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Using Silk Road

gwern.net

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Re: Using Silk Road

#121

Post by celticninja »

adamnemecek wrote: post #102
A1kmm wrote: post #74

I think the easiest attack on SR would not be one of the attacks mentioned in the article (although similar to their second attack, but focused on legal implications instead of fraud), but rather: a. Law enforcement creates a large number of vendor and customer accounts. Due to the pseudonymity, they can create as many as they like and they can't be linked (they may need to create them over time to avoid making the p…

SR would have to be brain dead not to realize that this is an issue. As maxwellhansen, one has to purchase a token to become a seller which are quite expensive. Furthermore, there is a limited number of tokens and the only way to get a token is to buy it from someone (who will then lose said token). Therefore it is pretty hard to become a seller.

this is incorrect, the site does require you purchase a vendor account but this is from the site admin and not from another user. to become a seller/vendor on the site you just need money, about $500 USD I believe.

Re: Using Silk Road

#122

Post by adcoelho »

schrodinger wrote: post #67
rorrr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me the problem is the delivery system. Everything is completely untraceable up until the very second you enter your home address. Is there really a feasible way to evade this liability? Maybe there is a market for truly anonymous "po boxes" or something? How else do you keep the last step anonymous?

I guess you could always enter your address but not your name. In case of trouble you could always argue that it was sent from/to someone else and has no connection to you.

Re: Using Silk Road

#123

Post by celticninja »

roel_v wrote: post #118
OGinparadise wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as other said, their cut is under $100K. A decent criminal lawyer will take that in a month and tell you that he needs $2-$3++ million for a drug case. (From Aaron S case we learned that a simple fed case is $1.5 million, on average)

"A decent criminal lawyer will take that in a month and tell you that he needs $2-$3++ million for a drug case." [citation needed], which is really a passive-aggressive way of saying "bollocks". Well I'm not saying that Pablo Escobar's lawyers didn't bank that much, but really - there are thousands of drug dealers tried every single day, a sizable percentage of that with turnovers way over 100k / month - you're not s…

whilst i agree with your overall assessment I do think that if the Silk Road admin(s) was/were identified and arrested it would be far from your usual drug trial and may involve a lot of expert witnesses dealing with Tor, .onion sites, bitcoin and importantly how they could link the defendant with SilkRoad given the anonymity provided by Tor. This would all add to the costs of defnding a client way more than your usual drug bust.

Re: Using Silk Road

#125

Post by dobbsbob »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #41
cnp wrote: post #35

Here's an academic analysis of Silk Road. After crawling the site for a few months they came up with this: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-... "Abstract We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months betw…

$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.

That study didnt cover all the hidden transactions, also DPR sells on his own site too when it started his g/f was the first vendor selling shrooms. So theres one person in this world who knows who DPR is, which is exactly enough for her to rat him out should anything go south in their relationship. Im sure she's told all her friends too like Max Visions' gf did.

Another problem is all the writing hes done on the site about agorism. Surprised feds havnt broken out the writing analyst software and then trolled agorist forums and the bitcoin forum to match it up, unless hes been extremely careful with his Opsec

Re: Using Silk Road

#126

Post by [deleted] »

adcoelho wrote: post #122
schrodinger wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the problem is the delivery system. Everything is completely untraceable up until the very second you enter your home address. Is there really a feasible way to evade this liability? Maybe there is a market for truly anonymous "po boxes" or something? How else do you keep the last step anonymous?

I guess you could always enter your address but not your name. In case of trouble you could always argue that it was sent from/to someone else and has no connection to you.

[deleted]

Re: Using Silk Road

#127

Post by acebarry »

arcadeparade wrote: post #117
juanramon wrote: post #100

Talking about Tor; you can built your own Silk Road with http://osclass.org/ (it's a software for creating your own classified site) and using the Tor plugin http://blog.osclass.org/2013/01/21/anonymous-with-tor-plugin... . Disclosure: I participate in Osclass.

thanks for the link. Any links on creating a .onion link and the rest of whats needed?

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

I set up a hidden service once to bypass a university firewall. It's surprisingly easy.

Re: Using Silk Road

#128

Post by maxerickson »

jerguismi wrote: post #93
DanBlake wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the coins mixed before exactly? Also, I think its extremely impractical to think that a volume drug dealer is going to do physical exchanges. Even if they did opt for that route- Track the guy he did the exchanges with, then beat him with a wrench to find out who he bought from.

> How are the coins mixed before exactly? You can mix them anyhow you want. If you know how bitcoin transactions work, the idea is simply to break the transaction chain. There are simpler or more paranoid ways to do it, and of course in Bitcoin world it is inviduals responsibility to handle his own coins. Edit: think about how someone would try to connect the transactions: timing, amounts, etc. I find it pretty annoy…

So what happens when the government decides to try every participant in a mixer with racketeering?

Re: Using Silk Road

#129

Post by jerguismi »

maxerickson wrote: post #128
jerguismi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How are the coins mixed before exactly? You can mix them anyhow you want. If you know how bitcoin transactions work, the idea is simply to break the transaction chain. There are simpler or more paranoid ways to do it, and of course in Bitcoin world it is inviduals responsibility to handle his own coins. Edit: think about how someone would try to connect the transactions: timing, amounts, etc. I find it pretty annoy…

So what happens when the government decides to try every participant in a mixer with racketeering?

Don't know. BTW almost every web based service is a bitcoin mixer in itself, including exchanges, because it is fairly standard way to implement a hosted bitcoin wallet. Exception might be blockchain.info.

Re: Using Silk Road

#130

Post by lhnn »

sruser wrote: post #17

(throwaway account) I've spent over $50,000 USD on SR in the past year, and I'm happy to answer any questions people have about the site or community.

How do you know the goods you purchase are safe for consumption? Is it based on reputation of the vendor? Do you have home testing kits?
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