I am not outing myself here. I think it's a silly business, but I've been reading about Ross Ulbricht again and of course Mr Alphabay.
Both of them operated in a very silly manner. Two people knew Ross's involvement in SR from minute one, there's leaving of his gmail address buried in the Bitcointalk server, and his operating SR in public places allowing the feds to grab his laptop before it could be encrypted.
With Mr Alphabay there was of course leaving his email address, but also flaunting Lambos and mountains of property.
So if you were to embark on such a life, how would you do it differently?
I for one would begin by only doing my nefarious business in a locked chamber. If you can wipe your laptop with one button press, you can physically isolate yourself for long enough if someone comes for you.
What else would you do?
Heck, I would probably take it even a step further.
I'm trying to remember where the story came from, but I believe it was from an old friend that was an ex-con. Lol, it was either him or Breaking Bad.
He was a meth cook for a while and I believe he said that he had rigged up a lab where if there was ever a raid they had their batch booby trapped to automatically dump into a bath of sulfuric acid. You might want to add that one to your list.
Another one he used to do was take a drive. A long one. Maybe 1.5-2 hours each way. He said he would have someone drive him 2 hours one way and then they would immediately flip around and go the other direction. The whole time, the passenger would be writing down all the license plates of the vehicles around them. Once they would get home they would compile the lists from both directions. Their theory was that there shouldn't be any plates that match going both directions. If there are.... someone's following you.
Tweakers are always paranoid. If I was a dark market kingpin, I would be as paranoid as a tweaker.