A Heroin Store

[PLATO]

I moved discussion of my physical-layer mixmaster network to a new topic http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3088.0.

I am willing to put my USD where my mouth is to kick it off, and eat postage for awhile.

if you don't have one, invest in a Amazon Prime account for free two day shipping on most items fulfilled by amazon. goons on somethingawful.com usually are splitting memberships. 4 accounts costs $80/year

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[n0m4d]

Okay, so to get this off the ground I need to undercut the ratio at MtGox...  I get free shipping but yes, that's an obvious demerit.  Duh.

Am I looking at this from the wrong end of the market?  Should I be soliciting dead drops, rather than offering to be one?  Would that have more takers?

[maxvendor]

i already run such a venture made up of worldwide vendors that sell literally everything. if i could switch to bitcoin tommorow i would but our current system is quite anonymous with layers of plausible deniability i obviously can't get into detail about

some sites bitcoins are worth .87 to buy but if you want to sell they're only worth 0.42-0.53 per USD if i understand correcly. if i'm selling say 1g of MDMA for $60 I'll get roughly 68 bitcoins judging by the daily rates on most sites. when i sell i only get back $30, not much of a profit margin while you're risking years of incarceration. it could be doable but then throw in exchanger fees and it's not worth it. unless i'm totally wrong (?)

as for the anonymous distro network, i have no idea how this would ever work. to avoid detection, you must expedite as quickly as possible without sacraficing stealth since stuff is vac sealed and not designed to be passed around for weeks. also nobody in their right might would sign up to receive somebody else's drugs and traffic it without a huge cut. obviously those caught in the link would become informants to pass information about the next link, and everything would collapse. even if your shipping link had trust, when one retired he/she would just steal the next motherload of ounces passing through them and disappear.

silk road is a good idea, i can fill in all the vendor gaps they are missing (Yayo, cheaper and guaranteed better quality MDMA crystal, DMT, anything)  but it would be helpful if they told you where to stuff came from. if you're in ireland and you try to import weed from NL it's a waste of time

[FatherMcGruder]

some sites bitcoins are worth .87 to buy but if you want to sell they're only worth 0.42-0.53 per USD if i understand correcly. if i'm selling say 1g of MDMA for $60 I'll get roughly 68 bitcoins judging by the daily rates on most sites. when i sell i only get back $30, not much of a profit margin while you're risking years of incarceration. it could be doable but then throw in exchanger fees and it's not worth it. unless i'm totally wrong (?)

You could always set your own exchange rate.

[Cryptoman]

some sites bitcoins are worth .87 to buy but if you want to sell they're only worth 0.42-0.53 per USD if i understand correcly. if i'm selling say 1g of MDMA for $60 I'll get roughly 68 bitcoins judging by the daily rates on most sites. when i sell i only get back $30, not much of a profit margin while you're risking years of incarceration.

That's not true.  Just check the bid/ask spread on MtGox.com.  Like FatherMcGruder said, you can always set whatever price in bitcoins you like.

i can fill in all the vendor gaps they are missing (Yayo, cheaper and guaranteed better quality MDMA crystal, DMT, anything)  but it would be helpful if they told you where to stuff came from.

DMT?  Lovely.  Synthesized or extracted from plant material?

[maxvendor]

surprised the Mt Gox proxy guy takes cheques and paypal. that's crazy, i know at least a dozen forums vending counterfeit cheques that will clear then be recalled around a month later. certainly wouldn't trust half my customers to send him legit money especially when free cocaine is a possibility they'd probably flood his box and paypal with stolen or fake funds. he should take cash sent with tracking only or a money order with a blank pay-to name for privacy protection.

DMT a vendor in Canada sells it as small as 250mg extracted or a guy in the US with 10-1000g extracted. Pure yellow powder. Obviously not vending here you can probably google and find the site.

[bitcoinex]

i already run such a venture made up of worldwide vendors that sell literally everything. if i could switch to bitcoin tommorow i would but our current system is quite anonymous with layers of plausible deniability i obviously can't get into detail about

some sites bitcoins are worth .87 to buy but if you want to sell they're only worth 0.42-0.53 per USD if i understand correcly. if i'm selling say 1g of MDMA for $60 I'll get roughly 68 bitcoins judging by the daily rates on most sites. when i sell i only get back $30, not much of a profit margin while you're risking years of incarceration. it could be doable but then throw in exchanger fees and it's not worth it. unless i'm totally wrong (?)

Think of it as a payment for reducing your risks.

[markm]

If you are bigger than the market, isn't that your own doing or at lesat your own choice?

If you want the market $40,000 larger so it can accomodate your upcoming $40,000 transaction can't you tell your buyer you won't sell until you see $40,000 worth of bitcoin appear in a bitcoin account they specify to you before transfering into it? With you telling them some least significant digits to "sign" the amoujnt with to help ensure it's not some random arrival of money in some random account they decided to specify to you?

It is up to you whether to first buy enough bitcoins to offer on the market to make the market large enough or simply to watch the market price increase as the customer tries to bid enough to buy $40,000 worth...

-MarkM-

[nanaimogold]

...

some sites bitcoins are worth .87 to buy but if you want to sell they're only worth 0.42-0.53 per USD if i understand correcly. if i'm selling say 1g of MDMA for $60 I'll get roughly 68 bitcoins judging by the daily rates on most sites. ...

Probably that particular exchange operator was not in a buying mood that day. Another exchanger would offer you more.

This crazy unstable exchange rate has made bitcoin more of a stock market game than a good money for commerce. It's difficult to set prices or plan ahead when it's changing so rapidly.

Coffee4Bitcoin can charge a fair price today, but by the time it is delivered the customer feels he has paid too much. I expect any product that can't be delivered immediately might produce these negative feelings.

The opposite has also happened, where a day or a week later, the BTC I collected was worth less than I paid for the coffee.

The intrinsic value of bitcoin is in it's unique utility. That utility is adversely affected by wild price changes.

[Gavin Andresen]

The intrinsic value of bitcoin is in it's unique utility. That utility is adversely affected by wild price changes.

Price swings won't settle down until:
 1. The bitcoin economy is bigger (a "market cap" of hundreds of millions of dollars instead of just a few million dollars).
and
 2. Bitcoin is mature enough for people to really trust it.

Unless there is somebody out there with very deep pockets and a willingness to spend a lot of money smoothing out the fluctuations there's not a whole lot we can do about it besides make bitcoin better, easier to use, more secure, etc.

[QuantumMechanic]

The intrinsic value of bitcoin is in it's unique utility. That utility is adversely affected by wild price changes.

Price swings won't settle down until:
 1. The bitcoin economy is bigger (a "market cap" of hundreds of millions of dollars instead of just a few million dollars).
and
 2. Bitcoin is mature enough for people to really trust it.

Unless there is somebody out there with very deep pockets and a willingness to spend a lot of money smoothing out the fluctuations there's not a whole lot we can do about it besides make bitcoin better, easier to use, more secure, etc.

I would think the major bitcoin holders have an incentive to pool their resources to do this to at least some degree.  Even the small holders might be persuaded to chip in a share of theirs, provided the fund was well-managed.

[marcus_of_augustus]

I would think the major bitcoin holders have an incentive to pool their resources to do this to at least some degree.  Even the small holders might be persuaded to chip in a share of theirs, provided the fund was well-managed.

That sounds to me like you are suggesting a cartel to manage the value of a currency .... gee, how novel, we haven't seen that before ..... not.

Could lead to two bad outcomes (or both);

1) the cartel goes bust defending their market position when a bigger fish or the market itself turns on them

2) the economy that is based on that currency gets distorted price signals from the false values delivered by the cartel, i.e. a false economy. (E.g. unnecessarily high or low network difficulty)

[QuantumMechanic]

I would think the major bitcoin holders have an incentive to pool their resources to do this to at least some degree.  Even the small holders might be persuaded to chip in a share of theirs, provided the fund was well-managed.

That sounds to me like you are suggesting a cartel to manage the value of a currency .... gee, how novel, we haven't seen that before ..... not.

Could lead to two bad outcomes (or both);

1) the cartel goes bust defending their market position when a bigger fish or the market itself turns on them

2) the economy that is based on that currency gets distorted price signals from the false values delivered by the cartel, i.e. a false economy. (E.g. unnecessarily high or low network difficulty)

Like Gavin said, "spend a lot of money".  This is almost certainly not a money making venture, at least not directly.  However, it seems reasonable to me to think that a coordinated attempt to smooth out exchange rate shocks - not to control overall trends - would make Bitcoin a more attractive currency, driving its exchange rate up, and possibly leading to an overall gain for those coordinating the "smoothing".

To the extent that they filter out real price information and not just noise, sure they're creating distortions.  But people don't see invisible distortions; however, they do see exchange rates.

[Local]

People are already being paid for smoothing out the exchange rate. It's a job you can hire yourself to do at any time.

Determine the right price, bid something below it, ask something above it. You will get paid unless the price shoots away past either your bid or ask and never returns. Having extra coins and dollars on offer will slow down and dampen swings.

You'll know you are good at doing this if you make profit.

There is no reason to think that this will work better if everyone hands their coins and dollars over to some entity or committee to handle. 

[QuantumMechanic]

People are already being paid for smoothing out the exchange rate. It's a job you can hire yourself to do at any time.

Determine the right price, bid something below it, ask something above it. You will get paid unless the price shoots away past either your bid or ask and never returns. Having extra coins and dollars on offer will slow down and dampen swings.

You'll know you are good at doing this if you make profit.

There is no reason to think that this will work better if everyone hands their coins and dollars over to some entity or committee to handle. 

Yeah, probably better for them to just capitalize a bunch of market makers, while periodically weeding out the losers.

[TiagoTiago]

Regarding moving packages annonymouslly, ii got n idea, would work at least within a city, and perhaps more:

It involves magnetic packages. It works like this, there are pedestrians and there are vehicles.


Pedestrians would each be told to be at some location, wait for a certain vehicle to park or stop at a traffic light, then the pedestrian would discreetly grab the magnetic package out of the vehicle and then place it somewhere else, either another vehicle he was told about or if necessary some fixed place, then another pedestrain would be told to pick up the package and move it to some other place, and so on.

There would be lots of pedestrians, each receiving apparently random instructions frequently, and lots of magnetic packages being moved around between spots or carried by vehicles from one place to another. The packages would have no identifying features differentiating one from another, and they would be constantly kept in flux regardless of actually having a payload meant to go somewhere.


The vehicles would be vehicles with predictable routes, city busses, cars of people that work everyday etc.


There would be a distributed censorship resistant system (perhaps running on Freenet) that would define the instructions for the pedestrians  of when and where to pick a magpack and when where to place it, the system would make sure the average density of magpacks across the network remains constant and that all packages have a decent likellyhood of eventually reaching everywhere in the network. Someone wanting to send somthing, would file a request with the system, specifying the destination, the sender would be one of the pedestrians, one day that pedestrian receives an special instruction telliing about a free magpack that they can use that will be avaiable at some location within their area at some time in the near future, that pedestrian will have a window of time to intercept that magpack, load it up, and put it back on the network.

Pedestrian should report missing packages (packages they didn't intercept or lost before being able to forward into the network) and missed deliveries (not keeping a package 'cause they couldn't attach it to the intended vehicle), the system will indenpendently analyze the patterns of losses and estimate if a given pedestrian or vehicle/location has become less reliable and adjust the routing accordingly.

Routes would be submited to the system announymouslly, and once a given attachable location or vehicle has been confirmed by enough reports some of the many magpacks will be routed thru them to test (most likelly empty ones, but once in a while loaded ones as well, seemingly at random), strenghtening the reliability value of that route based on successes.


This would only work if it achieved a certain critical mass before authorities try to crack down a given section (from a single city block to a whole city) ; with enough chaotic annonymous agents and packages moving around it will be impossible to predict when and even where a given package will be, and even if the authorities intercept one package or pedestrian the odds are they will have an empty magpack or a pedestrian without a magpack.

Some routes would have multiple intercept points, with pedestrians instructed to transfer the magpack if they do find it there and if they can, one pedestrian can't the next ones in the route will, their reports of success of failure will be computed by the system adjusting the next instructions accordingly, keeping track of magpacks to decide what orders to send to which pedestrians to keep the package in flux to it's eventual destinations.


Lost and then found packages will not be trackable by the system, but if a pedestrian finds a lost package, he is to attach it to a route attempting to leave it set to open and loose it's content, informing to the system (the magpacks would have a timed opening mechanism for disposal of any potential lost content before the next pedestrian), this way reintroducing the magpack into the network empty but without the pedestrian actually seeing what, if anything, was inside.


Magpacks might be moved between cities if necessary, given that is a possible route, like attaching to an intercity bus, or by a pedestrian with additional skills and access to a piece of luggage or the landing gear of a plane etc, these tranfers and routes only used when extremelly necessary; routes with less likellyhood of getting intercepted by the authorities, with less risk for the pedestrian etc being preffered when avaiable even if the final path is much longer (some sort of risk/benefit/cost evaluation of different paths would be done by the system to decide which path to use)


To help with the critical mass issue, lots of empty magpacks would be intentionally lost, and lots of orders to pedestrians would secretly be meant to fail; keeping authorities in wild goose chases, constantly wasting time spying on people that endup not doing anything and finding packages that are empty. Obviouslly these intentional failures being considered different by the system to not disrupt real realiability calculations.


The distribute system itself would be a black box, even if somehow the authorities managed to read the whole system at any given time, it would be white noise, once activated no one would be able to actually see inside the system, the system would run itself, it's message to the pedestrians saying enough for their current step, no pedestrian would be aware of where their current magpack originated nor where it is destined to go, people sending things would communicate with the pedestrian intended to receive the package telling them where to expect their package by means outside the network, they wouldn't know when, but when receiving a package, the target pedestrian would have been given an order similar to when someone gets an empty package to send thing, with the window being for withdrawing the contents before forwarding the package back into the network instead of depositing somthing in it.






Given the scale and complexity of this system, i guess it would be hugelly difficult to implement it right now, it's probably somthing that would exist in books and movies, but not be real in the foreseable future, but at some point it might be.

[anonameous]

Reading this thread is funny. You guys vastly over estimate the probability that a package of drugs will be intercepted. I would estimate that about one out of ten thousand packages are intercepted. In the USA about 2,000 arrests are made every year of people who sent drugs or got drugs in the mail. Almost all of them are people who got drugs because sending can be next to perfectly anonymous.  Most packages that are intercepted are going through customs so are international, if it does not pass through customs the chances of interception is next to none. Most packages that are intercepted weigh at least several pounds, if it will fit in a normal envelope and is sent domestic the chances of interception are so small as to be insignificant. USPS handles over two billion mailed items a year within the USA alone. The USPI has a few thousand agents. ICE has a few thousand agents, just short of one billion packages are mailed from foreign nations to the USA every year. The best detection system they have is drug dogs and they can be countered near perfectly with proper vacuum sealing and packaging. Interception is not what you need to worry about.

Vendors need to worry that their customers are feds. The risk of this can be greatly reduced with security techniques. Orders should be encrypted with GPG so that if the vendors contact point is put under electronic surveillance they can not find the addresses of other customers placing orders. Tor can be used to prevent a trace through the internet, using random open WiFi connections can prevent them from determining who is using Tor in areas packages are shipped from and makes a trace more or less impossible even if they compromise Tor. A particular worry is application layer exploits being used to side channel anonymizers. So far the feds do not even do this against child porn sites, only very serious targets like actual child abusers and murder for hire vendors etc. Not many of the FBI are skilled enough to do these attacks, it seems none of the DEA. Some Intelligence agencies of course can, but I do not see them as a likely adversary against even a very public vending site. You can reduce the risk of application layer exploits with many techniques though, hardening binaries during compile, mandatory access control permission systems, layering hypervisors / virtualization (including of network adapters), etc. The best option is to copy encrypted orders from one machine to another machine with NO ACCESS TO THE INTERNET in order to create an airgap, so even if the machine you get an order on is compromised with an application layer exploit the machine your decrypt orders on is safe. And of course use WiFi for when you get orders, so even if they break the MAC and go through hypervisor to real network adapter they can't totally fuck you with an anonymizer side channel. The only weak link is payment. Funding can be layered through digital currency exchangers and bounced around the world before it is cashed out with anonymous ATM cards. Bitcoin will be used by drug vendors more and more as it is easier. We really need a bitcoin mix or blind digital certificates on top of bitcoin to prevent financial network analysis though, Bitcoin is not an ideal solution by itself.

Let them analyze paper and such. First of all they already know your rough location from the return address / postmark so they are not going to learn jack shit new. Second of all you can use products sold at major chain stores. Remember, It took them decades to trace the Unabomber and he was mailing fucking bombs. Plus they never could trace him via mail his brother had to report him before they even came close to narrowing in on him. Of course you should wear gloves. Latex gloves are not good enough by themselves, they are thin and dust forms on them and leaves rubber stamp impressions of fingerprints through them. One pair of latex gloves over thicker gloves for when you touch product, remove gloves after vac seal, bleach scrub vac bag and then new latex gloves.

Customers can open private mail boxes with fake identification documents. Return addresses must be switched frequently to protect from network analysis. Finances must be decentralized to protect from financial network intelligence, if multiple customers send payment to the same point it is weak to attack. Decentralized payment can already be accomplished with out Bitcoin. It is best to decentralize and compartmentalize the vending operation as well, one person to ship and one person to communicate with customers at least. Geocache works as well, particularly for localized markets. Swarming is a technique to minimize loss. Don't send a kilo of product to one person, send 100 grams to ten people. You should only worry about finances, get people with out investment capital to handle the more dangerous jobs.

I want drugs to be decriminalized. Not every drug dealer is only about profit. Give me freedom over profit any time. I am sick of non-sophisticated friends going to prison for their life for wanting to have fun. The government ruins all trust in the youth, who knows if anyone is a friend or an undercover. They see us as a threat and use drug laws to split us apart. They make money off of our lives and treat us like subhuman animals, demonize us with lies in the media and via propaganda campaigns. All so they can keep us under control and make profit off us, keep us under their brainwashing. All they say are lies, you think you know about drugs but you know nothing but shit spread via their many sophisticated PSYOP campaigns. Please, do offer high quality heroin at consistent purity to the general public, maybe you will save one of my friends from overdosing. The vast majority of heroin overdoses are caused by varying purity batches, a user gets 30% purity heroin and then when a 60% batch comes around they use the same weight but get double the dose. If all heroin was 100% pure there would be no heroin overdoses. There would be no deaths from ecstasy if tablets had really MDMA in them and not bullshit like PMA that evil criminals pass as MDMA for profit and end up killing the users. The vast majority of negative effects of drug use in public perception have no basis in reality. Most of the others are actually the product of prohibition. The DEA is HAPPY that they lower the purity of drugs even though varying purity is the number one cause of overdose for all drugs. Fuck those fascists, I can not wait for the day that they are brought to justice for the horrible crimes they commit, I can only hope that their punishment is MORE severe than the punishment they give to the people who hurt nobody who they trick into thinking are their friends only to ruin their lives.

PS: We better not talk about how to use bitcoin to support jews hidden in attics in Nazi Germany because it is against the law to support Jews, all morals aside law is law. I really never will understand you law drones it is like you are completely incapable of thinking for yourself.

[hiker]

Great insight in the previous post.

"We really need a bitcoin mix or blind digital certificates on top of bitcoin to prevent financial network analysis though, Bitcoin is not an ideal solution by itself."

I also feel that bitcoin isn't exactly anonymous, as all the transactions could be traced from generation to any particular payment. You can mix funds etc., but still it has a lot of vulnerabilities as far as I can see. If the government decides to crack down on bitcoin, this would be a real pain.

Any working services or ideas on how to solve this?

[SmokeTooMuch]

BitLaundry

BitLaundry Explanation
BitLaundry is designed to help unlink accounts from each other. It does that by providing a well-known, and hopefully popular service. Here's how it works:

   1. Imagine that Alice wishes to send BitCoins to Bob.
   2. Bob, sadly, is not well liked. Alice would rather not have anyone know that she sent Bob BitCoins.
   3. So, Alice puts Bob's address in the form at BitLaundry.
   4. Alice gets a one-time-use address from BitLaundry.
   5. Alice sends the money to that address.
   6. BitLaundry sends money out to recipients every 30 minutes.
   7. (But, it doesn't send out Alice's money immediately, that might be suspicious..)
   8. So, a random number of 30 minute segments later, BitLaundry sends the money out to Bob.
   9. BitLaundry then deletes the database link between the one-time-use address and Bob.
  10. Alice has sent money to BitLaundry, but people do this all the time. She's one of many.
  11. BitLaundry has sent money to Bob, but BitLaundry has sent money out to a whole bunch of other people as well.
  12. Alice and Bob are much less linked than they would have been otherwise.

[johnieeliang]

if there was a way to virtually transfer heroine it would be a pretty good idea