Bitcoin Forum

What is the average total value of goods for sale on Silk Road?

I tried looking at it once, but the website was too slow to get a good idea (maybe I needed to open ports in my router).

I'm interested in figuring out how much Silk Road affects the demand for Bitcoins.

Pretty fucking big, you don't need to open any ports to make it go faster tor is just inherently slow.

i wonder how much demand spendbitcoins.com generates.

When I looked at Silk Road, I remember only seeing 500-600 items.  Am I remembering right?

500 items at $50 each (estimate) is only $25,000 which isn't a lot of money compared to the current Bitcoin money supply.

looks like there are about 2000 items up for sale right now, give or take. I'd say 20000BTC, at least. Rough guess.

I don't know anything about the daily volume.

Those listings are used repeatedly, not just once.

If someone has 100g of Substance X and is selling 1g, he can do that sale 100 times, get re-supplied, do another 100 transactions, and still use the same one listing.

SR has over 130000 registered members. Note that you have to register just to look in, so lots of these may have never been used.

It says it has 251 sellers. Seller accounts cost money, so people don't get them just for fun.

Unless it's changed in the past few months, it's totally free to sell on SR, as well as free to buy.

it did change. a lot.

Do you anything about the daily volume?

You mean: "Are you the person running Silk Road?"

here, I got a simple estimate for you.
on SR front page, they have 10 most recent feedbacks.
You can check the time when they were left. just now, the last one of the 10 was left half an hour ago.


which gives a (very rough) estimate of  20 purchases per hour.

if you are interested you can collect more data, along with the average price, daily fluctuations, etc.,
but i can't be bothered.

Are all the listings US based? If they are multiply the 20 purchases per hour for daytime hours only, assuming most people wont be up in the middle of the night. Also if its anything like ebay (disclaimer- i've never seen SR) then a small portion of buyers won't leave feedback. Assuming this happens, 22 purchases per hour multiplied by a conservative 10 hour day. 220ish purchases per day. Again very rough. Are all payments made via bitcoin on SR?

Interesting data.

20 per hour / 24 hours per day - round up to 500 purchases. 

At $50 each (rough guess - could be as much as $100, and expensive items will make the mean a lot more than the median) that is $25,000/day.   Or $9.1 million/year.

Now the Bitcoin money supply is currently worth roughly $53 million.

If the velocity of each BTC is 5, then you'd need $265 million/year of trading activity to sustain the economy.  Obviously some people are holding on to it for speculation (very low velocity: 0-1) and others are trading it for goods and services.

Does anyone know the current velocity of the US dollar?  I suspect the BTC velocity is a lot more as most people who use it to trade are converting it back into regular currency to avoid fluctuation risks.

I'd guess that Silk Road could run fine with a Bitcoin money supply of around $250,000-$1 million (gives people 10-40 days to convert into non-BTCs).  Or another way to think of this is that Silk Road is backing 0.5% to 2% of the BTC economy.

Is feedback given on every order? Is that when funds are released to the seller?

Care to explain to everyone the significance of velocity in economic terms?

It is the number of times an average unit of currency (in this case BTC or dollars) gets spent in a certain period of time. Basically how quickly a currency is spent, it can help infer how popular or how big an economy is.

Also this is just me thinking but I believe in terms of bitcoins, the velocity can infer how much speculation is going on at a given time since we all know speculation is currently the biggest market for BTC. Just thinking aloud someone please tell me if I am wrong.

I've heard there are currently 250 sellers on there. I have no idea how to prove it, it was just a guess by a friend.

It did not seem like people were very interested in my posts so I deleted them, perhaps because I am a new user? While I don't partake in SR goodies I don't want to show up in Google associated with analysis' of SR so it is for the best.

I just have to say I am quite surprised by the lack of knowledge people have in an economics message board of all places, on the single biggest market entity outside of speculation, in the Bitcoin world. I understand not everyone is for illicit drug use, but what happened to the basic principles of Econ101?...Know your market...go download tor and do some market research people.

I'm sorry if SilkRoad doesn't publicly submit their stats to the world.

Owner of SR is pretty well off from it, like ~62 bit coin payment to become a seller

I took action on your advice and went for a visit. Pretty interesting I gotta say... some of the transactions are obviously quite large too after browsing some of the listings and recent feedback.

The one question I had to myself was: whats stopping these sellers from signing up as buyers and performing a 'fake buy' to leave themselves more positive feedback? I'm no expert on this, but wont Tor itself will prevent basic security measures other sites may use like logging account IP's etc...

Or the Feds from doing so to start sniping off buyers?

Although, I'd suspect what they really want is to find the proprietor.

They would pay for the review the SR fee, which is omething like 10% I guess. So yeah, you can buy yourself some positive feedback, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't make economic sense.

Hi officer.

Except sniping a buyer makes no sense.  A buyer is probably buying a few pills at a time.  No real cash is exchanged.  They're just receiving pills in the mail from someone anonymously.  A lot of drug busts occur so they can get the small-time users and dealers to rat out the bigger users/dealers.  In this instance, a buyer has no idea who the seller is. 
 
You might gather what city that seller might be in, or close to, but that's it.  If someone from New York City is making drop-off mailings from the countless public mail boxes, good luck with that.  Not only that, but they have many many *other* boxes to throw it into within an hour or two drive outside NYC, not to mention stores "hey I need to mail this, can you throw it into your outgoing mail?"  No one is going to risk looking inside of it in fear of tampering with mail, etc.

God damn Gawker at it again.  ::)

http://gawker.com/5879924/now-you-can-buy-guns-on-the-online-underground-marketplace

No wonder SR went down in the middle of me checking out what's new..  :D

As a matter of fact, is being a real-life "anonymous" mail proxy illegal?  As in, I agree to open an item of mail sent to me, and then put the sealed envelope inside into the mail for the sender?
 
Since it's illegal for me to open an envelope not addressed to me, could I be prosecuted for passing along a sealed, addressed envelope, since I can't know what's inside?  I mean, there's lots of reasons for anonymity.
 
I'm sure the feds would consider that mail fraud... but I wonder

If the article on drugs being sold on SR brought some heat, wait until some senator hears about guns with scratched off serial numbers being sold anonymously on the internet...I can picture it now, someone capitol hill is sitting in front of their computer, jizzing their pants while reading this article, imagining all the grandstanding that could come out of all this.

I believe it is time to think about what would happen if SR suddenly disappeared from the web, would Bitcoin crash and burn along with it (or at least crash temporarily)? After all the June gawker article on SR was the beginning of the speculative bubble, bitcoin has been in. Since SR is the single largest entity actually using bitcoins for commerce (the rest is mostly speculative) what would happen if it disappeared? Anyone have thoughts?

Yes, post mail relays are illegal, but how would you be found out?  If you were to open an evelope addressed to you, only to find another smaller evelope inside (sealed, addressed and stamped) what would you do with it?

There is a forum community at SR who work together to try to root out the scamers through reviews and interactions with the actual vendors who themselves visit the forums to cultivate good relations. Also it costs money to buy a vendor account on SR which further deters scamers. Then there is the feedback system where buyers rate and leave comments on their transaction.

As far as the 'fake buy' feedback you are asking about, you can tell pretty easily as you can see along with the feedback what item the buyer purchased. Most of the time what happens is the vendor creates low cost listings or cheap digital listings (downloadable pron for example) where the vendor is able to build up feedback without having to pay large amounts of commission to SR. If a vendor wanted to make a fake account with legitimate looking transactions they would have to make a large investment as SR takes a cut from everything.

Whaaaaat..... "Dbush" is a SR drug/gun seller. He writes this to Gawker staff:

""Every single citizen should have enough firepower that the government fears the citizens. The people should not fear the government," he said.

Dbush said he tries not to sell guns to people who want to kill civilians or commit crimes. But most importantly, he won't sell to people who are anti-American or anti-Israel. "I would try to keep their money if I found out this was the case. Maybe send it 2 the US Israeli lobby 2 help gain more support for Israel," he wrote."

Yeah a lot of yellow journalism in the writers articles. I believe the writer is looking at SR as his golden ticket to make a name for himself.

If you want an indication of how much of a joke this guy (and gawker as well) is just look at the article he wrote prior to the one in June on SR. The title of the article is "The Legend of Dov's Dong" and is a hard hitting journalistic piece on American Apparel's founder and CEO's dick...