61–70 of 73 posts
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Well, buy domestic. USPS only, to be precise.
Can you explain what you mean, please?
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If they're smart, they'll just focus on compromising the site itself or using fake buyers/sellers. There are tons of ways to attack a site like that which do not rely on attacking tor.
Like what?
For the most part, just go after the weak human links in the chain and use standard anti-network tactics like turning people into informants and isolating everyone via mistrust.
Heck, they could just start scamming folks on the site. Create lots of new sellers, never deliver the promised drugs. BTC aren't revokable, so you can just rob them blind. The marketplace requires trust and there are lots of ways to break that. Yes, they could start building escrow services and the like, but those just create new avenues for attack.
With a little imagination, this could be used by the police as a giant honeypot.
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If they're smart, they'll just focus on compromising the site itself or using fake buyers/sellers. There are tons of ways to attack a site like that which do not rely on attacking tor.
Like what?
That was thwarted by a simple comment and up-vote system.
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Like what?
I think what Natsu is suggesting is similar to what the film and music industry tried with seeding torrent sites with partial clips, or material unrelated to that which it says it was. That was thwarted by a simple comment and up-vote system.
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Like what?
Compromise the site itself & gather information. Catch & turn real sellers. Crapflood it with fake buyers/sellers making it less useful. Order drugs & gather forensic info from the packages. Try to trace the money trail via the bitcoin block chain. While bitcoin is nominally anonymous, I believe there was an article a while back about how easy it is to accidentally deanonymize your bitcoins (see https://en.bitcoin.it…
Yea good luck with that!
> Catch & turn real sellers.
How would you do that? This seller got caught because he was a buyer too. People only selling on silk road can't be caught unless they do something really really stupid. And even if you do catch a seller what does that get you? Nothing! You're no closer to closing down Silk Road itself.
> Crapflood it with fake buyers/sellers making it less useful.
You can't be a fake buyer. Buyers must pony up the bitcoin up front and so that only helps sellers. Who cares where the actual drugs went, the seller got his money. Fake sellers are quickly caught out because of the reputation system. Buyers already know which sellers are reputable, they'll just keep buying from them. You can't do anything about that.
> Order drugs & gather forensic info from the packages.
This just targets individual sellers and won't do anything to stop Silk Road. Especially if the sellers are overseas.
> Heck, agree to sell someone drugs and actually send them flour + a GPS/camera if you want to go that route.
Yes buyers are vulnerable and always will be on Silk Road. That doesn't stop anyone and you'll usually only bust small time users which is a waste of resources.
>For the most part, just go after the weak human links in the chain and use standard anti-network tactics like turning people into informants and isolating everyone via mistrust.
Informants are useless. No seller can help you take down Silk Road because no seller knows where it's hosted or who is running it.
> Heck, they could just start scamming folks on the site.
Reputation systems stop this. Buyers only buy from reputable sellers.
> With a little imagination, this could be used by the police as a giant honeypot.
I don't see it.
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Compromise the site itself & gather information. Catch & turn real sellers. Crapflood it with fake buyers/sellers making it less useful. Order drugs & gather forensic info from the packages. Try to trace the money trail via the bitcoin block chain. While bitcoin is nominally anonymous, I believe there was an article a while back about how easy it is to accidentally deanonymize your bitcoins (see https://en.bitcoin.it…
> Compromise the site itself & gather information. Yea good luck with that! > Catch & turn real sellers. How would you do that? This seller got caught because he was a buyer too. People only selling on silk road can't be caught unless they do something really really stupid. And even if you do catch a seller what does that get you? Nothing! You're no closer to closing down Silk Road itself. > Crapflood it with fake bu…
If you're flooding them with fake sellers, it's going to be hard for new sellers to gain rep. Especially if you're leaving fake feedback, too.
By 'informants' I mean that you take over their Silk Road account and sell with their reputation. Turning people one at a time isn't useless if you make people afraid to use the site or to trust new sellers, then each seller you bust leaves them one less trusted place to turn to.
Reputation systems only work if there's a trusted authority to decide them or if there's more legit feedback than fake. It's not as though there are no ways to create fake accounts en masse. And it's not like a TOR hidden service can tell where the accounts are being spam registered from.
Overall, it's a cat-and-mouse game, but I don't see why it's fundamentally intractable.
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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!?!
You use an extreme example as a red herring. There are very few aggressive napalm-obsessive maniacs (outside the military agencies), but there are tons of regular folks who do no harm to anybody, but are constantly threatened by quirks in the laws. Do you know for 100% sure that you have paid all your taxes and filled all the forms correctly and never misspelled or accidentally lied in some gov. paper? So that if som…
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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…
How can you be radical if you feel "a bit biased"? I am radical voluntaryist myself because it's the only way to figure out what is right or wrong, what works and what doesn't. Whenever you have coercion, you cannot have study of human choices (that is, economics and ethics). It is as simple as that. If one wants to be coercive and violent - it's their choice, but it is illogical to claim that it's for someone's good…
I just mean, biased relative to what you might call "the mainstream". Luckily I give about half a shit about what "the mainstream" think.
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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 peo…
Some people don't like having everything they do tracked, just on principle. Also, drugs aren't the only black market trade.
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You use an extreme example as a red herring. There are very few aggressive napalm-obsessive maniacs (outside the military agencies), but there are tons of regular folks who do no harm to anybody, but are constantly threatened by quirks in the laws. Do you know for 100% sure that you have paid all your taxes and filled all the forms correctly and never misspelled or accidentally lied in some gov. paper? So that if som…
He was speaking in clear absolutes, so I think an extreme example is a perfectly valid way to open.
To say that general rule "do not use violence" does not work in extreme cases, is like saying that medicine is useless because it cannot make you perfectly healthy when you have a heart attack. But it is useful because it helps you to prevent heart attack in the first place. And if you ignored the knowledge and now having a heart attack, then how can you say that it is useless?