Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#111

Post by rayiner » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:15 PM UTC

VladRussian2 wrote: post #101

revelation wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to forget this is just the internet. It's a communications medium . Anonymity in communications are certainly not a unique feature of the internet, you can hide your caller id, and a letter will still arrive without a return address. The basic idea being that you can't shoot someone in the face by merely communicating, and I'm pretty sure you can still not commit a violent crime over the internet alone. C…

>The concept of "natural rights" is motivated by protection against the government. yes, there is no natural rights in Nature, except may be the right to run as fast as one able to away from the next up in the food chain. The current stage of human society is akin to a situation when a pack of predators and a herd of prey make an agreement that the prey willn't be hunted as long as it stays withing specified bounds.…

I think your predator/herd dichotomy creates a needless dichotomy, and also goes outside the bounds of its own analogy (predators and prey obviously don't agree in the state of nature, and in the presence of a fat herd the predators would multiply out of control until the herd thinned). I don't think it captures the relevant dynamics.

How I tend to view things is that humans are inherently pack animals. We are individually pretty weak and prone to being victimized, but organized together in a pack under leadership we can pretty much run the show. While, acting as a mob, we can always kill the leaders, the natural state of our existence is a very bloody anarchy so we avoid doing that unless absolutely necessary.

See, e.g., the French Revolution.

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#112

Post by tsax » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:18 PM UTC

GhotiFish wrote: post #22

venus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is anyone who believes - really believes - it has not. The war on drugs is kind of this diorama encapsulation of everything that is wrong with our politics, media, and society.

Well. I'm not convinced it did, myself. If prohibition didn't happen 1920s for the americans, would Al Capone never of being born? Really these prohibition laws give lowlifes something to fight over, and the fightings dangerous, but who says they wouldn't be fighting anyway? Does it make life more dangerous. Maybe not. Does it make it more dangerous for me? Maybe. edit: Ouch. Looking forward to that rebuttal.

I guess people who use the "they would just do something else" argument for cartels and prohibition mafias would be the ones to say that if the iPhone business goes bust within a year, Apple would just do something else anyway! I mean are people so boneheaded to think that a massive source of revenue can simply be switched over without costs? The real world operates _on the margin_ (economic term).

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#113

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:19 PM UTC

karzeem wrote: post #110

pak wrote: post #35

Here's a question for the techno-libertarians stepping up to say the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road. Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet? Life, liberty, freedom from discrimination, due process--these things I understand, and there are well supported philosophical frameworks (rule utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian etc.) for deriving them from first…

The other responses to this would probably be agreeable to most "techno-libertarians", but I don't think they're quite correct as to how this natural right is derived. They don't actually posit a natural right to anonymity specifically. The core idea is that the only moral use of force is self-defense. Therefore, it would be immoral for people to use force against you (in this system, laws are considered force becaus…

[deleted]

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#114

Post by superuser2 » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:23 PM UTC

ferdo wrote: post #67

slg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can have Liberty or Security but if we pick Security over Liberty, we'll lose both. I hate this false dichotomy. It simply isn't true as we give up a wide range of liberties in order to live in a safer world. That is what laws inherently are, rules that limit an individuals ability for the greater good of society. Whether is it preventing people from driving down a highway at 100 mph, whether they can grow and c…

> That is what laws inherently are, rules that limit an individuals ability for the greater good of society. Not to be unkind, but this is a simplistic view of law and realpolitiks. As an example, can you honestly say that arresting hundreds of thousands of peaceful weed smokers annually is a "greater good"?

Your problem here isn't with government, it's with Republicans (and conservative Democrats) who do believe that arresting pot smokers is a greater good.

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#115

Post by manicbovine » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:23 PM UTC

ferdo wrote: post #100

tptacek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have also traded the liberty of selling contaminated meat for the security of minimizing deaths due to foodborne pathogens. That trade seems to have worked out well. People have also traded the liberty of people able to discard carcinogenic industrial waste wherever they please for the security of the world's most reliable potable water delivery systems. That trade seems to have worked out well. He's right, an…

> the liberty of selling contaminated meat That's not liberty. That's criminal behavior that stems from criminal thinking. If government has any legitimate function at all, it's to prevent injustice from criminals and other predators. When government becomes the seat of criminality and predation, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? > He's right, and you're wrong. I parse this as, "I agree with him, not you" as these are a…

> That's not liberty. That's criminal behavior that stems from criminal thinking. If government has any legitimate function at all, it's to prevent injustice from criminals and other predators.

I think you're missing a fine point here. You've already said that contaminated meat is criminal, presumably because it's very dangerous. Are bath salts very dangerous? Meth? Low quality meth with contaminants?

How should we permit the sale of narcotics while disallowing poisons? I think that a lot of people can answer that, but how can we do this in a reasonable way? Let's think it through... I don't have time to keep track of which things are safe. I'd probably rely on some organization to help me decide. It's reasonable for me to rely on the government because they're democratically accountable to me. In that system, I'd prefer them to really err on the side of caution. Erring on the side of caution, is heroin poison?

Do you want to live in a world where buying a simple OTC sleep pill at Walgreen's exposes you to the risk of ingesting heroin or some other decidedly narcotic substance?

I really support the legalization of certain drugs, but I'm advocating for a per substance approach. (Actually, I'm saying that it's functionally impossible to just "legalize drugs".)

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#116

Post by john_b » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:24 PM UTC

pak wrote: post #35

Here's a question for the techno-libertarians stepping up to say the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road. Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet? Life, liberty, freedom from discrimination, due process--these things I understand, and there are well supported philosophical frameworks (rule utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian etc.) for deriving them from first…

> "We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous."

Using "natural states of being", however defined, to articulate rights in unnatural states of being (i.e. modern society) is a fallacy. It presumes that a natural state of being naturally endows people with all their rights, and that the arbitrary social systems that have evolved on top of that natural state have systematically deprived people of those rights. In some cases, this has happened, but it is not an inviolable law.

For example, in the "state of nature" women are born weaker than men, but that doesn't mean that men have a right to drag them back to the cave and do what they want with them.

> "Society has weighed the pros and cons and decided that this particular set of technologies is on the whole good. That it might in fact want to limit the level of anonymity on the network seems reasonable, in the same way that making people put license plates on their cars is reasonable."

"Society" is not a monolithic, homogeneous organism whose will is absolute and omniscient. Society is composed of many subcultures with differing ideologies that change over time. "Society" has not decided to "limit the level of anonmymity" on the internet; it is only some factions within it that believe that should be done. The worrying aspect is that these factions often promote it as a public good (using the same "societal consensus" language you have invoked) that only fringe groups like terrorists and pedophiles oppose. As long as indifferent factions (which most ordinary people fall into) are more swayed by this kind of fear mongering than by a desire to prevent the machinery of the destruction of their rights from being built, the minority faction that argues that privacy is unnecessary or even dangerous will exert a disproportionate level of control over our entire society.

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#117

Post by dllthomas » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:25 PM UTC

bsullivan01 wrote: post #99

ryanSrich wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because shutting down a service where the majority of exchange is conducted with an adequate amount of peace only forces such exchange into streets where volence is often unavoidable.

Fine, FBI should let me smuggle all the Colombian cocaine through NJ/NY ports so the violence along the Mexico border is eliminated.

Yes, they should, though not you uniquely...

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#118

Post by tsax » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:26 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #74

Maybe in some rhetorical sense, but not in any measurable way. Silk Road was enormous for what it was, but it's nowhere near even a tiny fraction of the global drug market. It's probably still tiny compared to the drug market in any large city.

Worldwide global drug market is estimated to be around $350B/year. SR did around 1.2B over 2.5 years. So yeah a tiny amount, but a huge amount considering it just started couple years back and needed technical sophistication of bitcoin + tor + pgp to use.

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#119

Post by dllthomas » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:27 PM UTC

llamataboot wrote: post #70

One doesn't need to assert any natural rights. Once can make a completely utilitarian case for the decriminalization of controlled substances. In fact, nearly all available evidence points in that direction -- it is increasingly hard in w a world full of data to make the case that criminalizing substance use offers any utilitarian benefits at all. It makes the drug market a more dangerous place, controlled by violenc…

Decriminalization of drugs does not answer the entire question - other illegal commerce was taking place there.

Re: Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

#120

Post by fragsworth » Fri, Oct 04, 2013, 7:33 PM UTC

jtbigwoo wrote: post #24

BashiBazouk wrote: post #14

Did Silk Road even put a slight dent in street drug sellers in the first place? I would be surprised if street level sellers and buyers are internet savvy enough to use a service like this. SR looks more like the ideal system for savvy college students and young techs to specifically avoid the street level market.

Right. Just requiring the use of tor prevented 95% of the population from using SR.

I doubt that. If you don't care (or know) about anonymity or security, it was extremely easy to access the Silk Road through a web proxy with a simple Google search.