i know this is a dumb question but im new to tor - how does one go about finding the addresses of hidden tor services like silk road? is it just word-of-mouth?
www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets has a list in the sidebar
Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
31–40 of 95 posts
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#32>Crawling through tor already obfuscates your identity to a certain degree, so we don’t really have to do anything other than cycling User-Agent strings to look different from any other client. Why is that necessary, though? If Silk Road has any checks in place that protects against scraping, why are those in place?
User Agents have proven to be (somewhat) uniquely identifiable under specific conditions so it seems like a reasonable precaution regardless of Silk Road configurations.
He can specify his own User-Agent string. If he sends the user agent 'silkroadparserbot v0.0.1' with every request, that is going to provide no information at all.
Even if this wasn't, did you think that after one change of UA he would be getting more 'uniquely identifiable' with each new request sent?
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legalized weed might eat away, but if the market is anything like Colorado, it's too expensive vs dark weed. It's so bad in fact that there are projected budget shortfalls because there are few consumers in the space. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/high-times/marijuana-prices-co... http://khon2.com/2014/04/09/colorado-tax-revenue-on-recreati...
Just speculation, but won't the legalized price drop as other states become legal as well?
depends on how regulated and taxed it is
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#34A few months ago I had the idea of creating a project to scrape Silk Road. The idea was to parse all listings, determine the quantity, divide by the price, and then average it through the entire site. The end result would be an average price for weed/lsd/mdma,etc. Sort of like the Winkdex, except for drugs prices. Shortly after I got it running, Silk Road 1.0 got shut down. Then the darknet market "scene" became really fragmented into like 10 different sites. Writing scraping code is tedious, so I abandoned the project. The code is here: https://github.com/priestc/weedprices
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#35WTF. According to a quick calculation 23% of the whole index of today ships from The Netherlands...
Is that reliable though? I'd imagine the DEA is more likely to investigate a dealer declaring their location as Washington DC than one declaring Netherlands. So their is a definite incentive to falsify this.
But a buyer from the US is far less likely to order from the Netherlands since international mail goes through customs and there's no 4th amendment protection on them at all.
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legalized weed might eat away, but if the market is anything like Colorado, it's too expensive vs dark weed. It's so bad in fact that there are projected budget shortfalls because there are few consumers in the space. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/high-times/marijuana-prices-co... http://khon2.com/2014/04/09/colorado-tax-revenue-on-recreati...
Just speculation, but won't the legalized price drop as other states become legal as well?
I think it depends more on the federal government officially deferring to state drug laws (unlikely) or taking action to de-schedule marijuana specifically (slightly less unlikely).
Right now the only people who can grow cannabis openly and "legally" with any degree of safety are the states themselves, which kind of puts a damper on market competition.
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 99 euro vacuum food saver will get you a long way in sending drugs worldwide. Combine that with some clever packaging and the chances of it getting caught at customs are pretty small.
Heard the same from friends - they were sending meat products that were a little on the grey side of import rules across a border. Vacuum packing + bleaching it overnight seems to keep the sniffer dogs away. Whether that works for drugs I can't say though.
Dealers use moisture barrier bags that are heat sealed now as apparently dogs can detect vacuum sealed bags though unclear if it's outside contamination, like somebody putting together a package in a room full of weed shavings or smoke.
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MDMA is difficult to find in pure forms and impurities can kill you. If you buy MDMA from a vendor with a 4.9/5 rating Could this be selection bias? If you're dead you can't give a bad rating?
Potentially, but death is still pretty rare with impure MDMA and the effects can be felt. It's also a social drug, so I would imagine most buyers purchasing ~tens of pills and sharing them with friends. One would probably leave a bad review if a friend died. Testing kits and services are also available so you could review the quality without even taking the drug.
Be forewarned: A lot of these kits only test for the presence of, not quality/purity of, MDMA and other forms of E. That being said, someone would definitely pipe up and say "this killed my friend" if something were to go wrong.
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#39Cool data, but your charts are absolutely horrible
1) Try to pick more different colors. Choosing two different shades of pink, of grey and of cyan to represent unrelated things makes zero sense.
2) The sellers-by-country map is completely unreadable, it's just very slight variations of the shades of pink. Italy looks almost as pink as Canada, but it's 16 times less active.
Re: Trends in the Silk Road 2.0
#40Cool data, but your charts are absolutely horrible 1) Try to pick more different colors. Choosing two different shades of pink, of grey and of cyan to represent unrelated things makes zero sense. 2) The sellers-by-country map is completely unreadable, it's just very slight variations of the shades of pink. Italy looks almost as pink as Canada, but it's 16 times less active.
or just add labels on the graph itself and you won't even need colors (bonus for the color blinds)