they still have theft, fencing, prostitution, sex trafficking, intimidation, computer crimes, etc.

All these avenues already exist and are in play. To take away the drug black market is to reduce the total cash potential for organized crime.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#195

Post by crowbahr » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 4:35 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #114

crowbahr wrote: post #2

Very interesting reading the obstacles faced by the black market drug trade and how they're overcoming them. It seems like the producer layer is most susceptible to penetration as it is essentially identical to most gangs. It's entirely glossed over here but procuring the product seems like a difficult problem for an anonymized distributor: How do you make sure the product gets to your support layers? As interesting…

> The article essentially describes a quintessential terror cell structure, but with the added benefit of 0 direct interaction. Isn't "terror cell" a little over-the-top? It's just trade craft. The US does it. Russia and China do it. The various mafias (at least, modern ones) do it.

It's not over the top, it's what I was talking about.

Terror cells have had to operate with reduced resources since the dawn of terrorism. The terror cell structure is trying to keep things as isolated as possible, and I'm saying this structuring and proliferation of dead-drop tech will all boost the potential power of the terror cell.

I'm saying that what they've described is a structure analogous to what exists, just higher tech. The time to adoption of this by terror elements is going to be short.