131–140 of 177 posts
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Example of batsheet?
A good example of LW going off the deep end is "Roko's basilisk" and Yudkowsky's response http://kruel.co/2013/01/12/rokos-basilisk-everything-you-nee... http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
Silk Road is very interesting from a design perspective, particularly the way it leverages different open source cryptographic tools to satisfy its complex security/privacy/anonymity requirements. I gave a talk about this at the Oakland Cryptoparty back in October. The slides are a little patchy and based entirely on perusing the site (read: speculation), but it inspired a lively discussion from amongst all the parti…
I think your Farmer's Market summary is outdated: it used Tor hidden service, for a short period only and after the investigation started (reading the indictment), and it's pretty clear now that Hushmail rolled over and then the garnered information was used to extract the Paypal & Western Union financial transactions. See my discussion of Farmer's Market in OP.
Slide 14 should mention the SQL injection attack on SR back in November or December 2012; I also disagree that DDoSes would be ineffective.
Slide 23: IIRC, someone has a verifiable anonymous mixer. I forget its name because it charges more than others.
Slide 27: Mtgox has been hacked and lost bitcoins, but haven't they always made up their users' losses? That's pretty important.
Interesting video and article here from the point of view of Australian customs http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-05/dark-internet-linked-t...
I wonder if the current little spike in the bitcoin price (from https://mtgox.com/ ) could be attributed to this article being posted on HN
http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u... suggests that daily bitcoin blockchain transactions make up something like $8m; much of this is just people shuffling bitcoins around of course, but even so, 260 people aren't going to push the exchange rate to $29!
It's very annoying that the back button doesn't work on your site.
There is no other place where I can safely buy military grade sniper rifle with delivery to my door, than tor network!
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A good example of LW going off the deep end is "Roko's basilisk" and Yudkowsky's response http://kruel.co/2013/01/12/rokos-basilisk-everything-you-nee... http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
That's not LW's problem, that's pretty much solely Yudkowsky's problem. Very few LW regulars agree with his response.
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I thought it is well established in the lesswrong community that we shouldn't give money to Eliezer Yudkowsky until the Singularity Institute proves itself to be of value.
The prevailing ideas (AKA Eliezer's ideas) do change. They used to be for AI research before they were against it. I am too bothered by the groupthink to hang around for long periods of time. I get enough of it IRL.
I'd much rather people change their mind as they gain greater understanding, as long as they document the reasoning.
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$1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic. Still, it seems like the risk far outweighs the gain here.
It's only small because bitcoins are a pain in the ass to get, and haven't spread yet. Once they become mainstream, there's no reason SilkRoad can't be the next huge thing. Think about - there's nothing that stops them from selling pirated books, movies, clothing at a huge discount compared to, let's say, Amazon. Many things only cost a lot because the manufacturer's profit margin is huge. That's true about anything…
In other words, it will always be small. Bitcoin has almost no chance of becoming mainstream.
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I've heard about the site and am casually curious, but how does the obvious security hole of eventually having a product sent to a specific real world address work out in practice? What is the genearl method for anonymizing this.... I'm sure it's a pretty basic question, but since you're here and all...
I've never ordered anything from Silk Road, but one thing I'm surprised isn't done is using cheap/knockoff consumer products as a "carrier." For instance, if it were well known that ordering a $295 DVD player from FrobozzCo.cn would result in delivery of a $29 DVD player stuffed full of Adderall or whatever people order, I imagine people would feel pretty safe ordering that way. The other thing is, I'm not sure that…