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Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

arstechnica.com

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Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#41

Post by jerguismi »

sliverstorm wrote: post #23
pippy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be realistic though, bitcoin is mostly used for gambling and drugs. Depending on your philosophy, the freedom it enables is far more important than what it's used for.

You pose an interesting philosophical quandary. If the freedom it enables is simply the freedom to gamble illegally and trade illicit goods, is that important...? Do people make the argument that freedom is simply intrinsically good? Or do they argue, like with bittorrent, that the possible occasional positive uses outweigh the more common, primarily negative uses ?

I think that the black markets are just the first adopters. After that, bitcoin will enable low-cost payment and payout processing and money transfer automation for everyone in the world. This is a great thing.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#42

Post by kirian »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #24
betterunix wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those drugs still have to be shipped via a real postal system. Speculative scifi suggests that I will have a machine in my house that will produce drugs on the fly, with chemical reactions that are controlled by software.

No need to wait for 3D printing, last night I was reading a short story [1] in which the players in an ARG earned experience points via the hand delivery of items from one player to another in the real world forming an alternative delivery system from the postal carriers. Similarly, in Daniel Suarez's Daemon [2] he describes how a series of net connected people pass around individual parts that they have no idea the…

Or maybe something like this drone delivery network: http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567193-...

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#43

Post by abrkn »

Cushman wrote: post #30
sliverstorm wrote: post #12

Talk about bad press for Bitcoin. Silk Road is probably the number one reason regular Joe's would ever hear them mentioned.

Somebody help me out here: Isn't Silk Road also the number one reason Regular Joe would use bitcoin?

Silk Road is a burden. Most serious Boitcoin discussion forums and chat channels will ban you for mentioning it. We're trying to change how cash transactions work, not help teens go to rave parties.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#44

Post by mindcrime »

sliverstorm wrote: post #33
polarix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that prohibitions against any value exchange are purely evil or misguided, so they should be routed around.

Wait, what ? There are no transactions that should be blocked? Preventing the sale of napalm to a triple-arsonist is evil? I know I'm being a little extreme, but again- what!?!

Wait, what? There are no transactions that should be blocked?

I'll be a little bit extreme here and agree that there are no voluntary transactions, made between consenting adults, that should be blocked. Any use of force (or threat of force) to try and achieve some social or political end is evil, IMO. Even if the "end" is a noble one, like preventing arson. It's the act of the arsonist which is evil, and intervening to prevent him/her from torching someone else's property is just self defense, which I would consider acceptable.

But, then again, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist, so I'm a bit biased.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#45

Post by Cushman »

abrkn wrote: post #43
Cushman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody help me out here: Isn't Silk Road also the number one reason Regular Joe would use bitcoin?

Silk Road is a burden. Most serious Boitcoin discussion forums and chat channels will ban you for mentioning it. We're trying to change how cash transactions work, not help teens go to rave parties.

That doesn't mean it's not true though, right?

I mean, help me along with this. Bitcoin is like cash, but you need to use a computer. If I'm already using a computer, there are many reasons I might prefer to use another payment system: Traceability, reversibility, confirmability, et cetera. These are generally very useful features that translate directly into me paying less for stuff.

It seems to me like for most people, the only real advantage to cash is that it is anonymous, and the only reason most people need anonymity is if what they're buying is actually illegal, and for most people that means drugs.

So if I'm an average guy with a job, a mortgage, and a credit card, if I pay my taxes, and stop for pedestrians, and I like to drop acid occasionally, what am I going to use bitcoin for?

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#46

Post by stephengillie »

sliverstorm wrote: post #11
stephengillie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the drugs are 3d-printed? Maybe in pill form?

That implies one of the following: 1) The printer is capable of "printing" complex compounds using individual atoms 2) The printer is pre-loaded with cocaine, LSD, MDMA... My point being not everything can be printed...

Not everything can be printed today...

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#47

Post by betterunix »

Cushman wrote: post #39
betterunix wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The researcher's original work was meant to crack down on child pornography distribution, where the covert channel would be embedded in the download of a video or large file of some sort. In the case of the Silk road, the police would probably need to direct the target to another website, and somehow convince the target to leave that website open. Harder, yes, although probably not impossible -- one might, for exampl…

The challenge isn't locating or identifying average users, though, since they'll gladly send you their name and address. The challenge is finding the distributors, who are (presumably) more careful to follow the rules. It sounds like this technique can't really do that in the general case.

Even distributors probably do not know all the ways that Tor can be attacked. Look at the Hushmail/DEA case: you had a reasonably big steroids distributor using Hushmail, sending mountains of incriminating evidence through that system apparently unaware that there was a major security problem. Is it really so hard to believe that the police might be able to get a Silk Road distributor to follow an off-site link?

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#48

Post by toufka »

sliverstorm wrote: post #11
stephengillie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the drugs are 3d-printed? Maybe in pill form?

That implies one of the following: 1) The printer is capable of "printing" complex compounds using individual atoms 2) The printer is pre-loaded with cocaine, LSD, MDMA... My point being not everything can be printed...

It actually wouldn't be much more complicated to have a machine into which you pour a bit of bakers yeast, sugar and water and out comes a highly-enriched biomolecule of your choice. Most (recreational) drugs can be created via natural biochemical pathways. Honestly, not that much more complicated than your espresso machine.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#49

Post by kryptiskt »

dalore wrote: post #40
dkulchenko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't some node eventually have to know the final destination of the hidden server?

One node will know the last link in the onion skin but it won't know that's the silk road's server or the outer layer of the skins.

I wonder if this isn't susceptible to statistical methods. The idea would be to both issue requests and to operate onion nodes, feed a big number of requests for the Silk Road into Tor, use timing and size information for the requests at your nodes to identify those that are possibly yours. Every request to the Silk Road has to terminate there, so the IP-numbers that it uses should sum to 1/(# of onion layers) of your total, minus a factor for packets you falsely identified as yours.

Re: Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

#50

Post by sliverstorm »

toufka wrote: post #48
sliverstorm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That implies one of the following: 1) The printer is capable of "printing" complex compounds using individual atoms 2) The printer is pre-loaded with cocaine, LSD, MDMA... My point being not everything can be printed...

It actually wouldn't be much more complicated to have a machine into which you pour a bit of bakers yeast, sugar and water and out comes a highly-enriched biomolecule of your choice. Most (recreational) drugs can be created via natural biochemical pathways. Honestly, not that much more complicated than your espresso machine.

Sure, but at that point it isn't a printer, and let's not forget that while any one particular chemical may have a simple synthesis process, different chemicals don't generally have the same process, which makes synthesizing an arbitrary chemical in a printer-sized box that sits on your desk a difficult prospect.
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