how do you propose to solve the 'last mile' problem?
Sure, trust can be built via ratings, which may be forged/false, and the 'first delivery' for someone new to the network carries a ton of risk if it's something like Silk Road material.
Dead Drop locations can be watched and whoever picks up the material insta-nabbed.
Okay, let me rephrase and number those, to see if I can address them properly.
A1) How do we build trust within the network, so that endpoints can send [expensive/extralegal/etc] material, while maintaining "acceptable" risk?
That was why I was limiting my initial bootstrapping effort here to items on Amazon within a certain price range -- that nails down concretely that at first, I will not accept extralegal risk, and I will not accept risk over a certain dollar amount.
However you'll also note that I am amenable to dead-dropping (without restrictions) within my area of operations, for payment in BTC. This is a risk I am also comfortable with.
B2) How do we lower risk of law enforcement infiltrating and corrupting / capturing nodes?
I am assuming that is who would be doing the nabbing - since the receipt of postage would be to a bitcoin wallet somewhere and not on the courier, and the nabber would already possess the couriered item.
This I was leaving up to the network to figure out - nodes on the net could figure out their own methods for making dead drops more secure, and I would hope would share them.
The problem, I think, devolves into two groups:
The sender is more at risk.
The recipient is more at risk.
I can eliminate sender risk by going out into the woods, burying the goods, and then telling the recipient where it's located.
Recipient risk is harder to mitigate, though I would imagine you have plausible deniability (to an extent) in that you can not be proven to be an exit node.
The strategem I'd come up with was negotiation of the time as close as possible to the actual trade, in a public place. Perhaps an airport, hospital, shopping mall, etc - where someone carrying a bag large enough to contain the parcel would not raise suspicion.
Flashmobbing several pickups / dropoffs in a short period of time would be another. This is what I was what I think a central DB would help out with - if I can organize 10 handoffs in one shopping mall inside of an hour, it would seem to me I can seriously spread the risk of being nabbed.
A nabbed courier would also indicate to that area of operations that there was a corrupt node, and they could begin auditing their peers. If everyone is using GPG, there will be a 'head node' that knew the time/place of the handoff that will be immediately suspect.
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