Bitcoin Forum

Our liberty loving Senate, the world's greatest deliberative body of the most free country on the Earth (notwithstanding the 2.4 million people rotting in jail), has taken note of Silk Road.  And they don't like it one little bit.  Brace yourselves.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-senators-internet-narcotics.html

Its being discussed in the general subforum: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=12456.0

They cant even find the site.  :D

Oops, sorry for the extra post, then, and thanks for the link.

"By cracking down on the website immediately, we can help stop these drugs from flooding our streets."

My coffee came out through my nose reading this.

I wish I was a fly on the wall in the meeting where some sith programmer tries explaining to these fools how Silk Road works.

Chucky needs to go here http://www.erowid.org/donations/donations_bitcoin.php (http://www.erowid.org/donations/donations_bitcoin.php)

We are making fun, but this is going to be a real life test to see if TOR is really as anonymous as it claims it is. Same can be said with for Bitcoin although Bitcoin only claims to be pseudo-anonymous (you have to actively follow some rules to be completely anonymous).

I read something a while back about Tor and anonymity. As I recall, Tor only provides anonymity to website visitors. The actual website they're visiting (even if it's a hidden site) is fairly easily locatable. But I would think the guy who runs Silk Road knows this and has taken steps to mitigate his exposure in case he's attacked. A good step would have been to locate the server in a country that is either extremely privacy loving or extremely hostile towards western countries like the US, UK, etc. Either would probably offer him the protection he needs.

Rage

If you do it right and know how TOR and bitcoin internals works, then you can remain anonymous.  Knowledge is power.


Well, again, if you know what you're doing, you can remain anonymous.  Take a reading of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_services):


So first off, don't provide any identifying information on your hidden server.  Second, in order to avoid correlation attacks and intersection attacks, I guess you'd have to make sure server is resistant to DDoS attacks so that there is do downtime that can be oberserved, and also I would think that if you also setup your server such that is works as a TOR router in the background when not servicing requests to ensure that there is always a constant stream of TOR traffic flowing along the wires from your government-monitored ISP.  That way there is no way for an adversary to identify your location by monitoring the response to your TOR traffic to some DDoS or other attack indented to cause a break your TOR traffic.  Keep in mind, I'm not an expect on this, so if anyone else can offer advice, I would appreciate it.

I'd suppose if the government or your ISP suspects that you might be running a hidden service, they could momentarily disconnect or throttle your internet bandwidth, and then see if they can detect a momentary lapse in service to your hidden service.


That and always make sure you are operating with a constant background of TOR packets flowing to/from your physical location to camouflage traffic to your hidden service.  But ultimately, the problem is Silk Road is a centralized hub.  What is needed is a distributed peer-to-peer network marketplace...