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

[Scott J]

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.

[stevegee58]

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.

[Scott J]

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? 

[paulie_w]

so much fud...

[stevegee58]

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? 

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.

[Scott J]

so much fud...

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.

[Marco Polo]

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.

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.

[Desolator]

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.

[justusranvier]

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

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.

[zoinky]

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.

Yeah just like the pirate bay... 

[Hasimir]

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

It's funny you should mention this because you can now bet on exactly that.

Disclaimer: I made that statement.

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?

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.

How soon might this happen?

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

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.

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.

[Hasimir]

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

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

[Hasimir]

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  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.

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.

[Hasimir]

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 it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.

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).

[kangasbros]

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

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.

How about creating products and services for speculators? 

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?

[makomk]

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?

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.

[unicron]

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)

[justusranvier]

(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.

[unicron]

(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.

[Soros Shorts]

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?

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.

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 ....