Bitcoin Forum

In my mind, it is inevitable that Silk Road will either be shut down or cease to operate in the not too distant future.

While successors will eventually spring up in its place, there will still be a large, sudden drop in demand for BTC.

How low will BTC go?

How soon might this happen?

Since I believe Bitcoin is bigger than Silkroad, I would welcome the opportunity to buy coins cheaply, but others may see this scenario as a disaster for the community.

I'm interested in peoples thoughts.

Meh, I don't think silk road is going to crash us.

I don't think Silk Road is going to crash.

are their any other silkroad-like sites running on tor? (marketplace that only allows bitcoin?)

there's several other sites. many are private.

black market reloaded is another one that's somewhat popular and public

here this should keep you busy

http://nobody.zerodays.org/hidden-directory/

I couldn't disagree more. I don't see S R ever going away. I only see more and more SR-like businesses popping up all over the place to take advantage of a successful business model. At that point if one of them fails it won't hurt bitcoin at all.

Not sure how can silk road be shutdown, the authorities would have a hard time to even locate their server, let alone the people behind it. Plus there are several other markets available in onionland, just not as popular yet. I'm sure their popularity will suddenly increase if the silkroad operators went full retard and got shutdown some how.

I have never used SR. It's collapse would mean nothing to me.

The silk road will not crash.

Silk road improves the efficiency in the dark economy, and the increase of the efficiency is especially huge for the the drug dealing industry. Now the Silk road is a C2C web site, and there will soon be a drug Amazon appeared. Some drug producer in the Mexico or some where like that will sell the drugs directly to the local drug dealers. The price of the drugs will fall, and reduce the harm of drugs done to the society.  

If a man don't use drug, he will not buy a drug on silk road only because it is easy; If a man use drugs, the inconvenience and expensiveness will not stop him from purchasing.

SR crashing is not impossible, just very hard to do.

i guess its just a matter of time. but i dont care ;)
would be an opportunity for cheap coins

I have never used silk road. I have seen several people saying that the majority of bitcoin commerce is on silk road, but I have never seen actual data that backs that up. Does anybody have the daily revenue of silk road? If we could find that we could compare it to the daily volume of exchanged bitcoins and see how much affect the shutdown of silk road would have.

As long as SR is profitable to the owner it will continue, barring getting busted somehow.

The USG has all but admitted that Tor is a huge impediment to their shutting illegal internet activity such as SR, CP etc.

The nearest anyone (outside the FBI possibly) has seen to a decent analysis, using data from feedback ratings over a number of months...

http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139) "We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers to approximately USD 1.9 million per month"

So that's ~200k btc a month, or ~6,666.66666666 btc a day. Mt.Gox traded 35,435.31 today.

I could see Silk Road getting shut down if the operator(s) made some sort of mistake that inadvertently disclosed their identity.  That mistake could be as simple as spelling some word in a peculiar way and then finding that same misspelling uniquely somewhere else, like here on the forums, or on Facebook, or whatever.

What would be awesome, however, is if the SR operator had a "dead man switch" that automatically disclosed his complete source code to the public in case he ever ceased to run it unexpectedly (died or went to jail or whatever).  Then half a dozen copycats - basically anyone with the balls - could take his place and open up all kinds of markets after he has nothing to lose by sharing his code.  (Meanwhile, the public would get a chance to close any hidden security holes or whatever there might be).

And I would guess many sellers are selling or spending at least part of the bitcoins. so the effect on the price is even less.

Also, as the price of btc goes up and the Bitcoin economy grows, Silk Road will be a smaller percentage of it.

op, please outline a plausible scenario by which SR might be taken down, assuming the admin has good security practices in place.

If there was any reason they'd shut down, it would be because they're having trouble cashing out their profits.

exactly. but the beautiful thing about bitcoin is that you can just sit on it for as long as you want, until you completely figure out your laundering strategy.

can anyone explain how an entire site can exist inside TOR?  I mean I read that it's like a fake TLD that's correctly translated but wouldn't the creators of the TOR software have to manually code the software to accept and properly route fake TLDs?  So pull the plug on that idiotic feature!  I'm still not convinced they designed it that way in the first place but I can't imagine how else someone could set up a website that exists only in TOR and have it actually work.

Btw with all the 3rd party code and direct to browser scripts and FTP operations and stuff, any web server sitting only in the TOR network would get identified and found out in like a day.  So if those idiots think they're safe, they're not.

try it ;)
i bet you wont get their public ip...

..as if illegal MP3 downloads disappeared when Napster went down...

The more you try to fight the internet the faster it will evolve.
same for war on drugs.

read this:

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

Yeeeeah, security certificate error and an extension ending in .en.  I don't think I'm gonna let that page load.

Btw you upload one PDF with scripts and get the server to run it, you'll get their internal and external IP and the name of the server, lol.  Same but even easier with an adobe flash file.  It's a direct route that bypasses the entire network by simply not using it.

Load it in a VM that you can revert after, Mr. Security Expert.  You seem to talk a lot for someone who is unwilling to read.

ROFL, this is joke, right?

Okay, now I'm really not clicking it, you dumbass.

Your knowledge of how Tor works is a joke.  If you wrap a browser or a service like IIS or something in a Tor "wrapper" basically, all communication goes through Tor.  All other programs on the computer do not use Tor and all browsers plugins are completely separate programs.  All web servers have the capability to view their own pages and do under certain circumstances.  Most also have Java, flash, adobe reader, etc installed.  So 1 little scripted file opens in a plugin and it bypasses Tor completely and goes straight to the target.

Don't believe me.  Believe exactly what I just said which is posted on their own Tor safety warning page:
https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html#warning

Not all warnings apply to entire server installations but the principal of alternate apps directly accessing the internet by themselves without using Tor is exactly the same.

Hey look, a quote:
The Tor Browser will warn you before automatically opening documents that are handled by external applications. DO NOT IGNORE THIS WARNING. You should be very careful when downloading documents via Tor (especially DOC and PDF files) as these documents can contain Internet resources that will be downloaded outside of Tor by the application that opens them.

Silk Road won't be the market leader in any case for long. It is trivial business to enter to. Maybe some mafioso can throw some money in clever guerilla marketing. Maybe the future marketplaces employ better techniques for quality control etc.

And there already exists an open source software which allows anyone to set up their own marketplace (I don't know how good it is). The software is pretty trivial to implement.

Of course there is side channels trough your server could leak IP address. But if you run site like SR you will not install it on your home desktop with Windows. :) You pick up server, install minimal linux or BSD on it and http server and of course use firewall and http server connect trough proxy on the other server wich allows connection only trough firewall to tor network.

BTW do you bother about updates on your Windows desktop? (certificate)

EDIT: WTF will you be opening DOC or PDF documents on the server that serves the hidden service?

Unless someone proves they obtained verified sillkroad IP, that's like just your opinion dude. If it was that easy, silkroad would have been pwned hundreds of times by now.

Are you aware that Silk Road has been in operation for almost two years? It has gotten tons of press coverage, and an American senator demanded that authorities take it down. How can you seriously claim that Silk Road would be taken down in a day, and is run by idiots?

You might as well claim that this "aeroplane" thingy will never fly because it's many tons heavy and it's made of metal.

I think they make enough money to do things like rent a server, encrypt it, and just use it for a VPN connection to TOR for their main server. And then get a new one each month.

By the use of bitcoin, can we encourage more half-volunteered-half-donated Tor traffic relay server?

You claim you want to know, then you decide to be spiteful instead.  The most charitable reading is that you are spreading FUD.

As for other programs on the same computer not using tor, if you torify your shell then every process forked from it will use tor.  This is a trivial enough workaround to make your point uninteresting to anyone who hasn't just learned about tor.

Ugh, you know servers are just computers, right?  There are tons of conditions under which a server or the software running on it simply opens a PDF file that someone loads.  A CMS's php-based thumbnail generator script alone could do it (especially if made by adobe, lol).  I'm just saying, server aren't magic, they're just regular computers and regular computers can leak data outside of Tor very easily.  You know how many linux applications and services are capable of using the internet connection on their own?  A LOT!!!

btw there's nooooo way in hell it's a hosted machine at a 3rd party host.  Almost all web hosts have backdoors to view content on their own servers regardless of security not to mention examining inbound and outbound data to the server.  The FBI probably has every host in the US and as many as they could get in the rest of the world examining their data for servers containing files relevant to silkroad or data indicating massive inbound TOR traffic.


All I'm saying is if you think Tor is a magical cloak of invulnerability that will never ever be vulnerable, you're wrong.  Here, let's get you all certified to talk about Tor.  It's 3 really simple steps.

1. go to google
2. type in "tor weaknesses"
3. shut the hell up

Please explain how Silk Road has been in operation since February, 2011.

Congratulations, you are going to my ignore list (how can http server reveals its public IP when it's not connected to Internet?). And as a reward I am sending you 666 satoshis. This reward is for your only valid point that is - you cannot have 100% secured site even if it is tor hidden service.

The existence of shady hosts notwithstanding, it really could be anywhere.  It could be on a hacked box in Russia.  It could be secreted in a closet at a NOC.  It could be somewhere completely different and using an ssh tunnel through a rogue access point in any organization.  The traffic would look like normal SSL traffic, and because of the way hidden services work, if the server or its tunnel endpoint ever went down, a backup could be placed elsewhere and nobody would have to update their links to it.  That's because the hidden service hostname is actually a hash of its private key.


I appreciate your concern, but I'm not the one being willfully ignorant here.

Seriously?  I don't even know where to start with that one, lol.  Ummm...it is connected to the internet or nothing else could reach it.  Everything on the internet has an IP address or nothing else could reach it.  The IP address is accessible about a hundred different ways once you're talking about an application with a script inside it (flash or PDF) that's running on the server locally.  You could read it out the system summary info on most linux OSes, among tons of other way

And they haven't been caught because the FBI is stupid, isn't allowed to do stuff like that anyway, probably doesn't know how TOR works, failed to go to Google and search "tor weaknesses" :P , and they don't have sufficient coordination to do an enter-exit attack nor would they be allowed to DDOS other people's TOR nodes and mount their own rigged ones to get to a sufficient control level for other attack methods.  That's like 1/10th of the reasons lol.

Oh and a server that receives 99.99999% SSL traffic and no normal traffic, that could happen in certain somewhat common normal circumstances but it would be at least suspicious enough that that would be the server a hosting company would look at to see if it contains things like text saying "silkroad."

plus, what if 1 single offsite image is posted as a link like as a product or something.  I've never seen a silkroad page obviously but if it's like other CMS or forum software, images could be embedded and read by the server, not the browser, especially if it's a PHP page or uses certain types of frames.  It takes some tricking and SQL-injection style HTML coding but once the block of HTML or PHP is uploaded and the server is tricked into serving it up as is, tada.  Then the server holding the image would get a direct server to server link up, revealing its IP address.  If it was a standalone, trap image for tracking purposes (something I've used many, many, many times on other people's websites), I'd check the log on my server hosting the image for what what IP address attempted to read the file.

There's like 100 ways to catch these assholes, just most are seriously illegal so nobody's done it yet.

I see You are a survivor from prime days of lobotomy! You mention many technical aspects but understand none of them in this and subsequent posts. All you mention such as offsite loading, embedding, plugins etc are taken care of. You did not even seen Silk Road page? LOL! Security "expert" who is afraid from .en extension in Tor Project homepage and is talking about Tor vulnerabilities in same time. You are retard, tell your handler The Suit that You failed!

I don't know much about the technical side of hosting tor websites, but on the client side the browser bundled with the tor distro is locked down and designed to explicitly notify you if there's embedded content from another website on the page you are viewing, asks you if you want to run javascript on a page by page basis etc. etc. and silkroad doesn't raise any alerts. So looking at it from the Tor web-browser, which is designed to tell you if there is a breach of anonymity I trust its security.

He is talking trolling about embedded images that are server-side. Even if this is possible somehow (I doubt it) then the server will fetch the image using Tor network and our "genius" will see Tor exit node's IP address in his logs. His posts at the end sound hillarious. How can someone know about all this stuff and have completely wrong understanding even in the basics? Maybe he is a so called "white hat" who just finished 5 year training in computer security?

If you could be arsed to take your own advice and read some docs, you'd know that there is no exit node involved in accessing a hidden service.

The government uses tor for its own purposes, so it has little incentive to ddos nodes.


SSL traffic is normal traffic.  If an ssh tunnel is employed, there are no files to look at.  You're grasping at straws in order to avoid admitting that you don't know enough about your topic.


This would be a stupid thing to allow.  I'd be surprised if this was possible on SR.  Even beyond disallowing such an attack, the web server could easily be prevented from connecting anywhere without tor, a step that I doubt the SR admins have neglected to take.

By the way, you are mistaken about the "direct server to server link up"; you wouldn't catch the server's IP this way, only that of improperly configured SR users (more likely, just that of a tor exit node).  Your server logs would only contain the hidden service hostname as the referer.


This is so naive it's cute.

And if that IP address is 10.30.100.10, it doesn't help you much.

There is no exit involved in hidden services, so that attack does not help you much.

But if you want to believe that the FBI is stupid, ignorant and does not have authorization to investigate an online marketplace of hard drugs and that Silk Road will execute PDF scripts you upload to it and load images externally and is run by idiots and none other than you have any sort of understanding of how Tor works even if you just learned that there is such a thing as hidden services, then go ahead, I guess.

I'm with the nay sayers as far as it burning the crypto economy. and for that matter being shut down. It's hard to even speculate on the who, what and where are they. who knows how powerful the operators are... it could be a handful of people like for example pirate bay... Or it could be hundreds of people.. I'm surely believeing there is a quantity of heartbeats behind it.

I've had deeper discussion with people concerning the actual TOR software comming under government attack. It is after all a creation by several governing bodies. but still. nothing stops another TOR project from aiding civilians to reach this portion of the internet.

I guess bottom line is if someone has the willpower it will get done no matter how hard of a crackdown world politics brings.

I think as well, the crypto economy will slowly begin to be adopted by more and more "legal" services. thus allowing for a split of the market. So as long as the current community can prove that with a little brains one can actually make rather then lose

Ugh, some of the general tactics I threw out there for getting the server to cough up its info may have slight catches and flaws but the idea here is sound.  You're all saying they exist in happy magic land and nobody will ever catch them.  Well guess what, their web server is a computer and it's sitting somewhere connected to the internet with an ISP or host and an IP address.  That means someone could find it out.

Obviously they set up their server(s) so perfectly that it's not exactly easy but if you think it's impossible to find out the server's true info, you're dreaming.

Oh, here's the short version of why the FBI hasn't caught them: when has the FBI ever been able to stop anything illegal anywhere outside the US?  I guarantee it's not hosting inside the US, lol.  So they could have the IP, mac address, name, and an 8.5x11" glossy framed photo of the server and if it's in some European or Asian country, good luck getting the plug pulled on it.  Go ask the MPAA how hard it is to get other countries to comply with their takedown requests.

Btw here's how China has almost complete control over blocking and spying on your perfect little invincible magic Tor network

http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/pdf/foci2012.pdf

same here, but less boring writing:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427413/how-china-blocks-the-tor-anonymity-network/

Blocking is relatively easy, but spying is lot harder. Tor depends on publicly listed nodes (relays). To block tor, basically you just need to block traffic to these public nodes. However there are some additional features (bridges etc) which allow better connectivity, even these are not perfect.

Anyway, blocking tor is not related any way to spying on tor.

On unrelated note, someone needs to develop bitcoin-vpn automated marketplace.

Okay yeah, very very difficult unless you operate a ton of rigged exit nodes.  Then it's simple if you control all the country's ISPs like China does ;D Classic entry-exit attack.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh that's right.  I almost forgot about Operation Adam Bomb.  Just kidding, I knew about it the whole time and just wanted all the arrogant, fake, know it all haters here to show how clueless they are first.
Anyway, mega lolz at everyone who's like "nah ah, silkroad is invincible!  2 years is like...FOREVER!  NOBODY could ever find it and shut it down!"

This article is titled:
"Feds shutter online narcotics store that used TOR to hide its tracks" <-- lol
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/feds-shutter-online-narcotics-store-that-used-tor-to-hide-its-tracks/

Super short summary: an exact clone of silkroad got shut down despite existing only in Tor.  Oops, Des was right again.  I guess computers connected to the internet can be found after all! lol.

Again, I don't know much about tor personally, but you are offering an explanation of how to stop people connecting to tor
 to support an argument that it's easy to find silkroad. I don't see the connection?


Edit - sorry I'm behind in the conversation. :)

I don't doubt that someday someone connected with silkroad may slip up, however they do seem to be doing ok so far with regard to online anonymity, and I doubt I'd be the only interested party to see you point out any flaws ;)

This site had a history of being hosted on the clearnet and accepting payment via PayPal and others. This was how they were caught. Them having moved to Tor by the time law enforcement got to them has nothing to do with it. This site was nothing like Silk Road. You're a buffoon.

Nobody in this thread is claiming tor is invulnerable, but the ideas you've proposed are not at all sound.  Now if you had said something like, hidden services can be revealed by a malicious node which advertises infinite bandwidth, causing the hidden service to preferentially route through it, you might have more credibility, though this attack can be mitigated by specifying a strict list of entry nodes.  Which I'm sure the SR crew are aware of, given the ease of this potential attack and their history of continuing to operate despite the yelling about them in Congress.

Someone may compromise SR, but I think it far more likely to get infiltrated, or discovered through old fashioned sleuthing, or to have been a honeypot operation from the beginning, than through a known technical flaw.


This was not an exact clone of SR.  The operators used hushmail and paypal, both of which rolled over for the feds, as anyone would have predicted.  You're not even reading your own links now!  FUD indeed.

Just pointing out that Tor is horribly imperfect in many, many ways.

Isn't it a case of FBCAK though? i.e. it works as advertised as long as you're really cautious?

No, no, no, I meant no matter how carefully you use it, there's huge problems with it regardless.  Yeah, guard your plugins but what are you going to do about rigged nodes, enter-exit attacks, etc?  So just don't pretend it's perfect.

wow, it's been like 2 minutes and I thought of another potential attack vector against silkroad :P this is so hard lol.  There are sources, intermediary nodes, exit nodes, and target websites in that order then the response is sent in reverse order.  Intra-Tor websites like silkroad obviously do not exit.
You're probably already thinking what I'm thinking.  Tor nodes do not know if the next link up in the chain for the traffic they're carrying is another node or an exit node so when they receive the response back, they don't know if it's from a fake tor-hosted website and the data never left the tor network, right?  Wrong.

If you receive the response within 10ms from the same IP you just passed it to, there's 1 reason for that because a hop to an exit node, getting a response, and a hop back to you would never have been that fast.  It's virtually impossible.  What is solely possible is you're the 2nd to last link in the chain and that's their silkroad server your node is talking to that's responding that fast with data that pretends it left the network and came back.

yeah, they could add a built in delay to fake it but they're not that smart :P

Farmers market got busted because they were idiots and used payment methods such as paypal. You just lost all your credibility in my eyes and I don't see the point continuing the discussion with trolls who throw stupid claims around without doing even basic research.

Getting back on point.....

The question wasn't about how SR is taken down nor was it about strengths and weaknesses of Tor. It was about what happens to the bitcoin economy when a major marketplace driving the economy goes away.

If the CMU research is to be believed, and there are many flaws with their research (which they admit in the paper if you actually read the whole paper), SR contributes a non-trivial amount to the bitcoin economy.

The question is one none can answer reliably (only estimate based on similar situations in other economies). Empirical evidence once SR goes away will be interesting.

I'd argue that the largest losers are the exchanges of global currencies to btc and back to global currencies.

There are six nodes involved in a hidden service request. Three chosen by the client, and three chosen by the server. None of them know they are participating in a circuit that ends up at Silk Road.

It's a real shame they can't all be smart, like you.

Please. Take down Silk Road. You will be a hero to the DEA and many other national law enforcements agencies all over the world. If it is so easy, please do it. Prove us idiots. Prove yourself a god. Victory is yours. The press will love you. You may get a parade in your honor.










of course, watch out for the drug cartels and users of SR, they may kill you soon after it goes away.

Hugs.

And people providing local anonymous exchange services will take a hit too. I do face to face currency exchanges locally, and while I'm not nosey enough to ask, I would bet about 1/2 of my exchanges have been with silkroad customers.

I suspect that it's close to a majority of actual commerce (not trading).

Except if your node is programmed to notice when response times are unnaturally fast.  Nodes just pass traffic.  They have no idea if you're heading to another node or an exit node or ending up at a hidden service or a real website but they do know if the response comes back down the line unnaturally fast, it certainly didn't leave the tor network so there's a darn good chance that the response came directly from a silkroad server.

Btw, mega elephant in the room.  How the hell do they deliver the products?  Drug sniffing dogs are at every mail processing hub.  If people could just fedex drugs somewhere, they wouldn't have submarines and mules and stuff, lol.  If it's all a giant in-person network or something, the FBI would post a fake buying offer and just arrest the dealer when they get there :P it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I don't believe Silk Road is going to crash. The people who run it seem to be good techs who are working very hard to make it a success and keep it running while protecting their users. More likely, some government will come after them and shut them down.

Meh

I don't believe SR is large enough to crash Bitcoin. I don't think we'll even see that big of a dip in prices. The biggest threat I see to Bitcoin prices are continued scams, the lack of security standards at exchanges, and public gullibility. That's going to contribute to massive issues with Bitcoin prices long before SR going away would.

Don't underestimate the inefficiency of a government-owned corporation. US Customs is barely even paying attention, nevermind a short-staffed postal service filled with cranky people who really don't give a shit.

The only busts I've read about in the news have come from someone sending stuff domestically via UPS. They actually seem to go out of their way to detect suspicious packages.

From an economic standpoint, it'd be bad.  Yeah most BTC transactions are not related to silkroad but there's more to it.  Mining is usually people wanting BTC -> $$$ and sell offs drive the price down on exchanges.  Then there's tons of BTC -> BTC.  Then there's $$$ -> BTC.  It's generally all-around difficult to buy BTC which is a huge detriment.  If I decided right now today to go attempt to buy some, it's some serious hoops to jump through with some sketchy foreign 3rd party processor or I have to cross my fingers and hope a quicker method isn't a scam, etc.

But people who wants drugs will go through some serious BS to get what they want :P So as far as the amount of people pushing the price up by creating a demand on the exchange for BTC, yeah it's probably mostly druggies :P If you think about the sheer number of people attempting to acquire BTC then sell it off for USD (basically all miners and all shops), it took more people than that to drive the price from $4 to $12.  Who else could they be?

I heard a rumor about Greeks buying up BTC cuz of Euro shenaningans but it's hard to tell what portion of buyers they are.  And certainly people are not quite so ballsy now when it comes to buying BTC as an investment, seeing as how it crashed pretty hard twice :P

If you put all the dogs in the entire country capable of the task to work sniffing nothing but mail, they would only be able to sniff a very small portion of the mail sent. And then a large number of those dogs would be taken away from other important tasks like sniffing for bodies or sniffing for bombs or biting people who need to be bitten.

Also, I have a strong suspicion that SR is kind of "allowed to happen". I'm reluctant to give the .gov credit for being able to see the situation as it really is but when you consider the alternatives of buying drugs on the street, SR goes a long way towards harm reduction.

By 'The Great Silk Road Crash' I was referring to the BTC price crash that Silk Road disappearing would precipitate.

Silk Road revenue is said to be "approximately USD 1.9 million per month". If this demand suddenly disappeared then I think there would be a massive dip. You can also add market panic to the mix.

I want to add that I am not trying to spread FUD with this topic - I just think this is something Bitcoin will have to go through during its evolution.

I think it just costs to much to try and track down people who are sending mail anonymously. Street pharmacists are pretty easy to trap and confiscate property from to support LE efforts.

SR would just move the server to portugal which has less retarded drug laws than most places.

These guys used hushmail and accepted paypal/western union for payment, they might as well hold a sign to their head that says "I sell drugs". It's a miracle they even lasted over 2 years and 5000+ orders. the FBI would just need to place a single fake order and obtain their paypal address, then all is lost.

Those un-retarded drug laws only say a drug consumer can carry a quantity less than 10 days comsumption. In the case of Marijuana it means 5 grams maximum. You will not be imprisioned, but they will take it away from you and send you to a psychologist and you'll have to pay a fine for it also.

If SR moved the server to Portugal it would mean jail for them and to whoever hosted it if they knew what they were hosting.

Please don't spread misinformation.

This number would be much higher if you count all the 2xMtGox coins sold on eBay heading directly to SR.

Why moving to Portugal? That would be the same as moving to Sweden or Finland. Do you guys have any idea how much jailtime the operators would get if caught?
Running a criminal enterprise on the longterm, means lifetime jail, in almost any country.

From most posts DPR seems a educated person.

And please quit this conspirancy theories about SR going to shutdown. No one can shutdown a .onion domain or trace the server origins via hidden services if well config. The revenue SR is making thru Escrow system is more than deserved for the work they done.

@Desolator

i love a good troll as much as the next guy, but the tor developers aren't idiots. you haven't discovered anything new here, but you are indeed revealing a great deal of ignorance about it. read the docs, study the source, talk to the developers.

I heard on these forums that TOR is broken so everyone should stop using it. Why is it broken? Jeez, can't you people google?

/sarcasm

Yeah, but as others have already pointed out, approximately USD 1.9 million of supply per month also disappears at the same time (unless you believe that SR sellers keep their income in BTC form). So in a rational market, this is a market neutral event.


Now there's a good point. It will almost certainly cause a price dip in the short term, because people will panic sell. Meanwhile, those who assessed the situation a little more thoroughly will snatch up cheap coins.

All of the above is under the assumption that SR shuts down due to some human error or bad luck (incorrectly configured server, inadequate money laundering allowing a known SR address to be linked to an address with a known owner, SR operators being busted for some unrelated crime in RL, or DPR being run over by a bus). In this case SR will quickly be replaced by one of it's competitors waiting in the wings.

But in the exceedingly unlikely event that SR was to shut down or be shut down due to some previously unknown weakness in TOR itself, that cannot easily be patched, the long term price impact on bitcoin will indeed be quite negative, since untraceable trade is one of the major bitcoin value propositions.

Since TOR is used by our own government so it can get away with whatever fucked up shit they do anonymously over the internet, I don't see that happening. Sites on TOR even survive DDoS'ing.

And what if I tell you that Tor was made by CIA... :o Now it is developed by geeks and nodes, relays and bridges are sustained by privacy geeks. They need it for some of their operations. I bet that this is the very same reason why Gavin was invited to CIA - they were looking for anonymous global payments system for their operations so they invited main developer to consult it. Maybe they are using Bitcoin for a while  :o

It appears it was the Navy, not the CIA:


Taken from https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en at Fri Sep 21 12:28:19 UTC 2012.

Ah, sorry, you are right.  :)

I was hoping this discussion would more focused on what would happen to Bitcoin if Silkroad went down, rather than if it was a possibility.   

I'm surprised at how relaxed some people are to the effect this will have on value of BTC.

I think it could easily match the previous crash that happened from $30.

I'm trying to understand the economics of why BTC would crash in relation to other currencies if SR went away.

Is SR so big that it's influencing the value of BTC?  I could see it might move it around some, but I'm not so sure about a crash.

What percentage of the economy do you think Silkroad fills? 

so much fud...

I honestly couldn't say.  There have been studies referenced here on this site that estimate how much business goes through SR.  But how much other commerce goes on through, say, person-to-person transactions?  SR is an easy target for study since it's a focal point of commerce.  How much p2p commerce is there?  It's impossible to even estimate.

This is honestly not my intent.

As someone who wants to invest in Bitcoin, this is just one of the risks I am taking into consideration.

I was hoping that I could get a clearer picture by asking for the views of the community.

My thoughts exactly. Silk road will get closed down eventually, be it by the owners themselves or the FBI / DEA. Nothing lasts forever, all it takes is for the public to demand Silk Road to be closed and politicians will start handing out promises to the public and at the same time putting pressure on the feds.
If the US government uses all its resources it could probably disrupt SR enough too force them to shutdown.

I would say in 2011 Silkroad was probably like 5-10% since most buyers (usd -> btc) were speculative investors and stuff.  Now the price randomly shot up 4x for no reason and the only explanation is "greece."  It's probably 50-75% unfortunately.  But if one shuts down, another pops up.

What we can do is promote BTC spending.  Spending BTC at cablesaurus so he can sell it off into USD instead of you doing it is exactly the same thing so stuff like that isn't amazingly beneficial.  Buy and hold investors who buy up BTC are just delaying selling it.  The only thing that truly and permanently props up the price of BTC are true BTC transactions where someone buys something and the vendor who sold it to them holds the BTC instead of selling it on the exchange because there's enough that he can spend thge BTC on that it would actually be inconvenient to turn it into USD, which is somewhat complicated and lengthy right now anyway (assuming you don't want to pay giant wire transfer fees).  So promote that to reduce silkroad's footprint and avoid a crash.

Bitcoin is just as useful for trade at $1 as it is at $100 - the exchange rate doesn't matter anyone except for speculators, and catering to speculators does nothing to secure the future of Bitcoin as a viable currency.

What matters in the long term is the market demand for products and services that can be purchased with Bitcoins. Anyone who wants Bitcoin to succeed should focus on creating those products and services rather than playing pump and dump games with the exchange rate, because speculation is a zero-sum game at best that does nothing to help the Bitcoin economy.

Yeah just like the pirate bay...  ::)

It's funny you should mention this because you can now bet on exactly that (http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=688).

Disclaimer: I made that statement.


I think there will be a drop, but not as large as you might think.  Most of the Bitcoin trade is currency trading, not black market sites.  It really depends on what percentage of the market cap is handled by Silk Road if and when it stops running, whether it's shut down voluntarily or not.


No idea.  I picked the middle of next year for my bet just to keep it interesting.


I'd certainly like to take advantage of such a drop, but I think Bitcoin is robust enough to survive the demise of Silk Road.

A bigger problem would be Mt. Gox closing suddenly.  What we need is more exchanges covering more currencies.

For example there are currently only two exchanges listed on Bitcoin Watch which trade the Australian Dollar (AUD), Mt. Gox and Crypto X Change.  The weighted BTC-AUD price is taken from the two.  Over the weekend Crypto X Change stopped reporting the AUD price and as a result that weighted average now comes almost entirely (and it was entirely yesterday) from Mt. Gox, resulting in an average price that dropped $0.40 AUD or more.

You know that .en stands for English there, right?  To differentiate the page from the other translations.

That's a bad example.  The Farmer's Market didn't get shut down because they're hidden service was compromised, they got shut down because they did stupid shit like accepting Western Union and PayPal for drugs.  They were found by simply following the money.

Yes, but that only catches Silk Road buyers and maybe the dealer (depending on how careful he or she is when posting the goods), it won't catch the site operators (unless they're dealing too and there's no point when they get a cut of everything sold).

How about creating products and services for speculators?  ;D

I think that the only viable (legal) businesses currently which can reach some kind of profitability are a) exchanges and b) mining pools. Probably gambling services as well, but those are already somewhat legal grey area. And yeah, cascasius coins are probably also profitable. Anything else comes into mind?

Not necessarily. Unless the website software is specifically coded to use Tor for its own requests it'll send them over the open internet - and since the site will appear to work fine even if the admin screws this up, there's a good chance that some Tor hidden services are actually misconfigured in this way. (Setting up a Tor hidden service that forwards to the webserver and making sure the webserver itself sends out its requests over Tor are totally independent of each other.)

Now, it's possible to set up your server so that the software running your hidden services can't access the internet except over Tor, but it's fairly non-trivial. The easiest method involves obscure iptables matching rules.

torify thttpd

as long as it's all in userland, it'll work (you can't torify vmware)

Sure you can. Set your VM up for host-only networking and you can use iptables to do whatever you want to the packets.

I just meant using the torify wrapper, which is trivial compared to any iptables mucking.

Most secure web servers would be double-NATed behind a stateful firewall that won't even allow the host to initiate outgoing connections to the internet. The host is only allowed to make make HTTP/S responses back to the internet. Patches, AV signatures, software updates, are all delivered from an internal host. This is standard practice to when attempting to comply with PCI-DSS, SOX, etc.

With a Tor hidden service, you just change the firewall rules so that the host can only send responses back into the Tor nework. Never allow it intiate a connection into Tor or out to the internet.

I'm pretty sure SR is not run by amateurs and I'd expect it's security to be on par with that of banks and financial institutions. Uploading a script and getting the server to execute it to give out some external IP address (which may be far away from the actual location), yeah whatever ....

I think it's getting a lot of users.... It seems to work for me on and off... More so in the early AM vs during the day...


Seems like everything is getting more and more expensive..... Is blow really worth 130 a gram?

What do you mean?

Seems expensive.... 14 btc for a g of blow?

I guess he means 1 gram of cocaine for 14 BTC

Here I was looking at the SR Forum....


Here is a quote from DPR:

if it's pure blow then yeah, i can see $130/g prices. ultimately it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it.
if i/you could sell my/your fecal matter to a research company in greenland for $130/g:

step 1)  taco bell
step 2)  prune juice
step 3)  fedex
step 4)  ???(OMGCHAOS)
step 5)  profit!

If the silkroad goes down, I would say that it would effect the price, up or down? I'm not sure. But I am sure that any effect would most likely be a result of peoples panic about how it will effect the price. There is an open source package that you can use to create anonymous marketplaces (Waspmarket? I don't remember exactly). And I'm sure if the silk road went down, p2p solutions would pop up.

Then again I'm someone who thinks these attacks/hacks/whatevers benefit the bitcoin community... With the push in colored coin development as a result of GLBSE and so on

I was already checking out the next new thing "Black Market Reloaded"



Prices seem a little lower.. Must be less % charged for vendors...

If the cocaine is as pure as they state it is, it's a reasonably good deal.  Considering most street coke that costs around $60 a gram is about 15-30% purity, if they are really selling 70% purity stuff for $130 it's reasonable value. That's a big IF though, cocaine is notorious for people saying it's the best stuff ever because they've never had anything but total shit before, plus dealers lie about the quality of their drugs as a general rule.

I don't have any personal experience with SIlk Road coke because those days are behind me, but if I was a cocaine user I probably would check it out. Even if it's not as good as they say it is, it's almost certainly going to be lots better than whatever you can get locally, unless you live in La Paz or you have incredible connections.

Maybe for new years ill get some and drink for once........

This is NOT a Cocaine discussion forum  :-X


Anybody knows what this exactly means?
Whats the trouble with SR?

Be careful if you choose Blackmarket Reloaded. I've heard there are a lot of scams on there.

FTFY  8)

I don't think that new site is asking for any Vendors account fee's making it easy for losers to scam.

fixed my wasn't pay attention error.... :)

Keep in mind, you can buy prescriptions as an anon.  Saves you the time and hassle of going to the pharmacy.

CharlieContent providing quality information on charlie. :P

  Someone can explain this?

I am not sure what that means. I always use the link with /index.php at the end.

Only in the SR forum or directly on SR? For internal or external links?  Sorry i dont get it  :-\

Me neither.. Only when I am loading the site form the start....

Everyone knows that SR is just a huge honeypot..

forum software replaced .onion links with warning text, I guess he was linking to the SR forum

I am sure that is not is the case, at least not for buyers.

I've never heard of anyone getting busted from using Silk Road. I also know many people personally who have ordered from Silk Road vendors with no issues.

I don't think it makes financial sense for the authorities to go after people who are buying small amounts of drugs for personal use. It would cost so much money to process cases, incarcerate people, police resources etc. Sure, if a police officer searches you and finds illegal drugs on you, they have a responsibility to arrest you and follow the legal channels, but are they going to mount a large and expensive operation in order to arrest and convict consumers? I highly doubt it.

The police have limited resources, and much bigger fish to fry. Like importers, distributors and dealers.

Is it a honey pot to trap dealers who wish to sell through the site? There would at least be some motive for doing that, but I am still skeptical. As I say, I know people who have ordered from Silk Road and received legitimate product, so at least some people must be selling drugs successfully through the site.

If you want a conspiracy theory, I think it's actually far more likely that Silk Road is being run by the CIA. They are no stranger to operating in the drug trade in order to fund their secretive operations.

Most likely though it's simply some guy who is very confident in his ability to use technology in order to keep himself anonymous. Bitcoin veterans will perhaps remember that the site didn't always take a commission from sales. I think possibly the original motivation was simply a political disagreement with drug prohibition, before he realized that he could make big money by taking a small vig on transactions.

Selling drugs on the internet isn't a new thing, but until Silk Road it was largely confined to cannabis. Previous sites processed payment with Liberty Reserve, Pecunix, and, when it was around, E-Gold. Any internet savvy potheads from 2004-2005 will recognize names such as Pepe, Budmonkey and Hermes the Hash Trader.  One of the biggest sites from this era, Budmail.biz, is still going strong. My personal belief is that it's run by a Canadian motorcycle gang.

The idea that drugs can be bought safely through the internet and delivered to your door is often greeted with skepticism, but it has been going on for a long time now. I wouldn't advise anyone to do it, but I wouldn't advise anyone to take drugs either, but more because they are extremely unhealthy rather than the level of risk involved in buying them from Silk Road.

That's what I meant. It's unreasonable to think that cops would actually go after buyers/sellers on SR but the bigger agencies are probably planning something similar to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp

I love conspiracy theories

It's a weird thing, the silk road.  The original silk road in china was riddled with violence and fighting from what I recall.  But, I think that as long as it can hold it's own as an anonymous supplier of drugs to people it will last.  If it goes through any correlation or mingling with the 'black market' though, problems will be had.  It's a cheap and reliable (from what I know) way of getting prescription drugs anonymously.  I speak from experience, it can be weird picking up your crazy pills from the girl who went to high school with you at the local pharmacy. 

I think it has it's benefits, and as long as it can hold it's own it will last.  It just needs it's own special attention, nothing more nothing less.  That being said, I don't think anyone should get hurt through it.   It's not like there is a candy road anyways...

and by design, it cannot be one of the sellers.

Silk Road pretty much created the market, and I doubt they would do that. I would trust the other one (Blackmarket or something like that) less, and tormail not one bit.

It couldn't be substantially similar. It's such a different situation.

In Operation Web Tryp, the people who were caught were operating registered businesses, taking credit cards, with websites hosted on the clearnet.

It would take maybe one day's detective work to find names and addresses.

Investigating Silk Road would take substantially longer, with a larger, more specialized team, a co-ordinated international effort, and no guarantee of convictions.

Why would they make life difficult for themselves when there are people who are easier to catch selling larger quantities of drugs?


If Silk Road ever became fucking huge, accounting for a substantial percentage of the drug trade, then yeah, they'd probably put enough men and enough money on it to find a way.

But as things stand, it just doesn't make sense.

I think a lot of people believe that large federal agencies are practically omnipotent, with infinite time, money and skill. They are well funded, but the fact is that they need to allocate their limited resources carefully in areas which will give them the maximum return. They can't piss away millions of dollars to find 15 kids who are selling a few ounces of drugs a month each when hundreds of kilos are traded every day outside Silk Road. Someone would lose their job over that type of resource misallocation.

 any suggestions for a good alternative?

They would end up going through the postal service to track down vendors.

Yes.  Create your own.  It's the only way to be sure.

@Grinder

  any suggestions for a good alternative?

There might be alternatives, but it boils down to trust.  Why do you not trust tormail anymore?  Is it because someone posted some FUD on a message board?

If you find another, why will you trust that one?  Because people on some message board somewhere says they trust it?  How do you know they're not government shills pulling the unsuspecting into their honey pot?

There might be alternatives, but it boils down to trust.  Why do you not trust tormail anymore?  Is it because someone posted some FUD on a message board?
If you find another, why will you trust that one?  Because people on some message board somewhere says they trust it?  How do you know they're not government shills pulling the unsuspecting into their honey pot?
[/quote]
Thanks, but "trust" wasnt my concern. Im just interested in anon. email alternatives.

Tormail is acceptable for hiding your identity, but then so is any email account you can create and use from the Tor network. It does not hide the content from the maintainers of the service though, for that you need to encrypt the email before you send it. The easiest is probably to use Torbirdy with encryption. The drawback no matter what you use is that you need the key for whomever you are contacting in advance.

Just goes to show how much work needs to be done to the BTC network.

http://s17.postimage.org/orzhf4a1n/silk_road_coming_BACK.jpg

posted this in other "SR Down" thread in speculation too. 

SR page now loading, claiming maintenance.    IMO positive sign that everything is as they say, upgrades for moar users.  Obv in BTC world you never know, but whoever the SR boys are they have done a good job keeping it alive, growing it, and dodging the fuzz.  I give them internet-brofist.

Good post... ^

SR should look into making a p2p distributed market place, tor is a quick and dirty solution. A specialized program where seller and users are completely anonymous, would do wonders for traffic, and also it could be organized to be impervious to DOS.

yea +1

No, not SR should look into it but everybody.
If there is a "SR Client" it would create a honeypot where just the possession of the program makes you a suspect. But on the other hand if there is a general purpose "Anonymous P2P Cloud Computing Platform" it would make tor (or hidden services) obsolete in an instant.

this is exactly what the whole internet should become. decentralized and encrypted. keep governments and other interests out from meddling. free flow of information would be the next renaissance for humanity.

Not a techy question or anything but do vendors on SR have their own site separate from everybody else?  In other words, can they still access the site despite the fact we can't?

IDK, but they probably use the same site.
if its down for you, its down for them
that would be my guess.

Thank you for the direct and simple answer!

I figured as much but had a glimmer of hope that there was another way.

isn't SR back up?

I could find what real Internet IP is hosting a .onion site. Or rather I could find what IP bridges the network hosting the .onion site to the real Internet. It would take some time, some money, and require minor illegal activity but I could do it in principle (not that I ever would.)

If I can do it in principle law enforcement can do it in practice.

There may or may not be people working on exactly this.

Good point. Another point: SR is not under pressure to to innovate, it's future competition is.

*puts on tinfoil hat* the FEDs or whoever figured out how to use that key they confiscated and are now trying to get the site replicated as honeypot.

I think all BTC denominated drug trade together adds something like two or three dollars to the BTC price, and if SR were shut down most of the sellers and buyers would just migrate to other sites, so SR itself would be less than $1. Most of BTC trade value comes from speculative demand, drug trade is the only real user of BTC so far that has any significance.

I calculated (guesstimated, pretty worst-case in the sense that the number is an upper bound) a while back SR was responsible for $0.25 of bitcoin value, if one can see it like that.

However: the market isn't rational *looks at mtgox-hack-drop*, it's more like an emotion-driven woman that will hysterically panic on bad news. SR down for good is one of the impactful news I can imagine in this regard.

On the other hand, since about at least half a year, the market participants seems to have become a lot more robust against bad news. Maybe it's just the bitcoinica-squeezing-effects removed, but I doubt it.

Yet on the other hand: it can be rational to follow the knee-jerk news reactions to profiteer on the irrationality.

Guess who just got back

Yeah it's back ^


edit: No it's not.... Login screen is back only :P


"Logins are restricted for the next few hours, please try again later."

If we want to keep it up, we need to keep it off this forum and fully privatized.  I think it should be referred to as privatized drug trade, rather than anonymous.  It does remove the dangers of people buying drugs on the street, then again they aren't the easiest to work with.

Silk Road is overrated anyways.  ;D

I've used Black Market Reloaded a couple times with great success though. I was able to find cheaper prices for a half of dank ($150) and I assume it isn't being watched as closely as SR is when it comes to the Feds since they are a smaller/newer black market.

They sell some crazy stuff on BMR tho, hitmen, prostitutes, weapons of mass destruction, guns, ... all sorts of crazy stuff. I'd be willing to bet 90% of those offerings are scams. Not that I would order any of those things anyways, but I'd be way too sketched to buy anything but some green on any of these sites.

This is 100% plausible.  I noticed a weird difference in their 'selection'.  I was originally interested in their pharmaceutical selection, but now most of the inventory seems to be quasi 'illegal' drugs that provide and require a little too much information to be safe.  It's obvious something isn't right...it's too bad too, so many people are just in line to become lab rats in a jail.  I mean, it is very inhumane to have to use the restroom in the same room you live in; let alone in front of another person. 

If SR can pull through this, they'll have my support.  But I will never do any sort of transaction with them until they can prove they are safe and legitimate.

how could they possibly prove something like that?

by the way they might really have had scalability problems!

http://warms0x.github.com/2012/09/08/scaling-onion-sites.html

"Logins are restricted for the next few hours, please try again later."

they're probably allowing sellers to update their inventory before the queue starts hitting stuff that is out of supply. smart.

Good sign!   ;)

What address do you use? (what actual?) http://www.<i>Linking to illegal sites is forbidden. If you bypass this censorship, you will be banned.</i>.onion/index.php not responding  :-\



lol, censorship! No shame?

the one that ends in piz3r

^ yeah; it's back up.

yup. same.

"Login failed, please try again"
you get the same thing?

Down right now, and since some hours.
Also, I was online before the down and It wasn't allowing me to buy, I made a withdrawn of one btc, the btc was sent, as today, seven hours later, I don't have received it yet.
 :(  :(

IMHO scam alert!

Hope not, I just put in 15 btcs.  ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D Also, I want to buy DMT.   :'(

Does anyone sell any silk on there?

LOL maybe dipped in LSD :D

In my case, in vodka. I urge everyone not to use drugs, in life and so much joy, just we must be able to notice the joy.

are you kidding? Vodka is poison..... Alcohol is much worse in every way possible compared to the Marijuana products that I use....

Marijuana causes cancer (in large quantities) and addictive, and the alcohol (ethanol) - addictive only people prone to alcoholism (I'm not one of them, so I'm don`t afraid to use ethanol)

Nope.

MJ has caused cancer exactly zero times and is only psychologically addictive.  Everyone can be addicted to alcohol and it is a physical addiction that will produce withdrawal effects.  The withdrawal effects of alcohol are even strong enough to kill you.

still poison.....


If you drink 5 liters of Alcohol, You will die......


If I smoke 50 joints, I might get tired and a sore throat... (Possible chance of MAYBE getting cancer) 1% or more like .005% ?


All things should be okay in moderation while using common sense.....

Water promotes the growth of cancer.

LOL....  What doesn't.... You should see/smell the city of Sarnia Ontario... It's infested with chemical producing plants....

Yes, of course, in terms of temperance and reasonableness. But I personally know many of my friends who started  with marijuana and finished with heroin, later they died after 2 .. 3 years. No one can change my mind after I've been to their funerals.

And if you drink a couple of liters of water at once, you will die.

Well that's bad... I have been using marijuana for close to 15 years. I have never used heroin and never will.......

Well. Just take DMT.  :D :D :D

Correction: \ .... \ you`ll mess (urination) oneself ;D

You had some stupid friends... Heroin is pure garbage.
BTW, Marijuana wasn't the reason they started using heroin. The fault was on your friends, not on MJ ;)

Probably  :D   And then you will die, not kidding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication#Notable_cases)

I just do not think I'm better than my friends, it is logical that I could end up like them. Therefore, i do not use marijuana. It's simple for me - I do not do that, which led my friends to the grave. Maybe it's silly, but it works. I am here and I am writing this. ;)

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4_%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B7_%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2

Here's Fund, which is struggling with drug addiction in Russia. This fund is regularly subjected to persecution of the Russian authorities. Drug advertising through YouTube, TV series and Hollywood movies that are broadcast in Russia. just want to destroy us, as the "extra, inconvenient" people. I think it's bankers.All this has taken a serious turn in recent years. I do not know how to do this in America, but in Russia - the general trend. Sad.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122241.msg1315262#msg1315262
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x7lhvk6ZnM&feature=plcp

Here are a few pamphlets issued by the Ukraine (Warning) they are printed special government service, "Health Ministry" with financial support from the UN It described in detail how to inject heroin into a vein, a sterilized syringe, how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy (lol! sterilized as cats). How to talk to the seller of heroin and who should not buy drugs. It's sad, but the trend is, I can even hear it in your words ...We resist, but we are few.

Right.. They do something similar in Canada.. with insight needle exchanges..

alcohol is a drug... one of the dangerous ones

probably the worst. very few drugs do what alcohol does. Most make people chill out or relax, or feel empowered. Alcohol turns good people into raging assholes who think they are empowered even if they cant walk or see straight.

granted some drugs, the addiction and cost is what drives some people into crime, to sustain the habit, but while high or wasted on most other drugs people don't do things like they do when they are drunk.

I did an independant study of gateway drugs that lead to heroin use. There is the tendancy to make the connection that marijuana users are more likely to use heroin based on the fact that ~85% of heroin users had used marijuana prior to trying heroin, a staggering number! However, our research showed an even more powerful influence; As it turns out, ~97% of heroin users had previously enjoyed Coca-cola products. How did the original study overlook this fact? It was shocking, and changed the way we looked at drug abusers. Coca-cola is the biggest known gateway drug currently, and I would advise anyone without the willpower to resist, to stop enjoying this beverage entirely before you enter the downward spiral that is hardcore drug abuse. You have been warned.

I smoke weed myself but I hear ya man, I've watched a friend of mine go through the same thing. Everyday I expect to get that phonecall.

Those of us with highly addictive personalities have to be extra cautious too.

Oh snap.... I like pepsi :)

ah, thanks. I always use potatoes instead of coca-cola. Your version is much better! thanks, will use!

:D

Except you would need to normalize it against the entire population.  When you do that, the 97% Coca-cola usage is not as large of a deviation from the norm as the 85% marijuana usage.

That said, the idea that marijuana use leads to heroin is absurd.  What you really need to look at is how many marijuana users begin using heroin.  However, because of its legal status it is next to impossible to properly study the population of marijuana users.

I dont do illegal drugs, but I did notice this on wikipedia some time ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg

MJ can definitely be a gateway drug -- I am living proof of that -- But heroin and PCP are the only classical recreational drugs I have not tried (yet), and honestly I don't see myself trying them any time soon.  Take it for whatever it's worth.

Well, the bitcoin I withdrawn yesterday It's here now. Also, I see the login screen. Trying to log in now.
So, mainly we have silkroad online again.  :D

Seems to be working okay.. I have noticed if the site doesn't load on the first try, you can't just hit "try again". You have to enter in the url again.. it adds a www. in front of the regular url and causes it not to work..


This is what's happened to me....

you can make the www not happen in the browser settings

mj is a gateway drug cuz its associated with the hard drugs.

I think SR and it's affiliates need to focus more on providing legitimate product, who's to say the 'herb' people buy on their wasn't grown with radioactive pesticides or next to a town dump? 

I think the fact that it negates street crime is a good thing, and it's secure in that it is anonymous.  So it would be beneficial to just leave it at that, but drug users have a history of acting strange when high.  That being said, I do see some good coming out of the fact that you can buy prescription drugs without having to give your identity; the way prescriptions are meant to be...

It's obviously had a lot of work and time put into it, I doubt it will crash due to an error such as leaking information or a bust. 

It never did it before... Seems like something new.

What in God's name are you talking about?

Who the fuck is going around irradiating pesticides? What a bizarre conjecture. Are you worried that weed growers use black market pesticides that was stored near Fukushima?

The reality is that weed growers take at least as much care over their crop as the farmer does with the wheat that goes into the bread you eat. In fact, they usually take much more care, because the crop is so valuable. They aren't growing it near dumps, or spraying radioactive pesticide on it. Think about it: if you had a plant that is worth $2000 if you grow it right, or nothing if you fuck it up, would you just grow it somewhere shitty and hope for the best?

The radioactive pesticide thing is nuts by the way, you couldn't even find radioactive pesticide if you were looking for them. I can't even begin to imagine what you were thinking with that one.

C'mon man, think before you type.

I have grown my own pot before and my main goal was to have absolutely no fertilizers left over in the plants when harvested.


I pretty much made sure the plant was dying due to lack of fertz before harvesting.

Yeah drugs can be bad....



Smoke weed instead..

I don't smoke anymore but back when I was at university I was a fucking cannabis connoisseur. The best bud, in my opinion, is totally organic stuff. That's made with no chemical ferts, just organic shit like worm castings etc. It was pretty difficult to get hold of, because artificially fertilized stuff grows bigger yields and is often a more potent smoke, but in terms of flavour the natural shit was second to none. A buddy of mine grew like that one year, it was NYC Diesel and he tenderly nurtured those plants like they were his children, and only used totally organic fertilizers. He even used to spend as much time as possible in the grow room, sitting there reading a book, in the belief that his lungs would manufacture more carbon dioxide for the plant.

His devotion really paid off. It was the best smoke I have ever had. When it was properly cured (another thing that most commercial growers don't bother with),the taste was phenomenal. Like an explosion of grapefruit, and the smoke was so smooth. Nothing else I have ever smoked came close. I've smoked way stronger weed, but it was strong enough, and nothing else has been as pleasurable. Even in Amsterdam nothing came close.

If you grow again then I recommend that route.

http://static.fjcdn.com/gifs/Homer_57c843_2358973.gif

YUP!

IMHO, if SR get out of business, a lot of other (legal or not) business will have a so large portion of the BTC volume traded, that SR closing down would'nt affect the ratio at wich BTC trades against other currency.  Maybe it's already the case.. I dont know wich part of the volume of trade occurs just because of SR.  It may just diminish, and quite fast.. maybe in few month, SR will represent less than 1% of the total BTC traded..if it's not the case already.

I can imagige that people selling MJ also sell harder drugs and these are way more profitable so they influence their customers to "try something new". The customer is not very well educated about the harder drugs (a flaw of our educational system in my mind) and so he "falls for it".

If weed was legally obtainable, that problem wouldn't exist.

I would do a 2/3rd chemical fert.... with a 1/3rd organic mix.... I would brew my own teas using stuff like castings, beneficial microbes. Carbs n sugars to feed the bennes :)

I don't do heroin bc it's a gateway drug. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desomorphine

LOL  ;D

I like how this thread turned into a drug debate  ::)

In an attempt to get this back on track..

Surely the recent downtime shows how SR is not as invulnerable as many people in this thread claimed.

It has shown that it can also be brought down by its own success rather than by its enemies.

What effect on the price of BTC would a couple of months downtime have? What if it was down indefinitely?

Obviously people would move to alternatives but this would take time.

Personally I think the shock to the market would be far greater than the recent 'pirate crash'.

Disclaimer: I am pro SR in terms of having an anon marketplace (now that they have removed weapons), I am only interested in the BTC economics here.

Obviously this is a test of how dependent BTC is upon SR.  However it sounds like SR's management is working on upgrading their system to handle the increased load.

SR isn't the only game in town, merely the most trusted/best established.  If they were to go away the current set of competitors would grow to fill the void.

well, it has been down for like 10 days now, and the shock seems to go in another direction, so no, I doubt there would be any crash due to one (even large) site going down - don't forget that most coins that changed hands there were most probably quickly sold, so it only is a large factor in transactions volume (and even there, annihilated by Satoshi Dice), not in raising bitcoin prices.

which is not a bad thing, stable is good.

it's been back up for roughly 3 days now.

And is now run by FBI/NSA/DEA  ???

I don't care. :P They can come to Europe to arrest me. Pretty funny would be indeed to be arrested because of buying drugs on SilkRoad.  ;D

You think that Europe is a safe harbour for drug buyers?
  When you get busted, I m sure you will have fun.

I hope also that they can prove that It was me indeed the person who was buying drugs through SilkRoad. Plausible deniability.
Also, for the quantities I buy.. The police can just put me a fine.  ;D Sooo. Yes, I don't really care.

He says, surfing the clearnet and posting in a forum.
 
If you start talking about plausible deniability I sure hope you never logged into your account without tor/proxies, as you basically just admitted to buying drugs on the internet.

I have bought drugs online.... Hash... I love Hash :)

Of course I know that I'm saying in a forum that I buy drugs, anyway, as I'm saying I just don't care. I'm not scared, and I don't even consider that some cops are going to arrest me because of that.
And yes, I don't  use always Tor, but atleast a VPN, and my email is in tormail. I can say my name and exactly where I live and I wouldn't care also.
I think that you people in USA are a lot more harassed by the police in the drugs thing, that here in Europe. It's pretty common go along the streets and smell hash etc

Europe has grown up.. They realize harm reduction is the best avenue..


The USA is all about greed... Greedy business people building jails. Greedy people pushing to keep the status quo because they make a lot of money the way things are.

Privatized prison systems are horrible...

+1 It's a national shame really. Not only the perverse privatization scheme, but that we can only think to lock people up in a sad effort to control their behavior.  Sure, some people should go to jail forever. Many others could be dealt with in other ways.  Consider the hot oil test. This is an African tradition that can be as good at getting to the truth as a western court. I will find a link and edit this shortly.

EDIT: Here is a pdf that discusses the "test" I was talking about.
www.bjournal.co.uk/paper/BJASS_3_1/BJASS_03_01_11.pdf

Basically both the accused and accuser must dip their hand into boiling oil to prove their conviction. In the example I saw the accused panicked and refused to do it, he then admitted his guilt. The accuser confidently reached in and took out an object from the bottom of the oil. He seemed completely unphased by the oil. Confident that God would protect the innocent.

P.S. I am not saying we should use this method, but we should look into other ways of dealing with criminality.

Drugs addiction should be treated as an illness instead of a criminal matter.

FTFY
"drugs are bad, mmkay???"
 ::)

I must admit I wasnt sitting clicking refresh 10 days, but I did a test before posting yesterday and it didn't respond in several tries, so I assumed it is still being down. I guess then it still is has ups and downs, while the price had only ups lately.

Works fine.

it depends on the time of the day it seems

Go and crawl back under the rock you crawled out from. I know it makes you feel like a big man to try to scare people, but no one is worried by your stupid FUD.

You're right. I find very early AM is the best time for me...

You're right.  It's absurd FUD to think that contacting a random person you never met on an imperfect privacy network and buying something illegal for them could ever get arrested.  Yeah, all those COPS shows are actually actors.  FBI agents actually process tax returns and all TOR nodes are owned by lovely volunteers and not companies or governments.  Oh and the SR servers exist in a quantum state where they do and don't exist and cannot ever be found.

If you think the FBI is trying to catch people buying an ounce or less of weed on TOR, click this link (http://piv.pivpiv.dk/)

And just more, they're trying that to catch people in another countries.   ;D

i heard 20 million dollars a year travels through SR.

Is anybody trying to sell oil on Silk Road?

Oil of tiger penis.

=> silkroad only handles 0.006% of global drug trade. A joke.

Peer to peer drug dealing is going to become federated instead of centrally controlled. Look at this project: https://github.com/Bit-Wasp/BitWasp

Soon anyone will be able to setup their own marketplace with relative ease. Dealers will either run their own servers or use an escrow service's servers. The key point is that it will be handled by a swarm of independently handled websites independently.

They are even working on a feature where a common GPG web of trust feedback system can be used by all of the servers. So when you create a new user you can send your public key and login by signing a nonce and your feedback from other sites can be confirmed and imported.

Brave new world!

That project looks like it's dead...
https://piratenpad.de/p/bitwasp-planning
http://www.thelaboratory.org

It's a pitty.

It would not be through tor or bitcoin but more likely a side channel attack.

A newly discovered buffer overflow attack combined with priviledge escalation could give someone root access to the server and send out a packet on the clearnet to reveal the IP.

Once the physical server is tracked down by its IP they would then try to figure out how they are paying for their hosting. It is now just a conventional follow the money investigation.

It is not likely. More likely the server itself is in a VM and is firewalled by another system that filters out any non-tor traffic. More likely is they have found a way to pay for servers anonymously. Likely they have other servers ready to take over the .onion address at a moments notice.

It can happen, but I doubt it.

It was only a few weeks ago that a plea for developers to help was put on this very forum. Not entirely dead.

The good news is that all of the technologies that the silk road uses are publicly known. There are no unsolved problems. All that is needed is the man hours to implement and audit.

For an open source project. begging for developers is equivalent to dead.

Few weeks ago, when that request was made, their site was working and the planning was on that pirate pad link. Now it's gone, so I would say it's dead. Hell, they say it themselves on the pirate pad.

Like I said, all of the technology problems are solved. It is simply a matter of the time of an intermediate developer to build such a site.

My point is that peer-to-peer drug dealing does not rely on the silk road, it relies on tor, gpg and bitcoin which any website can employ.

Fuck, yeah. I saw that episode of COPS where they busted the guy who bought an 8th of weed off Silk Road. Apparently it was a $1m FBI investigation to catch some kid with 5 joints worth of fucking weed. Bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

Use your brain for a change you dumb fuck.

If I was that guy who got arrested and I learned that my kidnapping had cost the state a million dollars, i would feel like leonidas at the battle of thermopylae.

how many people actually go to silk road

this hidden directory is really well hidden

anyone know where it's hiding these days?

Looks like SR has been partially compromised by means of SQL injection. Damage limited so far, but who knows whats next!
http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/151sok/sr_quick_buy_is_a_scam/

Oh man a subreddit dedicated to it... that spawn an immediate facepalm.

so......people buy more btc as SR goes down???

someone hoping to be first back on and get the low drug prices?

I interpret it as SR not actually being that big a deal to the BTC economy after all. 

That or traders actually educated themselves on what was happening (actually not that much) and bought/sold on a rational basis instead of pure panic. PSHHHHT hahahha just kidding on that one.

they have constantly something wrong there. some icons misplaced is not a biggie. I wonder if you can do load balancing easily in tor network. They don't seem to use RESTful design for example. Because tor is so slow it is really important to optimize the page as much as possible.

From the article: "I'm aware of the image hack that has taken place and am working with my team to fix the issue. Whoever was able to pull it off was is very skilled and clever."

...in 2001 maybe, lol.  SQL injections is part of basic programming classes in every college in America (more in the context of preventing them).  All you need to know to do an SQL injection is SQL, lol.  That's a million or so people in the US alone.  What a joke.  Wow so potheads and burnouts can't custom code their own 100% homemade, SQL injection-proof interface that matches the capability level of craigslist.  SHOCKER! They should have just used Angelfire or Tripod or Geocities then :D  I'm surprised they didn't use Wordpress or phpBB2 lol.

Although I still think my idea to act as a rigged TOR node then watch reaction times in millisecons of symmetrical traffic that claim to be hitting the clearnet but are too short would identify the true IP address of their server in about a day.

..and then it would miraculously change.

That wouldn't matter a bit.  They'd know exactly where the server was hosted even if it changes IPs quickly. Even if they move to an entirely different server, they'd confiscate the old one and possibly some valuable info off of it as to who was running it.  I doubt it's in someone's basement on a residential ISP account, lol.  So it's definitely in a server hosting place somewhere, which is easily accessible by the cops.

Desolator, and you somehow think you are the first guy that came up with such an idea? I like your youthful completely unfounded self-confidence, really, but step back and look around you :) You did not hack SR, so your claim of "everybody and their mom could do it" is worth less than the enter key on your keyboard, i.e. 0 coins.

Anyone who writes database-related software of any kind in any language is trained in how not to let your software be vulnerable to SQL injections.  That means we know how to do them as well.  Here, let me teach you the super, extra, amazingly complex way to do it:
Find an improperly filtered input field on a website or in a program or whatever you're targetting then add dummy data, an SQL statement termination character, and a new SQL statement that does anything you want.  Tada, that's it.  The specificl version of SQL, the database structure, etc are some wildcards but for common software like non-customer web interfaces, it's trivially easy to find out both of those.

You might be surprised.  Spend a little time looking over questions in the PHP tag on StackOverflow.com and you'll see way too many devs who are completely ignorant about SQL injection :(

I meant ones who, like me, actually went to college to learn programming and database design.  Not just someone who attempted to sort of learn it on the internet and only learned the syntax then volunteered for a FOSS project like phpBB3 or something.  That reminds me of all the women in my web design class who knew nothing about computers or servers or the internet.  They just wanted a more modern job than fashion design so they switched degrees and now they make website without knowing what Redhat is or what JPG compression means.  Those people have no business working in IT.

Holy shit you must be really smart if you're like the only person smart enough to be able to take down a $20m/year illicit drug market.

I mean, that's a pretty big target, both for authorities and hackers, right? And you're the only one that can do it so all that is left to say is that you're like the smartest person in the world, dude!

>I meant ones who, like me, 

>like me

>actually went to college

>to learn programming and database design.


The fact you "had" to go to college to learn this is quite telling. Your ego is quite bloated, friend.

You're just acting bitter now because none of them would be your friend. Give up that ghost and get on with your life. There's plenty more fish in the sea!

Well said,
SR is not big enough to get some serious resources to be used to bust them out, once it reaches a critical point that some agency/agencies would took it seriously and dump resources, besides, SR may be get busted all by traditional means (get some random clue from someone, caught one involved, snitch others)
When it happens, bitcoin may endure a hard hit.

Yes, normal programmers go to college to get real world training from career programmers who actually know what they're talking about.  If you're just some nerd sitting in front of your computer with a textbook you got off Amazon, trying to learn it with zero guidance or on some forum full of arrogant douchebags who pretend they're professional programmers too, good fucking luck.  That's where garbage code with no standards, no comments, and no sense comes from.

If you want to know what kind of software comes from self-taught dumbfucks who are clueless about UI design standards and efficient programming, look at Fedora 18.  It's like me trying to write a symphony and not knowing shit about music, lol.

What a coincidence that the same exact people saying professional programming training isn't necessary are the same ones who talk out their ass about security vulnerabilities and make immature, misguided comments to anyone they view as potentially superior to them because they have no self esteem.  I guess dumbasses about programming are dumbasses about everything in life.

I love the interwebs

don;t panic and be happy, dude ;)

The vast majority of the code that monitors satellite and seismographic data to identify nuclear tests for the US gov was written by someone with no formal training in programming.  He was self taught and frequently schooled those with formal training.  However, he is very intelligent.  Not everybody can teach themselves, but formal training isn't necessary for everyone.  I'm almost done with my CS masters and I have a bachelors in CS and Math, but he often teaches me things I would never learn in school.

Desolator, sadly for some argueing this is right. Formal education is a must for ANY trade or practice.  I'd go out on a limb and say yeah you don't need college.  But you cannot do it alone.  You need mentors,  you need critic's and furthermore you actually need a hard hitter like desolator to point this out.

If you want an example as to why.  Go on digital point. Have one of those east indian coders do something extremely simple for you. You will pay for googled code. Ask them to provide source code then do some googleing of your own. You get what you pay for.

At any rate the point is, you can't be 100% self made.  Ask yourself this question involveing a totally different field.  If your house was on fire would you want the trained crew of emergency responders.  Or the weekend on call crew that has basic training?

Mike is obviously one of the few who knows who DPR is lol

Ok, I didn't read the whole thread, but I think it would definitely be possible for USG to close down SR. Just pump a lot of traffic at it and see where traffic increases. You will have a lot of noise so do it a whole lot of times. Eventually you will see that everytime you pump traffic at SR,   165.54.43.21  gets a lot of encrypted traffic. GG

I would guess there are some possible countermeasures to hide the increased traffic. Don't know wether such things are deployed on SR, though.

I won't argue against the need for mentors, but formal training is absolutely not necessary for all people.  Most people have no motivation to learn without formal structure, but some people can do it.

DPR i don't see that symbol on any of the exchanges!!!~ = BSC ? lol;)

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/fbi-seize-deep-web-marketplace-silk-road-arrest-owner/

Let's see how much of an effect this has.

I think we will easily bounce back :)

Guess that fills in the blanks.  "The Great Silk Road Crash of 2013". 

BTC-e has dropped from $124 to $115

I wouldn't be selling BTC now.. Bitcoin is antifragile - smash it and it doesn't die, only gets stronger!

Given Bitcoin has seen -40% days and -75% weeks I think the "great crash" would need to eclipse that.   Something massive and spectacular like a -66% day and -95% week.   
I don't see SR being shut down dropping BTC from $120 to $9.  

That's a really persuasive argument.

I prefer to sell now and buy more at the bottom.  Holding in a crash is pointless, IMO.

It will be interesting to see what effect this has on bitcoin transactions - it might be possible to gauge just what % were attributed to SR.

I've always been saying that Bitcoin is backed by SR and gambling. People keep telling me there is some bigger fantasy Bitcoin economy. Now you see.

True that! This is a bloodbath.  :-\

All the weak hands will really be regretting this later. But hey.. panic ahead, more BTC for me!

In during crash. Got out at 115.

This might happen....... TODAY.

Now all the speculation comes to and end, lets get some popcorn and see what happens.

Busted for posting his email address on Bitcoin Talk. Awesome... Very smart of him... ::)

the us govt seized a great share of the total bitcoins that there will EVER BE. What will be done with these coins?

Until I know, I am staying far away from BTC.

I know, right? Real name in email address? Blows my mind.

A couple of minutes ago:

MtGox $125 / BTC-e $80  :o

Nobody wants MTGoxUSD

I guess drug addicted morons and other SL pervs really did keep the BTC price at float.
Are we going to see 60? Think about all the ASICS ....

I guess people are overreacting(and some are taking advantage of it)
SELL SELL SELL ::)
and after: BUY BUY BUY :D

BTW: http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

For what I've read only about $3.6 million (35000 BTC) were seized.

It happended, so, where's the bottom? :)

Lots of coins to buy.

It will bottom out at about $75, then climb back up to $100-$110.

Bitcoin is not actually backed by SR and gambling. Bitcoin is backed by speculation.

The downside is that the fact that bitcoin can be considered useful in any way rests too heavily on SR and gambling.

Well that rise was unexpected..

Everything starts somewhere.  The fact that Bitcoin went from the genesis block and $0 valuation to >$1B in four years is impressive no matter how it got there.  The "ecosystem" has allowed VC for things like BitPay, coinbase, the Bitcoin trust, etc.  It will be that second round of more sophisticated service providers which will create the increased utility. 

We'll the government needed to get their hands on bitcoin somehow!

You must be new here that rise was 100% expected.  Of course I expect it to fail and fall again and then rise again and then fall again and then "bottom out" and then crash through the bottom and then rally for over a week and then give it all back in a day ....

Just rewind your charts to the prior bubble.  It probably will all happen again (although in smaller scale).

I have not traded on the exchanges in a few months, but wow i miss that rush of riding the waves, walk out with more BTC than dumped, mission complete.


did anyone else catch the 78$ price swings on btc-e?

I don't think it matters that much, consider about close to half of BTC fiat trade is in CNY.  I doubt the Chinese uses SR.

True, it's all a sum of huge count of elements.

Btw, GJ OP. Good prediction.

This is a good point, though where do you get that amount from?

look at btckan.com and check the volume - today's obviously different, but you see total CNY trade from Chinese exchanges vs mtgox + btce + bitstamp volume is about 40-60.

Older than you, you filthy '11 :P

Hopefully when the new Silk Road replacement rises from the ashes, the owner wont be stupid enough to operate in US jurisdiction.

Not that I have ever even looked at the SR web site, it's just the entire saga strikes me as very noob. He should have learned something from watching the .torrent site dramas eg TPB.


On a side note, the people dumping alt-coins because of the BTC drop are silly.

The myth that SR was the main use for BTC was dispelled back in April when Bitpay passed SR in trade volume.

Unless the crash turns into a stiletto :P

The fact that a few hours of panic selling by inexperienced traders is enough for you to declare victory is telling.

Silk Road had nearly a million users and likely the highest transactional volume of any Bitcoin business to date. The stats are all there now. But go ahead, keep living in fantasy land. :D

Yes, and that million users is still out there, all ready and somewhat trained to use BTC. SilkRoad already did everything it had to do for Bitcoin: give it an audience.

Why do you act like it's not at least a temporary blow? Do you really think tomorrow (literally I mean) there will be as much Bitcoin commerce as yesterday?

It's going to affect liquidity for a longer time as well as perception of Bitcoin's most important underlying business gone.

My claim was:


Please show me, now that the stats are out, a single Bitcoin denominated business larger than Silk Road.

yeah maybe all the SR users who got fucked by DPR -- fucked badly -- and lost all their coins on deposit are going to line up to buy coins to buy into another centralized drug exchange, after who-knows-what information of theirs, and transaction history, ended up in the hands of the feds. perhaps they will line up to buy bitcoins to spend on okcupid and wordpress, or the shitload of merchants whose websites look so fucking ghetto that the only reason i would use bitcoin with them is because i would be terrified to give them my credit card information. yeah. maybe.

pirateat40 also fucked a lot of people badly. And most of us are still here, using Bitcoin.

And Bitcoinica, and Karpeles, and BFL, and GBLSE (how the f@ck it is spelled), and...

Bitcoin is just not that good for internet payments.  Wealth storage and private transfers are where it's at.  SR was huge, but in long run case no publicity is bad publicity.  Exposure exposure exposure.

There are like a million BTC sent around the net each day according to bitcoinwatch.com how many of those would have been SR related, bugger all I reckon. SR importance on BTC trade is overstated.

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/3910/bitpay-processes-5-million-in-march-eclipses-silk-road/

psy, come over to my thread  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=267406.0)and show me a business with similar volume please.

yeah, and speculation comprises just about the entire economy outside of SR and gambling. not a good comparison. if an investor makes a bad investment and loses money -- that's different than those who buy/sell coins for drugs and just had their illicit histories compromised, a wealth of information that could fuck many, many people. apparently there were many hundreds of thousands of people who thought that a centralized drug exchange was safe.

you think everyone feels that way now? you think any drug exchange will ever reach even a pittance of the same magnitude considering what has happened? i never would have touched SR -- drugs in post on centralized marketplace/server -- no fucking way. now lots of people realize how dangerous it is, and how the security of their identifying information could be in the hands of ONE person.

and what about those who use bitcoin for SR only? $1.2 billion in activity -- you think there is a shortage of people who fit that description?

Bitcoin will bounce back, no worries. This isn't as big a deal as people are making it out to be.

I believe you ::)

Read my thoughts on the matter: http://cryptolife.net/silk-road-takedown-bitcoin-great-buy-right-now/

I cant read thoughts

Moderator talk ahead:
Yeah, dude, how about you stop spamming the link to your site on every thread?
You have thoughts on the matter you post them here. EDIT: Or make a(nother) thread.

Silk Road down another will take its place its the nature of illicit activity. Black Market Reloaded will explode.

So DPR knew the server was imaged in july, and they have plain text copies of all the private messages from the site as well? That's pretty disturbing!