Can an online market for meth, smack and pot win?
An Internet marketplace for drugs called Silk Road is continuing to profit despite legal attempts to shut it down
Jeb Boone
2013-02-27
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/27/can_an_ebay_for_meth_smack_and_pot_prevail_partner/...
Rather than getting busted, Silk Road appears to be getting more robust.
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To avoid the easily-tracked trail left by credit cards, customers must make purchases usingbitcoin — a digital currency championed as a way of maintaining online privacy. Bitcoin is not completely anonymous on its own, but it can be customized to obscure a user’s identity.
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Still, law enforcement agencies are thought to be devising strategies to take down online offenders using vulnerabilities posed by bitcoin.
And banning the service would come with its own collateral impact. For example, bloggers in places like Saudi Arabia and Vietnam can use bitcoin to pay for hosting services on WordPress, reducing the likelihood that local authorities could discover their identities.
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To stem the flow of drugs into the online market, law enforcement may need to rely on the skills acquired in policing hacker collectives rather than regulating a burgeoning market for online currency. In spite of bitcoin’s use for illegal online purchases, the transaction is not dissimilar from a typical cash purchase of drugs in the real world illicit marketplace.
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Matonis said. “We already use paper cash anonymously and untraceably in our lives today. The only thing bitcoin does is retain that same privacy in the digital environment.”
