Bitcoin Forum

It was bound to happen, these DNM are scary to the core.

What do you guys think BTC is going to do, up or down?

I don't think it matters. When a tree falls in the forest, the canopy is opened up to more sunlight, which in turns reaches the saplings at the forest floor, which will grow and eventually fill that space.

Ever since Silk Road 1.0 went down, there's been a robust variety of darkweb markets to choose from. Such is the power of decentralization.

I think the market will simply adapt and find a different solution (that much is obvious). Regarding your specific question, it seems that BTC's monetary value works independently from daily news.

Yea we learned from the original one that more will pop up.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/operator-of-silk-road-20-arrested-and-indicted.html

I dont mess with Dark Net suff as I dont do drugs but it is definetly interesting to watch.

This guy is looking at some time for 1 year of being the king.

Hope he spent the dogshit out of his money.

I have taken a peak there from time to time out of curiosity. I am not a drug user but I think these sites actually have some utility in the harm reduction area. People will get their drugs. I would rather them get them in the mail or via fedex/ups from other bitcoin users than feed the cartels. 

https://twitter.com/NewYorkFBI/status/530386208099426304

Guys, we have to think about HOW people will react to this.

This will be obviously different from the last time, BTC went from 150$ to 1500$ because of Silkroad.
But people are not retarded, will people think it will do like the last time and dump ? If they do, it will obviously dump because they will sell every BTC they have.
What will happen if they don't, the BTC price will be unchanged ?

But it crashed first 2 days, don't forget.

As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace) SR 2.0 started on November 6, 2013. Exact 1 year and now it has been taken down while BTC is very low. Coincidence ?

A year ago it was totally different situation.
I am pretty sure that closing down Silk Road 2 will not really change the price.

Ps. I am happy that Silk Road 2 is almost gone.

Why? You prefer dirty politicians and their gang relations than decentralized free market?

I hate twitter with the force of a thousand suns, but some of the comments are gold.

"In other news, Silk Road 3.0 is now accepting orders."

"I'm all for it. Not because he was allegedly running Silk Road, but because he picked the handle "Defcon""

"I imagine @NewYorkFBI meant to say *alleged* operator. But then what's a little presumption of guilt in light of the panopticon."

"was it because he was doing a better job cutting down on drug crimes than you were? What's the point of the drug war again?"

OH MY GOD you're fucking right

What the fucking hell does that mean ??? Does the US government want to strike hard and make BTC fall definetly ?

Open Bazar, please take command  :D

Silk Road 2.0  the owner https://twitter.com/blakeeb .

overview:

http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/11/06/silk-road-2-seized/

::) Always seems to be silly mistakes that get them taken down.


Lol.


Exactly. Can't wait to see decentralised markets and exchanges come into operation.

Silk road 2.0 is not going to affect the price of bitcoin now. It will do when the seized coins are auctioned off. Do we know how many coins were seized?

Looks like a few small time markets are also seized.

Hydra and C9.

Can anyone tell me about these markets?


https://twitter.com/NewYorkFBI/status/530386208099426304

The comments on the FBI's twitter are hilarious.

Chris DeRose ‏@derosetech 54m54 minutes ago
@NewYorkFBI was it because he was doing a better job cutting down on drug crimes than you were? What's the point of the drug war again?


V ‏@JSDRAM 2h2 hours ago
@NewYorkFBI @BarbarianCap In other news, Silk Road 3.0 is now accepting orders.


Ben Jackson ‏@innismir 1h1 hour ago

@thegrugq @ncardozo I'm all for it. Not because he was allegedly running Silk Road, but because he picked the handle "Defcon"
0 replies 0 retweets 0 favorites
Ben Jackson ‏@innismir 1h1 hour ago

@thegrugq @ncardozo Were "Crash Override" and "Lord Nikon" already taken?
0 replies 0 retweets 0 favorites

SR or SR 2.0 were not decentralized free market. They were very much centralized. OpenBazaar aims to be a decentralized one.

I believe  individuals shops can be shut down on OB ?

Taken down by who? I'm sure if there's issues with how Open Bazaar works people will just create a new improved one.

No.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/


Damn, is that true? Are they all down as well? 

Did not Agora had a thread on BitcoinTalk as well ?

??

OB can't be taken down but I'm pretty sure shops can.

I tend to agree with u on this regard. Individual OB shops can be taken down just like individual bitcoiners can be nabbed. But taking the the whole system is not possible and that is the beauty of decentralization.

Ah no I agree. OB can't be taken down but specific individuals can. Yes  ;D

No.
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/openbazaar-not-for-drugs/

Patterson says OpenBazaar is “listing agnostic,”

Patterson suggests that OpenBazaar’s creators may create a voluntary whitelist option that allow users to prevent themselves from seeing illegal products. But that filter could be turned off by any user interested in exploring OpenBazaar’s darker side.

In fact, OpenBazaar’s peer-to-peer design means its creators won’t be able to stop anyone from selling anything they’d like.



Yes, but going after dealers individually will be futile and impractical. I misunderstood you to indicate that OB devs could take down shops.

CAN I GET AN AMEN!!!???

AMEN!! Let the torture of things beyond human imagination bestow these criminals of humanity for all eternity.

https://twitter.com/openbazaar/status/530400447539183617

"The end of centralized marketplaces is nigh."

Just the other day, I accidentally stumbled upon a stranger from the street and he was taking drugs. I asked him where he bought it and he replied with Bitcoin. So I think feds should make this kind of effects more and more to keep this BTC community clean from corruption.

Bitcoin is open source so even the corrupt and violent criminals at the FBI can participate. I agree that it would be great to keep these assholes out but we have to remain neutral.

Wonder what will happen to Bitcoin price now ( and as soon as all SR2 funds will be auctioned aswell )

Also from businessinsider,

"During the Government’s investigation, which was conducted jointly by the FBI and HSI, an HSI agent acting in an undercover capacity (the “HSI-UC”) successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website, and was given access to private, restricted areas of the site reserved for BENTHALL and his administrative staff. By doing so, the HSI-UC was able to interact directly with BENTHALL throughout his operation of the website."

Human error got the big guy in for life.

I don't prefer politicians.  But I don't think that sellin illegal things is really what I want to see on the decentralized free market.

This was a decentralized black market. Not decentralized free market.

There is a difference between those two :-)

Regards.

False. Silk Road 1 and 2 sold legal and illegal items. Illegal items were merely in abundance because the black market is always the first to take advantage of newer and risky technologies. One should expect openbazaar to also mainly list illegal items at first as well.

So do you or do you not want a decentralised free market? You can't have one but for only the things you want to see. And it's the politicians who made the things illegal in the first place thus creating a 'black market'.

Nope, OB can be easily taken down, just arrest anyone who develops for it, it'll easily scare all developers into not touching OB. Without active development, OB is dead in the water.

Arresting people for writing code would be an interesting totalitarian thought experiment which would totally not backfire.   ::) Writing code anonymously for a project is easy to do. Distributing code anonymously is also easy to do with torrents.

There is no stopping this.

Creating a website is writing code too, FBI had no issue arresting website operators.

If TOR didn't protect silkroad 1.0, 2.0 etc... what makes you think anonymous code contributors are safe?

Ahh... This is where you are confused. With Openbazaar there is no website to shutdown. https://openbazaar.org is merely for information and ca easily change TLD's or to a .bit to promote the project.

There is no server hosting Openbazaar to shutdown either, the marketplace exists across all users.


Nothing is 100% secure with anything digital or physical. The point is to make it impractical because the costs are too high. The FBI can afford to spend millions of dollars to track one server but not thousands of users. The more they attack the first amendment buy jailing people for writing the more devs will join the cause.

The struggle is futile. How successful have they been with torrenting , wikileaks, and the war on drugs in general?

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

Until people make t-shirt sized implementations of it (http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/).

He brings up a good point . It isn't that hard to figure out who has what on OB and just arrest each person. I guess OB could be honeypot in a way ?

I know many developers that will specifically drop involvement in their current projects and work on Openbazaar specifically because they are using violence to censor speech.

I would be one of them.

OB is very different.  It's intent has nothing to do with illegal activity.  Why is BitTorrent a company operating freely here in the US with no arrests?

Not really a good point as there have been many failed attempts at stopping code in the past. DeCSS is one example out of many.

Why aren't you building for silkroad then? (or maybe you are, then I'm wrong). Silkroad isn't just for drugs neither, there's plenty of legal products on it, pretty similar to OB.

agora and evolution appear to be online.
Hydra displays a "hidden site seized" notice.

Don't know about the rest.  

the price skyrocketed because people found out that you can buy illegal drugs using Bitcoin in a safe manor.

I prefer working on decentralized projects and silkroad was a centralized marketplace. Yes, I have been testing on OB, and yes, I don't fear being kidnapped by thugs for developing and working on any project I choose.

These intimidation tactics both scare and attract developers.

Doesn't reallly matter. Silkroad has plenty of legal products on it too.

As soon as one illegal product show up, and OB developer ignore a cease and desist, then OB will possibly become illegal.

Plenty of BitTorrent website and companies has been shutdown/arrested over the years.

Dude, you're not getting it, OB is a platform for others to buy and sell, it isn't hosting anything.  Again, look at BitTorrent, I can download a # of things illegally, yet BitTorrent team is a Silicon Valley company with no arrests. 

appearently several of the illegal dark net sites were all taken down around the same time. Law enforcement is claiming to be running an operation to take down several darknet sites in the next 24 hours

thepiratebay is still going strong after illegal raids, arrests, domain seizures, bribes to corrupt politicians, ect...

Sure there have been outages of a few hours here and there in 11 years...lol...

Plenty of BitTorrent website and companies has been shutdown/arrested over the years. BitTorrent software itself is just a protocol, much like TOR, is not illegal by itself. It's what's built upon it, that could potentially be illegal. The protocol can't control what other people are doing with it.

From what I understand, OB is not a protocol, but THE platform itself, the developer can directly control what goes on in the marketplace by using code. Is it possible for others to develop alternative clients that also works?

OB is a protocol, being that it is merely open source code run on individual computers. The devs cannot control anything because the users can fork or simply not upgrade to the newest version at any time just like with Bitcoin.

The FBI would have to raid individual users homes to try and slow the growth of the OpenBazaar marketplace. Such attempts are futile.

OB is not blockchain based right? how does it hardfork without having a chain?

Forking doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Bitcoin or blockchain technology. It is a term used in open source code.

But to answer your question OB does indeed use Bitcoin and DHT as methods for decentralization and security.

Additionally, I plan on selling many legal items on Openbazzar to support the marketplace and specifically go out of my way to use this marketplace to distribute products and services which would be political and social suicide to shutdown or stop.

A real protocol can't be forked, it would always work the same way, regardless who's developing a client for it, it's not a software.

For example, if you forked SSH, then it's no longer SSH. If you forked BitTorrent, then it's no longer BitTorrent.

If you forked OB, and it's still OB, then you just proved FBI have a case against the operator, since it's not a protocol. It behaves like a website. Pretty much like silkroad 1.0 vs 2.0

What makes you believe that protocols are static? Such a strange suggestion.

No, you are very confused. Protocols are always changing and any open source protocol can be forked at anytime.

I.E.... Lets assume all the developers working on OB are co-opted and malicious code or backdoors are introduced into the code. All users have to do is not upgrade and pick up with the last version to essentially fork the protocol/software.

So it looks like the price went up a little bit.. not much..

Dude, if they were going to make a piece of software illegal they would start with tor. Since that will NEVER happen, OpenBazaar is in the clear. OB only provide a tool and it is the users that commits the (potential) crimes.

Tor isn't the best example in all seriousness because the CIA /NSA heavily fund TOR. Tor is used by everyone, form the government to the darkmarket.

They will not and cannot attack TOR because doing so is attacking their own operatives. all they can do is try and control more exit nodes in a race to try and track illegal crime.

Kudos to you!!! And may your OB store be very successful!

Thanks and the beauty of this is that it doesn't even need to be profitable to be successful as some see this as an ideological battle with much larger stakes involved.

Some people don't seem to get this and think that violent thugs can intimidate us into disbanding these projects. It is not going to happen, decentralized marketplaces are here to stay and will only grow in use.

True. Once decetralized marketplaces reach a critical mass, we wont need to have to go through centralized services to buy and sell products and services again.

The point is that it can be used for good and evil. The same goes for Bitcoin and the same for OB. For that reason alone it will not be outlawed.

I partly agree with this statement but in reality its not always true. I.E. - Napster, and many other centralized torrent trackers had some legal content distributed and was forced to be shutdown regardless of it of it having negative innocent casualties. Ultimately, they justify such actions and one must create a critical mass of legal material which make any attacks more taboo and politically dangerous.

As you say, Napster was centralized. They could control what went on their servers, same as torrent trackers. But they couldnt do anything about the underlying protocol. With decentralized solutions law enforcement can only go after individuals and not the system. Tor, Bitcoin, OB and many other technologies will be forever safe.

Agreed , but this doesn't necessarily have to do with being socially taboo by shutting down a neutral marketplace as these ruthless thugs don't mind blowing up children if they can remove their target. It has more to do with the fact that attacking a decentralized network is extremely difficult.

The alleged owner was an educated and prolific software engineer and entrepreneur who contributed to multiple repositories and also previously worked as a software engineer at Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

Your comment is both slanderous and ignorant.

Even that dimbulb Schumer admits that the first Silk Road bust has actually just made the situation more difficult, by causing a proliferation of smaller sites.

It's like stomping a puffball mushroom.  You may feel as if you have defeated mushrooms in that moment, but wait until the morning.

Incidentally, these busts do show one thing others would be wise to acknowledge.  Opening and operating a site overtly dedicated to selling drugs and other illegal commodities, and doing anything to further such transactions, and doing anything that remotely smacks of actually knowingly getting a cut of illegal proceeds, is going to paint a big red target on your back.

Maybe those who do this can manage to evade prosecution for a while, but if their identity is exposed, they are going to be subject to the draconian penalties any drug dealer faces, including life imprisonment or (in some jurisdictions) the death penalty.

Compare to those who currently distribute things like BitTorrent software.  This has legitimate non-copyright-infringing uses, and the current vendors of such products studiously avoid the kind of stupid rhetoric you hear out of people pimping their drug sites.

Compare to Napster, which openly participated in copyright infringement and was easily shut down.  But then compare to the P2P stuff that followed like Grokster and Limewire, which sold software with legitimate uses, but also spouted all kinds of dumb rhetoric and had internal emails showing that they too were basically encouraging copyright infringement.  They too were held liable.

The common thread in all these busts is site operators dipping their hands into the pool of tainted drug money.  Once they did that any rhetoric about freedom is basically just bullshit.  They're just drug dealers like any other at that point.

The only kind of site like this that stands any chance of withstanding legal scrutiny and/or prosecution is one that does not explicitly exist for illegal purposes, and also doesn't basically act like a bank of sorts, subjecting it to financial regulations.  If one legally provides a service with substantial legitimate uses, and it just happens to be able to be used for illegal purposes, and does not oneself participate in those activities, that is always going to be a good defense.

This might be the last big seizure/auction of this sort, if sites now realize the necessity of adopting multi-signature transactions.

i was surprised it last this long

Education may not always correspond to degrees or book smarts. Core of what it's supposed to teach makes education valuable.

I think OpenBazaar fits the bill quite neatly. The dev team's publicly said that they dont intend for OB to be used for illicit trade, but cant stop users from doing so.

This conversation is going well, isnt it?

The combined efforts of multiple investigators, the FBI/CIA, and a years worth of effort is enough to catch any suspect. I wonder how many millions were spent of taxpayers dollars to carry out this en devour?

You are foolish to think that anyone could go uncaught with this much scrutiny.

Decentralized marketplaces only increase the costs of these investigations high enough to make them impractical. Enough effort and investigative work is sufficient to uncover any suspect.

Silly mistakes? This is exactly how Ross was caught. You would think that he wouldn't make the exact same mistake.....He used an email address that was blake@benthall.com to sign up for the hosting of the servers of SR2.

IMO that is not a mistake, that is asking to get caught

Just read many pages about silkroad 2 take down. Owner of SR2 made so many mistakes thats insane.
FBI got like literally 20 proof's of his guilt.

I would say it would probably depend on your definition of "evade". Someone could easily live in a country that is not friendly to the US (like snowden does in Russia) to avoid being arrested.

The problem with this is that it will result in your having a much worse standard of living then you otherwise should have.

I guess SilkRoad 3 will be up and running soon.  :)

Just had a look, it's down alright. I did have my suspicions when it went down a couple of days ago that something might happen.
It's a shame because Defcon looked like one of the better darkweb operators, he did pay back most if not all the money that was lost in the "hack".
Good luck Defcon your going to need it. I just hope you didn't do something real stupid like DPR and try hire a hitman.

https://i.imgur.com/nkdK9TU.png

That's at least a good lol

Always SF :'(

I think this hurts the ecomony. 

BTC to $100.

It won't affect the price like last time, there is heaps of other darkweb sites now and the price has actually jumped about $20 since yesterday when SR2 was still operating.

The owner of SR2 was actually arrested over a week ago and the site itself has likely been a honeypot for at least 6 weeks now.

Thanks, nice to know  >:(

This kid fucked up everywhere possible.

This is why you dont mess with the DNM.

This kid uses his name email and opens a server for a illegal marketplace.

He also logged in under Defcon without using Tor WTF.

People need to learn bitcoins arent anon as you think and htis guy is about to do life in prison.

Think about that, this kid is going to do LIFE for this, FUCKING LIFE.

Under 1 year ownership, hope it was worth it.

And sometimes i'm being paranoïd coz i'm walking in the street with 1 gram of weed xD
There really are some unconscious guys, it's beyond the deepest stupidity…

The FBI had informers among the SR2 staff even before the site was opened to the masses. Means, SR2 was operating as a honeypot from the start.

from http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/11/06/official-silk-road-2-0-admin-charged-manhattan-federal-court/ :

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: “As alleged, Blake Benthall attempted to resurrect Silk Road, a secret website that law enforcement seized last year, by running Silk Road 2.0, a nearly identical criminal enterprise. Let’s be clear—this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison. Those looking to follow in the footsteps of alleged cybercriminals should understand that we will return as many times as necessary to shut down noxious online criminal bazaars. We don’t get tired.

What are the twenty ways he fucked up / pieces of evidence against him?

- He was using his real name to rent a server to operate SR2.
- He was also using an email adress that was connected to several real name accounts  (Facebook/Twitter etc)
- He didn't use Tor at some occasions, revealing his real home ips.
- He operated SR2 when he was travelling under his real name in Hotels with unsecure connections.
- He contacted support staff from the rented server, when the server had some downtime (due to the FBI mirroring the server at that moment) with ips that were tracable.
- He worked with the old admins of SR1, which was most likely infiltrated
- He traded his wealth on a trading site, using his real name /email adress
- He was using the same email adress for his Facebook/Twitter whatsoever accounts
- Infiltrated admins of SR2 were able to see his real ips, when he logged in to SR2
- His online behaviour fit perfectly to his movements in real life.

Not 20 yet, but I'll keep digging ...

That has nothing to do with btc price this is not 2011 man, its almost 2015 , BTC economy is so much bigger and those deep web sites are not even 1% of the whole BTC economy.

This hurts San Francisco. Richter to 9.0.

Now , a Silk Road 3.0 will open  ::)

You look suspicious when paranoid.   ;)

Wow. I don't understand how these guys don't cover their basic tracks. If you're going to engage in illegal activity the first thing you would do is ensure nothing can be traced back to your real identity and create fresh accounts for everything. What's the source for these colossal fuckups?

I would argue that some of these would count as more then one. Especially the ones about him connecting to SR2 directly from his home computer, and him connecting directly from hotel IP addresses without at least a VPN.

They had informants on the SR1 message board before SR2 was created to make it easier for them to become trusted by anyone who decided to make a new similar deep web illegal marketplace.  

What about sr3 now?
When and how will it open?
Will it get thrashed by fbi again?

P.S : I used to think that except for vice city, fbi was dead

sr2 was open in 5 weeks after sr1 death.

Well that sucks. I guess I'll just have to go back to the Dr for my OxyContin.

Well, it looks like that's the end of illegal drug use.

He was running it from inside the US. From San Francisco. The stupidity of that blows my mind. It blew my mind with SR the first time, it doubly blows the second time. The lesson should be- so far only idiots start up online drug marketplaces.

I guess you are kidding ;-)

There will be other Silk Roads soon, and soon after there will be decentralized markets without a single point failure that can be taken down.

When people want to buy something, there are sellers.

So, we won the drug war?

Yep, bring back the troops. Parades in NYC and a baby boom soon to follow.

Thing that gets me is the price of pot is $50 a 1/8th in SF and Billions of dollars spent on weed yearly.

Why are these ass holes selling other shit when there is already one market to dominate... CO cash tons of cash their businesses can't put into the bank and no one is lobbying them.

Blows me the fuck away.

People think because they have a high IQ and they're on the Internet that they're somehow invulnerable.

They end up thinking they're Walter White when they're Moe, Larry or Curly.

Anyone who sets up something called Silk Road 3 is just begging for it, because that name alone is like waving a red flag.

Because of the amount of drugs involved, even with small profits for that amount, these idiots are going to be facing "kingpin" sentencing enhancements, some of which basically result in a mandatory minimum of LIFE.  All so they could play badass drug kingpin on the Internet.

Nah I bet this lil pecker checker gets 10-20 and serves 2-5 years.  Depending on how many of his friends he burns and how many details he gives on how to make something like this happen.

____


If you were a admin/vendor or anyone else who was involved with this I would say it is a good time to go lawyer shopping, get some ball field pricing IF someone comes to knock, don't keep shit at your house and if the person who got busted knows something about you do not freak out and attempt to hire a hitman.  If a hitman contacts you assume it is a FED.

US government really found a way to grab themselves some coins. This is the first time in history they had some positive cash flow and real asset without a corresponding debt from FED  :D

Silk Road is just a name. Alternatives are available and plenty more will spring up over time, not to mention decentralized markets in the future which is what the market desperately needs to protect people on all sides.

I cannot fathom for the life of me how these people can be so intelligent but also so frikken stupid. They might be good computer programmers but they're obviously not cut out to be great criminals. Decentralization is badly needed and can't come quick enough.

Shit no telling how many BTC the US gov has.

They sold the SR v1.0 their cocaine by the key at the start of the site :P

So...twice they were able to take down a major Bitcoin drug site using laws already in existence...

And they want to pass new regulations on Bitcoin why? Because of drugs and terrrerrists?

Silk road 3.0.

here we come.

eventually it will be run on some sort or anon block chain / asset exchange. Eg the NXT asset exchange with many suppliers could probably do it.

Wont be able to take that down.

This is what will and needs to happen. Check out Open Bazaar which is trying to become the first decentralized marketplace.

This is what I see when I hear the name Bleake Benthall from now on (from 1:03 - 1:07)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDkNdGng8mM

 :P

Edit: I guess I will be working on my new animated gif

Why did he not learn from his buddy "DPR" that you just can't get away with this in the US!?! He was even busted in the same damn city!!!  ??? WTF!!!
If I remember right BTC went from around $130 to around $70 within a week of the last bust but there are more and even better markets now. People will just migrate.

Does this really solve the problem though? Can't the FBI just download Open Bazaar, join, put of a fake storefront, fake reviews, fake trust and the bust people who buy from them? Who isn't to say they can't setup a sting like that?

Were you an admin/vendor? ::)

Golden. ahahahaha

How would you know?  You make a gazillion childish and ignorant comments and you come across as extremely uneducated about the world. 

The term is idiot-savant where someone knows a lot about one specific thing but is completely clueless about the rest of the world.  There are many of those involved in Bitcoin.  So, yes, someone can do some coding but still be "young, unprofessional, greedy, foolish, and all around uneducated" and I see it all the time in Bitcoin.

It's so strange. But this time there hasn't been a panic selling. Novembers seem to become something special for Bitcoin. Let's just hope for another bubble, maybe! :D

It's not as simple as that. Let's say that I got arrested. I'm obviously going to tell the world who I bought from, the 'fake merchant' and such.
OpenBazaar solves a part of the problem. There is no domain to seize, no website to shut down and no owner to arrest.

We can quibble about the other qualities but  "all around uneducated" wouldn't be a descriptor that most(98%+ surveyed) would describe someone of his education and abilities.

I wouldn't have responded if "all around uneducated" was replaced by "lack of common sense" or "lack of street smarts" or "capricious" or "irresponsibly sloppy".

Those descriptors would make such a comment "arguable" and thus a reasonable opinion.

This is pretty funny.  Oh the interwebs saves everything.

Maybe they knew each other? I think if you are going to run one of these sites the bare minimum you need to do is locate yourself in a country that isn't on co-operative terms with the US.

They could but they won't last long and I'm pretty sure that would be entrapment. Law enforcement aren't really interested with wasting resources on busting kids trying to buy small amounts of drugs; they go after the big guys.

Here is a current decentralized platform people can try out and test in addition to OpenBazaar -
 BitXBay

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=589578.0
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitxbay/files/BitXBay%20Windows%20binaries/
https://github.com/bitxbay/BitXBay

You sound exactly like those people who post long ranting comments that one political party is responsible for everything wrong in the world.  They are called "wing nuts."  There is no point in discussing anything with them because they are crazy.  There are good and bad aspects about everything and most things are a grey area rather than black and white.  Just try to stop making Bitcoin look ridiculous with your rhetoric because the success of Bitcoin is not going to validate your agenda.  

Idiot-savant seems to be your favourite word and you love calling everyone it. I'm sure you're a genius in all fields and a flawless expert in bitcoin.

Edit, just saw your signature. Seem that you are an expert. Certified bitcoin professional lol.

Mr Certified Bitcoin Professional,

I have another proposal I would like to offer you as you obviously have a personal vendetta against me and my politics(or lack thereof)...

How about I don't tell you how to use Bitcoin and you don't try and control how I use it either? We can both benefit and support from this amazing technology in our own ways. Bitcoin is a big tent that can support socialists, democratic republicans, all the flavors of anarchism, and minarchists.

Signed,
A genuine "wing nut"

he was making 400k+ per month. If you were making that much money you are going to want to live in the US to be able to enjoy luxuries that can be purchased in the US (or places that are friendly to the U.S. as places that are not friendly tend to be third world like countries).

I do agree that he made horrible mistakes - it was almost self sabotage

Whether it was wise or not of him to live in the US is arguable as agents and investigators can extradite Americans and/or bribe corrupt regulators/officers to carry out their bidding as they often do in most countries worldwide. You have a few countries that don't roll over to US interests such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran and those aren't ideal places to live either. Investigators probably first scrutinize all ex-pats living oversees when investigating crimes of this nature and thus living abroad could , arguably, bring more scrutiny to you.

There are many obvious mistakes he did make that are easy to point out in hindsight like blowing a stack of cash on that car and not getting rid(firing) of all the previous staff.

Silk Road 3 coming soon  ;D

Other countries are available :D. I'd rather live like a king in Cuba or something than live in fear in the US. I suppose it's also possible to run one of these sites from the US, but only if you're completely certain you've covered all your tracks, though I personally wouldn't like to take the risk.

Even that kind of money wouldn't be worth it for me. Money is worthless if you can't spend it as he's likely going to be in jail for the rest of his life. I really can't imagine the stress of the paranoia I'd be under operating such a site, but if I did I wouldn't be dumb enough to log in from my home computer even through tor.

living in places like Cuba means that you have other risks like questionable health care if you get sick and law enforcement who are corrupt who may get paid to steal from you or arrest you for questionable reasons. Plus Cuba specifically is on the short list of countries that the US may invade so you would still be at risk (plus other countries the U.S. is not friendly with also faces this risk)

well yes the EV of running this kind of site appears to be negative as the risk of jail seems to be close to 100%. But if you do take the risk you want to spend your money while you have your freedom.

It wouldn't be worth it but obviously these guys don't think they'll get caught, but they're obviously not smarter than an entire team of feds and I can't imagine the resources they have available to them. If I was going to use Silk Road even just as a buyer I wouldn't buy something from there unless I was booting from a tails CD and using a internet connection that wasn't tied to me - ie a public one or maybe even buy a pay as you go dongle that was no way attached to me. Maybe he would've been ok if he'd have done something similar, though I'm sure it's not quite as easy as that.

Cuba actually has a great and free healthcare system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Cuba plus many other benefits like free education up to University level I believe. It's a very under-appreciated country, though obviously they USG will try paint it as a corrupt third world country when the reality is much different.

History has shown that the technology and resources available to the highest echelons of power are ~10-15 years ahead of anything that is publicly known. Ex SR-71 Blackbird.

I think that even if the people running these sites use perfect opsec and are absolute mastermind geniuses, they'll probably be caught unless they can somehow find a way to do it outside of the system.

Tor is probably still useful, but also still part of the system.

Guanaja would be my hideout.

Unspoilt countryside, miles of beaches & coral reef, only 3km of paved road, 25 degrees in winter.

+ Honduras has no extradition treaty with US.

SR 2 blast will not effect much on the BTC price. The price will remain approximately the same.

Thank you, Captain hind-sight.

No suprises... any agency that consists of three letters I.E.  FBI, DEA, NSA, are not uneducated and easy to ellude... it is their job to make sure things like this do not exist in this world, but its others jobs to make sure that they do, it will always be an updown battle between the "good" and the "bad"

I'd love to live off the grid in an exotic country and live off btc for the rest of my life, though I guess I'd need an internet connection at least.


Lol. The price does seem to have gone up according to Preev, though I can't see why it would just because SR has gone down.

Despite the marketing advantages, it appears that operating a site named SilkRoad(x) attracts too many lightening bolts.

Something with a higher and more legitimate purpose.

Possible names:

• FreeTrade
• SelfRegulated
• HonorSystem
• CombatOrganizedCrime
• GoldenRule

It's always in San Francisco! Do these retards think San Francisco is somehow not attached to the USA?


https://i.imgflip.com/dwozi.jpg (https://imgflip.com/i/dwozi)

Maybe... openbazaar with thousand of nodes?

DopePath is a perfect name for just a legal weed selling place. Not some big road, but just a nice lil dope path :P

No one was forced to give money to SR2
Everyone is forced to give money to the massively overstaffed government organizations who destroy these marketplaces

Who are the bad guys again? Those who take your money by threatening you with violence, I suppose?  >:(

There a lot of places one can live in luxury. Some of these place even will let you enjoy the same luxuries for a smaller amount.

I think he just thought he was too arrogant to realise he could be caught.

he was making 400k+ per month. If you were making that much money you are going to want to live in the US to be able to enjoy luxuries that can be purchased in the US (or places that are friendly to the U.S. as places that are not friendly tend to be third world like countries).[/quote]

If you are making $400k a month and spending accordingly, you are going to appear on the radar of the IRS.  Contrary to popular opinion, the IRS doesn't catch the majority of people it catches with some complicated analysis, but simply because they're claiming some small amount of income while conspicuously consuming.

He got caught because he did not know how to properly spend and hide his assets.
Just horrible all around...smart but dumb.

Wow, he bought a freaking Tesla! I'm surprised google handed over his information like they did.

Way to stay inconspicuous.   ::)

You can blend in fairly reasonable with a Tesla in SF. (kinda being serious... there are a bunch of them.)

Very true.
Not to mention, he worked for SpaceX.

Why don't these blackmarket admins marry some girl who looks like Natalia Poklonskaya in Crimea for citizenship, and run their immensely illegal enterprise out of Russia while living in a Tony Montana sized palace on the beach with paid police escort and NAF bodyguards instead of driving a shitty Tesla for a few months and ending up in Oakland federal prison for the rest of your life.
  

He doens't need to stay inconspicuous as it is not illegal to spend a lot of money, although when you do spend a lot of money it is difficult to determine just where all this money is coming from

Preach :P

Probably not the best and brightest grow up to want to be drug market owners.

I bet he only does 7mo-5yrs behind bars.

He is facing life in prison if convicted on all counts. I doubt that he will spend less then 5 years when he is facing this kind of maximum penalty

Because Natalia Poklonskaya would promptly put him behind the bars, to take over his enterprise. Why would corrupted policemen become your servants when they can become your masters?

EDIT: Behind the bars - if lucky. If unlucky - under the asphalt.

openbazzar will have to throw it out there with no control, from an admin or mods, still they can get prosecuted for doing so and they might have to make sure the site dont do any thing illegal, The FBI will just get it shut down easy

7mo to 5yrs? What country are you in? ???

Because most of the offspring of the San Francisco hippies of the 60s have had their minds polluted over years by listening to their parents and eating nothing but the crap they sell at Rainbow grocery in the Mission. Dehydrated goat fart protein and soybean jello will rot your brain over time.

I don't see this as something bad. I do wonder whether it'll affect Bitcoin at all. My guess is it won't since SR2 was not as big as the first one as far as I know.

SR2 was much bigger then SR1. It has a lot of free press and got a lot of attention that SR1 took a very long time to get.

As Open Bazaar is a decentralized platform, do you think it will be possible for the USA government to seize it one day? 

No. It has been proven time and time again that once code or speech is released on the internet it cannot be seized or completely removed. Open Bazaar is p2p so they would need to remove that code from everyone's computers.... good luck with that .

Can they charge the core developers with any crime?

It would be political suicide to do so, but sure they can do anything they want as they don't even follow their own laws.

If they charged the core developers with a crime more would be attracted to this project and take over and be anonymous. If no one takes over the existing code would still work fine too.

Do the words "mandatory minimum" ring a bell?  They're pretty much up to the prosecutor, too, since they depend on what the prosecution decides to prosecute as part of a deal.  If any of these clowns gets out of prison in less than 20, they got an amazing deal (and someone else somewhere is going down hard).

No.  At least, assuming none of them have any involvement in any of this illegal activity.  But given what we know, they couldn't get a grand jury to indict, and as the saying goes, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.

(This is assuming they don't try something bizarre like the ITAR "crypto as a munition" export regulations that they harassed Phil Zimmerman with.  And they've shown no sign of any interest whatsoever in doing that.)

I don't think it would be political suicide to do so, plus the decision to charge someone should never be a political decision. If it is determined they broke the law then they should be charged.

With that being said I think it is unlikely that any crime the devs of open brazaar are charged with would be able to stick, at least with how it is marketed right now

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-legacy-of-the-dread-pirate-roberts/


this was  a good read for all of those interested in the founder of silk road and just a quick lil article on him and bitcoin in general.... worth reading....

I hope that SR 3.0 will soon be launching with P2P technology.


Well... if you have the connections, then Russia can be the best place to start such a business.  ;D

The problem with p2p marketplaces is that you won't be able to censor really nasty things like child pornography, murder for hire, and stolen goods and data. This really isn't a problem for society because all of these things can be investigated with regular detective work but does present a PR problem. The good news is you can filter (they are there but not visible based upon your preferences) out these items and we hope many legal items will be available too.

Both SR1 and SR2 used a p2p marketplace and the only part that was not p2p was the UI and the escrow

Well, there's no such thing as moderate censorship. You either control it or not. (not that I approve of CP and murder for hire) or

This is one positive behind using a somewhat centralized illegal marketplace. The marketplace can have some level of morals and some people do not want to participate in a market in which it is easy to sell things that are generally considered to be "uncool"

Yeah, there could be some sort of community voting system where listings such as CP get down-voted and eventually removed, though this could obviously be abused. It's definitely going to be interesting to see how decentralised markets will work and how they overcome the obvious problems that will naturally arise.

The problem with downvoteing in this regard is that people could potentially create a bunch of accounts and downvote their competition out of business

No previous crimes. (assuming)

No gun on hand. (assuming)

Has proven he actually brings something to society by working on space shit.

In California.

It'll be interesting to see how it works out. 

He just caught a bunch of conspiracy causes (which suck), but do they carry MMS?

Do we know the name of the person responsible for SR2? I can't seem to find a credible article with a mentioned name/location/history and most importantly IMO their connection to the original SR.

Even if someone has a lot of mitigating factors they must still serve the mandatory minimum sentence. These factors would only be an argument for Blake to serve no more then the minimum, but no to serve less

Which are the best black market forums into the Deep Web nowadays?

The forums were centralised and played a big part in people both disclosing too much information about themselves and behaving as though other forum users were their personal friends talking in a private room.  A lot of people made themselves far too visible on the forums and undermined some of the anonymity the platform itself was designed to allow them.  

It was kind of scary watching how quickly people were willing to trust others largely on the basis of their forum personas and how willing they were to believe that what regulars posted was the truth - even after they'd been reminded many times that it was inevitable law enforcement was not just watching but likely actively posting on the forums.

A real danger of trying to foster a sense of community around the dark markets is that it makes social engineering relatively easy.  It's much easier to be undercover online than in real life because there's no risk of someone recognising you.  You can live your normal day life and be someone else entirely online with no risk of bumping into an old high school friend or someone you've previously arrested while you're undercover.


Many people believe that DPR2 was StExo - the guy who never shut up about being a major money launderer on the SR1 forums.

The mythology is that there were mechanisms in place for new people to take the reins if people were caught.  Defcon took over when DPR found it "necessary" to disappear (from memory, this happened when the SR forum mods were arrested).  Yet it would have been really stupid to set it up in a way that someone knew who their successors were going to be, as they could obviously disclose that information to law enforcement.

There was a whole lot of stuff going on immediately after the fall of SR1, with vendors and users alike believing they should have some say in who took the reins (which is kind of like your average small drug buyer thinking they should have a say in who heads a Columbian drug syndicate).


You pretty much have to assume that any which are talked about publicly are under active investigation at the moment.  The Europol statement mentioned two which haven't been taken down yet, but which are clearly under investigation.  Any service which says it's totally secure is full of shit because none of them can guarantee that.  Nobody knows at the moment the full extent of the information law enforcement has got from this operation and how many more services it may affect.  New markets will probably spring up overnight as they did when SR1 went down, and they'll sucker in desperate users and run with the money once again.  Don't be in too much of a hurry to find a new dark market right now - see how things shake out over the next few weeks.

Now I would consider them to all be unsafe. Law enforcement was able to take down more then 400 dark market sites in the span of 24 hours and who knows how or why the remaining dark sites were not taken down

According to tor mailing list it's because those hosts are in countries that Interpol/FBI don't have access to, such as Russia, and because they likely don't have any immediate identifying indicators (like Blake using his personal vanity email to setup and pay for hosting) and because they could be honeypot stings like when the Secret Service ran it's own hacking/fraud forum and lured fools from hackforums.net to it.

Maybe some enterprising Liberians can make an ebola protected hosting service in Monrovia :P

How would the people behind the tor mailing list know this?

I also don't think they waited until they could determine who was behind each site to take it down, they only conducted an investigation if they had information that would lead them to believe a specific person was behind sites (like a personal email address). They took down many more sites then they made arrests for.

The guy who ran doxbin posted his logs showing how the Europol/FBI/everybody used a massive DOS attack to move traffic to their nodes which they then used to identify hidden servers. A lot of the 400 sites were actually duplicates, like the doxbin guy who ran a few of them. Many of them were also vendor private sites that "Defcon" had set up for sellers on SR2.0 he sold a shitty template and script that deployed a .onion store.

None of which is going to matter.  This is federal, and guidelines sentences will be a separate offense for each substance.  Then there's the amount transacted, which will be applied to him regardless of whether he personally had anything to do with it.  Then there's whether it's one of the eight 841(b)(1) substances, and I believe SR2 trafficked in all of them.  Things like cocaine and heroin.

Once drug kingpin kicks in, almost all mitigating factors go out the window.

Just drug kingpin, 20 years minimum to the statutory maximum, life.  Repeat offender, 30 years to life (apparently doesn't apply).  Large operation (e.g., gross $10 million + per year), MINIMUM sentence life.  Killing in furtherance, 20 years to life, and/or the death penalty.  The prosecutors are not playing around with this shit.  They're going for blood.

Haven't heard of anybody being sentenced yet for running an online drug market, guess we will find out end of November/December when they sentence these people http://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/case.asp?n=2:11-cr-01137-DMG&s=CA&d=71855 I'm guessing life sentence, though that Dutch guy can apply to serve his sentence back in the Netherlands, where they will likely immediately release him on parole. The Americans however aren't so lucky in that case.

People are crazy for operating these markets, not worth your whole life in jail. Leave this kind of high level criminality to Russian mafia connected to the Federation Council and bang out some Clojure apps for $120k/yr, run a side business trading coins for an extra few thousand to take a month to sit on the beach in Majorca Spain without having to sleep with one eye open worrying about police crashing your door and dragging you to a dungeon.

Well the laws (and the sentencing process) in the Netherlands are very different then they are in the US where both Ross and Blake will be tried/sentenced. While they both carry potentially very harsh sentences, it is possible they will be offered plea deals that amount to what will seem like a slap on the wrist when compared to the life sentences they are facing

Tell 3 go free.

These little powder puffs just had internet markets... I know a kid who got caught with 6 Keys of near pure meth and is still out.  He says he is going to go do years in prison, but this was years back.  Probably headed to witness protection.

This would generally only apply for people who are not at the "top" of a drug "empire". For example the mods of SR1 who were arrested could potentially end up going free if they had given up information on either SR1 or SR2 that could help the prosecution get a conviction. I don't see either ross or blake going free this way as they have no one to nark on

EDIT: blake *may* end up going free (or more likely getting a much less harsh sentence) as he confessed right away and could potentially give up information as to how law enforcement could catch a lot of online dealers

SR2 was apparently raking in $400,000 per month in commissions from $6,000,000 worth of sales every month. If they wanted to charge defcon aka blake of SR2 with kingpin charges they certainly could. I don't think they will throw the book at him since his confessed almost immediately, and presumably is willing to help catch other drug dealers.   

It depends on the balance between how much they want to make an example of these "kingpins" and how much they actually need them.  Depending how compromised his network was, they may already have all they need.  OTOH a good looking, articulate witness for the prosecution is often a deal-closer for the prosecution.

Drug kindpins almost never will cooperate with the prosecution and will certainly not confess, especially not right after getting arrested. A number of mitigating factors was posted above but one thing that was left out was his confession. It is almost always very favorably looked upon when someone confesses right away (or at all) - a likely reason for this is because the reason many cases are solved and/or successfully prosecuted is because of a confession and it is in a prosecutor's best interest to encourage confessions as much as possible even when a specific confession does not substantially help a specific case   

whoa, i'm a little late to the scene but this was not surprising. everyone knew it was coming.

why in the world would anyone risk selling / buying on these markets right now. Its like robbing a stapler from a police department. Your asking for trouble

People trade on these markets because they feel like it is more safe then buying/selling on the "streets" as you are at risk of violence when you deal in illegal items on the "street"

if you're buying drugs in small quantities, i'd think that the feds aren't all that interested in spending the money to lock you down.. plus it's safer than buying on the streets.

it's quite risky to sell though.

I do not advocate for breaking the law however I would say that the risk of selling is actually much less then it is for selling on the streets as it is more difficult to get caught selling as having a undercover officer buy from you would not expose your identity (at least I don't think it would)

The feds aren't going to waste time and money tracking down and arresting people who are buying an eighth of weed from these places. It's just not feasible. Law Enforcement will never learn and neither will the black market operators. What we need is a decentralized market that hopefully gets rid of both problems.

Any law enforcement agency cannot offer to sell you any particular drug, nor any particular quantity of drugs, as doing so would be considered to be entrapment. The criminal would need to approach the law enforcement officer (posing as a drug dealer) requesting to buy the drugs, and the law enforcement officer cannot discriminate for you and not charge you with a crime if you buy drugs from him

The problem is that they could decide to make an example out of a few people. And you could be one of those unfortunate few.

I would doubt that the police/dea would want to make an example of a small time buyer of illegal drugs. They tend to want to go after the "bigger fish" and will almost always let the small time buyers/users (especially 1st time offenders) off with what amounts to a slap on the wrist

Adapt and overcome. That is the Bitcoin way.

SR3 was up within hours of SR2 being taken down. Whoever is behind SR3 was likely prepared for the eventual takedown of SR2 and wanted to launch ASAP (although it is possible that SR3 is a scam and whoever is behind it wanted their site to get free press so people would quickly send money to the site so they can buy illegal items)

This is as farcically wrong as the idea that undercover officers have to tell you they're cops if you ask them.  Controlled buys and sells are part and parcel of the regular practices of the DEA and all state law enforcement agencies that enforce drug laws.  What is legally considered entrapment is to try to involve someone in criminal activity who would otherwise have had nothing to do with it, a la John K. DeLorean.

What is permissible is enticement of those who are already reasonably suspected of engaging in such activities already.

No it is not LOL. Law enforcement is allowed to lie to you all they want as long as they are not suggesting that you break the law, at which point they are committing entrapment.

Indeed, now we have OpenBazaar which is coming to Windows too and that will open the doors to a plethora of users which will strenghtening a really powerful tool for online transactions of goods. It is like p2p applied to ebay.

The fact that people think that a "cop" must tell you if they are the police when they are undercover is likely from movies that like to promote this misconception.

SilkRoad 3 is ready, sir.

Quit embarrassing yourself.  First off, read the posts you're responding to.  I said the idea that cops have to tell you they're cops if you ask is "farcically wrong."  I'm not sure how illiterate you have to be to think that means I'm agreeing with that statement.

And as for your other statement, if that were true, not a single vice operation would be legal.  The fact is, cops routinely entice people into prostitution, drug purchases, drug sales, contract killings, and other forms of enticement.  You clearly don't know the legal meaning of entrapment, which is narrow and specific.  I even gave you the specific example of John DeLorean, which is an actual example of entrapment.

But keep being wrong.  There are plenty of people in Club Fed who believe as you do.

Jesus.  The ignorance is overwhelming.

Most drug dealers in prison who were not caught out in the open were caught in what is called a "controlled buy," in which an undercover officer approaches the suspect, generally a known dealer, and suggests the dealer sell them drugs.  When they make the sale, they're arrested.

The evidence is routinely admitted, as anyone who has had anything to do with actual courts knows.  It routinely leads to convictions and to sentences.  It is routinely upheld on appeal.

This is what happens in reality.

They don't even need actual drugs anymore and can convict for conspiracy if you agree with a police informant to buy/sell/import. Happens all the time here some guy just got 25yrs for agreeing to import a bunch of invisible coke.

I think your definition of "suggests" is different from the legal definition. The under cover officer would generally ask/say things like "what do you have" or "what can you sell me" without specifically asking the dealer to sell an illegal item, however since it is the dealer's business to only sell illegal drugs he assumes the officer is referring to some kind of illegal drugs and proceeds with the sale

Its probably a good idea to avoid any of these dealers and psychopaths.

http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-killed-police-officer-terrorist



DEA and enforcement agents lie all the time and routinely don't follow their own laws and than when its court time use Parallel construction to convince the judge and jury that the evidence doesn't come from the fruit of the poison tree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

They are doing this right now to Ross Ulbricht, so focusing too much on what they are suppose to do and what is illegal is mostly a waste of time. If you are a large target and embarrassing them they will come after you with any means necessary, prepare accordingly.

Well when you earn a doctorate degree, you are qualified to make public policy. It is doctors that develop and prescribe prescription drugs and they do so because they deem the drugs to be good for society as a whole and good for the patient taking them (the rewards outweigh the potential risks).

Your "street" (or "internet") drug dealer will not have this qualification (almost never) nor will they discriminate based on if the drug would actually (or would potentially with the rewards outweighing the risks) benefit you. 

Some prescription drugs are prescribed with the intention of poisoning the patient and may eventually end up killing the patient, but still prolonging their life and/or increasing their quality of life (for example for cancer patients or AIDS patients or patients with other similar diseases).

I also think your price comparison is somewhat unbalanced. According to my quick google search, a gram of pure coke costs ~$120 while "street quality" coke costs between $60 and $80 per gram (I am not sure what a typical "hit" of coke is, however I imagine it is less then a gram). Also the "sticker" price of oxycodone (like most/all other drugs) is not the price that is actually paid by the insurers/patients and the consumer (either themselves or via their insurance company will generally always receive a discount that is usually large

This is one person's opinion. While I do somewhat agree, doctors must take the Hippocratic Oath in order to practice as a doctor, so anything they prescribe should have some benefit to the consumer (patient).

This just adds to your previous picture of that editor saying that drug companies have transformed into marketing companies.

The book is also just one person's opinion.

I would find it hard to believe that you would say that no prescription drug is good for a patient most of the time they are taking it

Some opinions are backed up by citations and research papers.

Judging by the title of the subject book, I am going to say that her opinion is based on person experience which is generally less credible then "citations" and research done by other qualified professionals

Why are you assuming things? Check out pages 155-157 of the book.


Why do you need to Straw man, who even hinted at this?

Do you know there are medical benefits to Schedule 1 illegal drugs as well?

All of my textbooks in grade school and Uni indicated their were absolutely no medical uses for certain types of drugs like psychedelics. Later on I realized I was being lied to :
http://www.maps.org/

Yep, that's 100% accurate. Big pharma is controlling the government. Johnson & Johnson probably doesn't want small time dealers muscling in on their turf. My mother died of cancer in the 90's. The drugs they were giving her were making her so sick that she couldn't eat and would throw up. I had her smoke a small bowl of pot everyday for the last year or so of her life and she ate like a horse and kept it down!

Sorry, you had to go through that, it must have been very traumatic, especially knowing one of the crucial medicines she needed was illegal and you would be violently kidnapped and tortured if you were caught with it.

I have seen many people die and recover from cancer over the years. Some friends absolutely hate the pharmaceutical industry and go through a "natural" homeopathic remedy in an attempt to cure their cancer and others just go through chemo. The homeopathic remedies are just plain idiotic but I am placed in a moral dilemma as I won't convince my friends by talking about moles and  Avogadro constant and the math behind homeopathic solutions and anything I do tell them will weaken the small hope that they are healed from the placebo effect alone.

I'm not a fan of drugs, but Cannabinoids have been shown to attack cancerous cells in research and I would certainly be eating hash brownies , applying hash oil and going through targeted chemo if I ever developed cancer.

It sucks seeing someone you love die of cancer. It was funny to see my old gray haired mother huffing on a bong. lol Some of the best conversations we had about my childhood were during that last year when she was high. She hated the meds she was on and thought about homeopathic alternatives but, being a very practical woman, told us she thought they were all bullshit (her words).

Yeah, it's crazy to keep a drug from people that works in the name of protecting children and then dope kids up on Ritalin until they sit in a corner all day and play with an old shoe (a friends 11 yo kid would just play with a shoe for hours sitting on the floor).

I am sorry for your loss. I would also think it would be funny to see a grandmother smoking from a bong (hopefully you were able to share a few good experiences from doing this). I would say that she would probably have been prescribed medical marijuana today.

Would you agree that the drugs that were given to her were at least designed to treat the cancer and would have potentially given her a greater chance of beating it then if she had not taken any drugs? Even though the drugs technically did kill her do you think the cancer would have killed her sooner if it were not for the drugs?

I do think that it is very sad that the medical profession essentially needs to resort to poisoning people with cancer to attempt to fight it. It just shows how horrible that cancer is

I think your definition of "suggests" is different from the legal definition. The under cover officer would generally ask/say things like "what do you have" or "what can you sell me" without specifically asking the dealer to sell an illegal item, however since it is the dealer's business to only sell illegal drugs he assumes the officer is referring to some kind of illegal drugs and proceeds with the sale
[/quote]

Undercover officers quite routinely and explicitly offer to purchase specific drugs, or ask for them, or offer to sell them.  Think about it.  If a dealer could avoid undercover officers simply by only selling to people who uttered the right magic words, nobody would ever get busted.

In fact, an undercover agent who clearly used weird language would "sound like a fed" and in many contexts, would simply be killed on the spot.

The test of entrapment is not whether magic words are uttered, but whether the person was inclined to commit the offense already.  So for instance, a DeLorean, who never had anything to do with drugs until, in bankruptcy, he was repeatedly importuned by undercover federal agents to get involved in cocaine dealing, was acquitted based on entrapment.

It should also be noted that entrapment is an affirmative defense.  This means that, the prosecution having otherwise proved its case, the burden shifts to the defendant to prove the defense.

The critical factor in an entrapment defense is not magic words uttered by an undercover officer, but whether 1) the intent to commit the offense originated with the government; which then 2) persuaded the defendant to commit the offense (merely providing an opportunity is not entrapment); and 3) the defendant was not otherwise willing to commit the offense.  If the defendant raises these three elements, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that entrapment was not involved.

The very fact that most defendants, including these SR2 defendants, are already in possession of drugs in amounts sufficient to deal, possess bags and scales and other dealer paraphernalia, and/or are readily willing to and have the knowledge necessary to acquire contraband, all goes against 3).  That is, it's pretty solid evidence (if and when the government has it) that the defendant was predisposed to commit the offense.

Such a predisposition negates entrapment.

Imagine  :)

Well I would think that it would be somewhat common for people who are not law enforcement to not want to specifically say they want to buy/sell cocaine (for example) out of fear that the conversation is somehow being recorded and/or that the person they are buying/selling to/from is no longer in that kind of business.

I would say that it would still be possible to convict someone who sold an undercover officer illegal drugs with a crime if the officer specifically asked the seller to sell them drugs, but would not be able to be gain a conviction on a selling/dealing charge (especially if the amount was small enough) as it would be difficult to prove they would have otherwise sold the drugs. The defense could argue that there was no prior intention of selling prior to the officer suggesting that he sell the subject drugs. The defendant would likely sill get charged with possession (or potentially possession with the intent to sell).

I would say it gets much more difficult when an undercover officer specifically asks someone if they want to buy drugs as it would be difficult to prove the buyer would have otherwise purchased the drugs had the officer not suggested them to do so. 

It's possible I suppose. I don't really know if the drugs helped or not. I know they made her very sick to her stomach. The only drugs I know for a fact that worked were the pain meds. I think it was percodan that worked the best but it only really worked when she was high.

I don't think people should need to resort to illegally buying drugs online. The non lethal drugs should be legal to stop street crime and the really bad drugs should be offered to people through monitored programs.

Well I think that some drugs/drug combinations do help cancer patients, plus the fact that cancer is more or less certain to kill without medical intervention. While I agree that it is very sad that your grandmother was not able to beat her cancer, I would say that drugs are able to help patients beat cancer some of the time and that drugs are generally getting more effective of fighting cancer over time.

The list of non-lethal recreational drugs are very small. I would say that it probably both starts and ends with marijuana because AFAIK you cannot OD on marijuana, however it is something that will generally cause you to want to expand your drug usage into stronger, potentially lethal drugs. Drugs like cocaine and heroin can be almost instantly addictive and can be lethal in relatively small doses.

I am not sure how you could potentially monitor the really bad drugs as people could potentially have their friends who have no intention of using the drugs so they can have/use higher quantities.

The weed 'gateway to harder drugs' was debunked years ago, marijuana has been proven to actually alleviate withdrawal symptoms of alcohol and heroin addiction.

The problem nowadays is that cancer 'treatment' has become a $billion industry, it's not in their interest to 'cure' cancer.

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/003674687/5613858670_CancerCures_xlarge.jpeg

This is not true. Every drug has a fatal dose. At present it is estimated that marijuana’s LD-50 is around 1:20,000 or 1:40,000. In layman terms this means that in order to induce death a marijuana smoker would have to consume 20,000 to 40,000 times as much marijuana as is contained in one marijuana cigarette.  NIDA-supplied marijuana cigarettes weigh approximately .9 grams.  A smoker would theoretically have to consume nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana within about fifteen minutes to induce a lethal response.


Even if you took the ethical stance that our liberties should be curtailed in the name of protecting us from ourselves, we still should be motivated to decriminalize all "hard" drugs.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-decriminalization-in-portugal-12-years-later-a-891060.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/portugal-drug-decriminalization/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwald_whitepaper.pdf

It's pretty rare for an undercover sting to involve trying to entice someone to BUY drugs, unless it's dealer quantity.  In that case, though, the issue would still be predisposition, and for instance, already having drugs in your system, going through withdrawal, having the necessary paraphernalia, etc. would be strong evidence.

(This is aside from the issue that it would be genuinely shitty behavior even for cops to go around trying to urge addicts to relapse just to bust them.  But it's pretty rare that anyone bothers with undercover agents to bust a user.  In fact, I can't even think of a sting like that offhand.)

Any else find it a bit suss that SR2 started accepting new venders about a month or 2 before going down?

I would say this was likely because they wanted to expand the number of listings on their site, along with the associated increased level of potential sales (and related commissions the site would receive)

Or maybe he was going to run with the escrow....... Sometimes the most simple answer is true (occams razor)

Why would he have previously made good on money stolen in a hack if that's the case?  All the "character evidence" so far I've seen on Defcon is that he seems to have been ideologically motivated as well as by money, and wanted to run an honest (if illegal) business.  He doesn't even have the taint of DPR's scheme of having antagonists whacked.

So I really doubt he was running off with anything.  I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the nark urged along acquiring new vendors in the hope of acquiring new investigation targets.

It was rumored that the "hacks" that SR2 encountered were really the operators just stealing their customer money. He could have kept the site open in order to install further confidence in the site to be able to steal even more money from customers in the future. Although the site was reportedly making huge sums of money - $400,000+ per month according to the complaint

A silk road 3 is already up and functioning, amazing what a free market leads to!

SR3 was up in a matter of hours after SR2 was publicly taken down. I would speculate that SR3 is some kind of honeypot and would personally not consider it safe (or it is some kind of scam). Just because the UI is the same does not mean the actual site is the same - the operator is clearly different considering that the previous alleged owner is in jail. 

Some would argue that SR2 was a scam that kept repaying the people who were scammed over time several times (they probably had many users who simply never logged in again after one of the scams and did not have to repay them).

It would be very difficult to know with any level of certainty that any instance of SR3 is a scam/honeypot or not, the only reason it is easy to say that the current instance is one of these is the speed at which the site was brought up

Everyone knew that they were going to catch the people behind the silk road eventually. As for the price of bitcoin i think that the price is going to stay where it is at now until some great adoption from the world is taken into place.

I would say the blake guy was almost trying to get caught as it made it very easy for the government to find his identity. I might speculate that he might use his mistakes as a defense that he was not aware as to how illegal what he was doing was illegal

Ignorance of the law isn't a defense, even if it was plausible.

In order to be guilty of a crime the prosecution must show that the defendant intended to commit the crime he is accused of. For example if someone were to steal a pair of jeans from a clothing store, the DA must not only prove that the defendant not only stole the jeans but also intended to take the jeans without paying for them (a defense would be that the clerk did not properly ring up the jeans and put them in his bag).

Additionally if someone does not know that something is a crime they may receive a somewhat lighter sentence once they are found guilty 

These guys aren't very smart, are they? I hear poor op sec is to blame.

Feds will keep playing whack-a-mole with the darknet markets until they move onto something else ...

That's entirely not true.  Ignorance not being a defense is such a bedrock legal principle it even has one of those fancy Latin maxims:  Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. 

You are talking about a specific intent crime.  In this case, the specific intent is to take the jeans without paying and, additionally, that the intent was to deprive the owner of them permanently, i.e. the codification of the old common law offense of petty larceny.  "I didn't know shoplifting was illegal" isn't a defense.  Just as "I didn't know dealing drugs was illegal" wouldn't be.


That's an entirely different issue from whether it is a defense in the first place.  Guilt is one thing, sentence another.

In this case, though, it is completely implausible considering his public statements that Defcon was not entirely aware that there is this "drug war" thing going on and that it is highly illegal to deal in large quantities of drugs.  Considering he was denouncing the very legal scheme he was violating, he was not only aware it was illegal, it was actually his intent to violate it and to thwart the drug war entirely.

Whether or not one agrees with him in principle on that issue, that's going to be very bad at sentencing.

That would mean basically abandoning the drug war entirely.  They're not going to do that.

And if it got out that the feds were basically ignoring darknets, and throw in the fact that online ordering is vastly superior to dealing with often murderous street scum for one's buzz, the bulk of the market would move online overnight.

The federal heat is going to increase, not decrease. 

The good thing about this, for those who do not care in the least about the drug trade, is that it will inevitably lead to an arms race as surveillance and anti-surveillance technology duke it out, resulting in improved technology for the rest of us.

I disagree. As long as the world is at "war" with the drug trade, law enforcement is going to want to stop the darknet drug markets. The war on drugs has gone on for several decades now and does not appear to be slowing.

I don't think that law enforcement is going to move onto something else.

I don't think they are going to give up on the war on drugs

I love that phrase, "war on drugs". It cracks me up. When they finish that war they're going to start a war on food and then a war on cocktails with little umbrellas. The U.S. gov likes wars with inanimate things because they don't shoot back.

It is called the war on drugs because the government is trying to stop the drug trade and people using illegal drugs that often are used to finance terrorism.

I prefer Agora cause u can create your own deposit addresses.  SR 2.0 only gives u a hard-coded 6.  also can't finalize transactions.  That's another problem.  The site sucked overall.  F+

basically created by an ass-clown that doesn't give a sh** about Security.  arrest him and his bitch bible reading ass

This American war on drugs is a joke. By doing this "war on drugs", they are indirectly helping the Mexican drug cartels (by removing the local competition). Also, how can they claim any justification for this, when NATO troops are actively engaged in protecting and transporting the Afghan heroin production? (Well... Afghan heroin kills tens of thousands of Russians and Iranians every year.... so as per the NATO, they do more good than bad).

They're not really trying to do that.  They're trying to keep their for-profit prisons full and control the population.  Also, they use the drug trade themselves to hide at least part of the black budgets for intelligence agencies like the CIA.  Whether it's to fund the Contras during Reagan or, now, the CIA's cozy relationship with the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, the government has always played both sides of the tracks in the "drug war" game.

Yeah, right - you would expect them to be smarter than this.

+1

the talibans fighted against the drugs but not the USA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/world/asia/afghan-elections-cited-as-factor-in-record-levels-of-opium-production.html

Production and sale of illegal drugs keeps more families above the poverty line than respective governments do to alleviate the plight of the poor in drug producing countries.

Trade in illegal drugs finances many things but mostly funds the production and distribution of more illegal drugs.
 

There is just too much money involved for this to end anytime soon

I predict 5 new sites for every one that gets busted

Actually the NATO is encouraging Afghan opium production. They are even helping the drug smugglers to transport their stuff to Russia and Iran. Well... these photos speak better than any proof:

http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/data/upimages/us_opium.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/USNATO-poppies1.jpg

https://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/USopium6.png

This literally is a war "on" drugs.

You can have a permit over there.  *wooo* Fucking permit fuckery