The Great Silk Road Crash of 20** ...?

[Scott J]

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.

[kiba]

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

[Come-from-Beyond]

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

[BladeMcCool]

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

[Aseras]

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/

[Domrada]

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.

[kokojie]

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.

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.

[RodeoX]

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

[WITRcenter]

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.

[kiba]

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

[flower1024]

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

[bitcoinbear]

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.

[stevegee58]

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.

[salty]

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.

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 "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.

[casascius]

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).

[AbsoluteZero]

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.

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 "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.

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.

[paulie_w]

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

[thebaron]

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

[paulie_w]

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.

[Desolator]

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.