Bitcoin Forum

Because of the Great FireWall in China, you can't imagine how hard it is to connect to the Tor network.

Finally found a way , somehow i am so disappointed

There's only 5000 users registerd,
1000 pieces of goods on sale (90% are drugs),
concurrently less than 50 users online top,
and i bet less than $1k goods are sold everyday.

... :o

Of those 5000 registered users, probably most of them make real use of SR considering that they went through all the pain to reach it.

there is no pain reaching SR, i have been there, to see what people are talking about. it was easy.

sry  :-[

No satellite providers in china?

This is great news. I've never been on there but you've confirmed my suspicion that it's a small part of the bitcoin economy.

Where did you get those numbers from? Are they on the site?

google keywords  "Travelling down SilkRoad", it's on the image.

Thanks, finway.

I wonder how many of those 5000 users are law enforcement.  Now investigators must use bitcoins. ;-)

Well, I don't know. I have visited it couple of times just for interest, and the amount of drug ads went from 1000 something to almost 1500 in a couple of months. (last time checked couple of days ago). Let's see if the trend grows.

I haven't used tor before, and I think the effort of getting to the site is easy - you just install tor browser bundle, the address of Silk Road is in wikipedia easily found with googling.

I also checked the feedback of one seller - he had 100+ pages of positive feedback. From my software business I have learned that only about 1-10% of my customers leave feedback in app store/android market. This is very different market of course.

Also it is very hard to estimate the amount of sales on silk road - you can estimate it by following the feedback, but i think feedback isn't required. (Somebody correct me if I am not right)

Speculators also like to think that the silk road business will increase bitcoin price - that is actually not the case, at least the effect isn't that big. Silk road and the sellers don't need to hold their bitcoins. During the escrow process the funds are hedged to dollars. Also probably now most sellers just sell their bitcoins as soon as possible, because of longtime downward trend.

Exactly. BTC is just a proxy currency ATM. It is often said that more adoption = huge price rise. That is simply not the case etc.

I guess you are looking at the silk road discussion forum numbers, which are separate from actual Silk Road. The actual silk road doesn't disclose those numbers (I didn't see them anywhere).

The silk road forums and actual silk road are entirely different sites. You need to create separate accounts for the discussion forums. I would guess that most people who are customers on silk road might even not be registered on the forums.

OK, so I had to check it again now and there 1611 advertisements in the drugs section. Two days ago it was a little under 1500. So about 150 new advertisements in two days.

If the current growth continues, it is very interesting phenomenon. Let's see if law enforcement can do something about it. According to the wikipedia the site has been online from february, and I guess the LE should have known about it for at least 4-5 months.

Why is everyone so obsessed with SR? Can't you get drugs where you are?

yes i can. but not as pure, and anonymous, and cheap.

  The growth rate of advertisements does not necessarily represent the number of advertisers.  It is just as likely there could be less people with more adverts per person. Who knows, only SR owners do. Maybe try asking them?

After some digging, i found there's dozens of SR like sites,  all use bitcoins.

How can I contact the Silk Road guys? I have a case I want to put before them about putting out some rough figures to help bitcoin. I have some questions to ask them.

  I'll PM you..

SilkRoad will do for Bitcoin what porn did for VHS (and the Internet). But on a much smaller scale.

If you can convince them to put out price information on common things (say, weekly average $/oz or BTC/oz on weed transactions or something), we could trade futures on that. It'd probably be a bigger market than the actual drug sales. :)

I think it would be not very wise to publish any data for Silk Road guys - I guess they are in this for the money, and they make money by taking cut from each sale. Anything else is just a waste of time.

I guess that silk road guys/other drug sellers are not very interested in promoting bitcoin itself or its value. For them bitcoin is just handy money laundering method - if something better arises, I guess they would move to it.

It should be also noted that the values published by finley are false. He admitted using web proxy for accessing tor, and was somehow getting wrong numbers. It appears that using web proxies for tor hidden services is not recommended.

Also there isn't any way to get numbers like "users online" from silk road (unless you are silk road operator yourself).

More than my eight track & turntable?  The turntable still works.

Not sure if thats true. As far as im aware they just take a membership fee from the vendor. Still decent cash I suppose. trading futures on drugs would be AWSOME.

"Yeh just going to take my money out of precious metals and put it into the future market of MDMA"

WIN

This would certainly be in Silk Roads interest. It would most likely result in another media blitz that would draw even more attention and users to them.

And I don't think the person running the site is in it only for the money. He also seems to be a pretty dedicated anarchocapitalist so a lot of the commitment behind Silk Road seem to be ideology.

I do not believe that SR is a real black marketplace. I mean c'mon, DEA publishes a fake product and you just give them your home address. You have to be high to believe that is a real business. This has to be a big joke on the Bitcoin community, right?

or your neighbor, or some pickup address. there are still plausible denial.

The DEA can place a tracking device in the package. You pick up the package and they knock on your door. This SR thing smells of psyops.

Do you know how much those tracking devices cost? Wait, do you know how much it costs for the DEA to investigate and prosecute someone? I really don't think the DEA is all that worried about some Joe Blow purchasing a quarter oz of weed and 500mg of MDMA. Let's not fail to mention that there is literally NOTHING linking the buyer to the purchase - that'll go over well in court, won't it? I have a feeling that the DEA is more interested in the sellers at this point, and the operator of the site more than anyone else.

Get real man, psyops? Really? The worst thing that could happen to you is your package is tagged and you get a knock asking you to assist on an investigation in regards the seller. Even that's highly unlikely.


You should be glad you finally got tor working - now you can actually use the real world wide web. It'd be nice if everyone in China could use tor.

In reference to your numbers, you're way off. There may only be 1000 items for sale, but you can't see the quantity behind those numbers. People in this business are professional - they have plenty of stock. I'd imagine that number is more like around 10 - 20k

You can't see how many people are online or registered at SR - I have no idea where you got that number.

As far as your daily currency movement goes, trying multiplying that by 10 to 20.. possibly more - those are just estimates based on what little one can observe from the outside.

I am not sure why anyone at this point wouldn't think they would be going after buyers just for the same fact that you listed.  Though nothing links them in theory, people do trace transactions going on in the Bitcoin network, enough where shit like this exists https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50037.0 , so it seems to be an ongoing battle at the moment.  Winning or not, I think it is silly to think they wouldn't fight this thing if they don't even have to get up from their computer to check on it.

Does China block Tor bootstrapping process? Do You have to use Tor bridges?The Silk Road ir real, purchased ganja from it and it was probably the highest quality ganja I smoked and absolute quality/price winner by multiple orders of magnitude. Just see it for yourself. Just don't be stupid.

That's real smart.


The irony.

Weird, weed is probably the last thing I would order from such a service.

Mysteryminer is speaking hypothetical of course, lol  ::)

Purchasing small amounts of marijuana via postal service is not very risky. Even if you get caught the result is maybe a small fine.

Of course using drugs in the first place isn't very smart, but if you are going to use them, ordering them from silk road would actually be safer than buying them from the streets. Don't have to deal with shady people.

  fixed it for ya. ;p

That really depends on what state you live in. Some people it's a small fine and a misdeameanor charge. Others, it could be a felony. Before anybody orders ANY contraband, they should research their local laws to find out exactly how much you can "safely" order.

   Aye, this and it depends where to. The laws may or may not carry differnt penalties or classifications depending what state and/or federal borders your package crosses.

   As with anything in life, use them spare brain cells to weigh the costs verse the benefits of any endeavour...

+1
LOL

Silk road is going to open a drugs futures market? DRUGEX

  ::)

But that depends on the substance... for downers, can you buy shares for the us military (afganistan)?
Uppers... various base materials, lab equipment and shares from used cardealerships.
Psychedelica... fund chemists and math student loans  :P
Weed... sponsor the occupy movement  :D

Not for all people. For some people any amount of drugs means years in prison. Take necessary precautions.The bless of Silk Road is plausible deniability. Almost anyone can send some junk over postal service to me. And I probably have set up some unrelated recieving adress and some homeless person is recieving the packages. Safe cutout if you are familiar with spy tradecraft.

And I did not recieved the answers I'm looking for:

GreatFireWall is powerful, tor bridge does not work.  :-[

according to the tor faq there is the oh-so-ironic fascistwall=1 setting.

lol..

Not enough. The GreatFireWall is indeed powerful. They block even Tor bridges. And if you run a Tor relay or bridge yourself, you'll probably be blocked from accessing anything inside China.

you will probably disappear or end up in a prison camp if you set up a tor relay in china...

Then they must be actively scanning the whole ip range for computers running tor, I doubt that would be economical and exchanges where the lines out of china end would probably complain about the amount of junk traffic.
IMO as long as you can connect to https you can always establish a link somehow, but it might need someone to help you out.

edit, this really seems to be an issue, here is an hour long talk on the subject....
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3945011430392697080

  try this;   http://www.networktunnel.net/

    "Super network Tunnel is equal to SocksCap + Bidirectional Http Tunnel + Remote Control. It's the first two-way http tunnel software in the world."

  Not sure how true 'first' is. But previous to this type package 2-way tunnels were built using winpcap to capture and resend the traffic through 'allowed' ports.

I would invest in a drugs futures market. Considering how consistently people have used drugs since before recorded history, I think it would be a very conservative bet.

I'm amazed how you americans are attracted to making money by speculation, not doing real work, such as growing and selling the drugs by yourself. In soviet union speculation was punishable even by death penality.

Speculation provides working capital for producers, as well as signals for allocation of resources.  It's a necessary part of the free market system, and the very fact that the Soviet Union would punish it with the death penalty should be indicative of that.  It also has the net effect of suppressing drastic price changes with regard to forseeable economic events.  Do I need to remind you that the history of your own nation is circumstantial evidence that top-down control of economic resources (i.e. soviet style communism) is a failed political ideology?

In Soviet Russia, drugs sell you.  :D

What I was saying is that if you run a tor relay/bridge outside of China, you'll be blocked from accessing anything inside of China. The GreatFireWall works both ways.
No idea on what happens to those who run such relays inside of China.

They just need to block the IPs, what you mean by "scan"?
Blocking relays is pretty easy since they're all public. And blocking bridges for them is easy too, all they have to do is hire a couple people to spend the day creating new Google accounts to request for more bridges.

One wonders why their economy ended up so well.  ::)

Well, if I had the option I would earn my money as a drug tester.  ;D

Yeah some misconceptions in my most on the matter how tor works.
Have you seen the video?

They go over it in some detail, basically china can block alot of bridges, but to block all of them they would have to adapt an attack strategy for every distribution method tor uses.
The video mentions them if you are looking for a accessible bridge there should be a way to get one if you follow these instructions.

The video is YEARS old. IMHO it's too outdated to be accurate in current situation.

The problem with Tor is that the connections are identifiable for anyone with the ability to oversee large portions of the monitered section of the Internet, such as the government of China.  So even if a bridge node is established, it can be identified prettly easily.  Also, China itself could establish a bridge node, and record connections, then kill the bridge and track down the IP's that it has recorded.

Hmm, damn those bastards...

I guess then it's time for a full steganographic communication protocol. Something along those lines of these scientific paper generators though look like a webpage but with a full blown ip layer hidden in it.
I mean we live in times were private individuals can easily come up with several magnitudes more computing power than any entity can. I'd like them block that, or better yet bbcode make it look like some innocent blackhat seo.  ;)

  Read my Lips. "Build your own using PCAP"......... It will work.