2013-09-05 Forbes.com - Follow The Bitcoins: How We Got Busted Buying Drugs On S

[Stephen Gornick]

Follow The Bitcoins: How We Got Busted Buying Drugs On Silk Road's Black Market
by Andy Greenberg

With the data from just 344 of their own transactions, they were able to label the owners of more than a million Bitcoin addresses. And by making just four deposits and seven withdrawals into accounts held on Silk Road, Meiklejohn says the researchers identified 295,435 addresses as belonging to that drug market.
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Once our bitcoins had been mixed up with other users’ bitcoins in the Silk Road’s 40 bitcoin account, it became impossible to track them further. So even though Meiklejohn could show that we had deposited bitcoins into a Silk Road account, she couldn’t see that those bitcoins were later paid to a drug dealer

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/09/05/follow-the-bitcoins-how-we-got-busted-buying-drugs-on-silk-roads-black-market/

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[Stephen Gornick]

-1 for using the "busted buying drugs" in the headline.   Silk Road's E-Wallet can be used without placing any orders whatsoever so there simply being proof that funds were sent to Silk Road doesn't prove anything other than that you sent funds to Silk Road.  The researcher was not able to conclude that the funds had been used to purchase drugs.

Additionally, there was no bust.  Nobody was arrested nor was there any law enforcement involvement whatsoever.   So the title was a shameless attempt to drum up page views.

[Patel]

Forbes just lost my respect for a stupid article with a stupid headline

[StarfishPrime]

So basically the bitcoin equivalent of writing down the serial numbers of a suitcase full of USD bank notes and handing it to a drug cartel. More "see, it's not anonymous!" fud.

Remember the early days of ecommerce on the web? It took 5-10 years before people were comfortable using credit cards online because of all of the trumped up scary stories about card info being stolen on "the internet". I read a report once that Visa never had even a single instance of card info having been stolen by intercepted TCP/IP communication - which was the big scare at the time.

[Carlton Banks]

Concerted campaign across the board to spread FUD and bizarre disinformation? Anyone would think this was all in anticipation of a known future event... which could be anything to be fair. I do wonder if there's an expected price rally, though. Or a stock market tumble (stimulating a price rally  )

[jwzguy]

Concerted campaign across the board to spread FUD and bizarre disinformation? Anyone would think this was all in anticipation of a known future event... which could be anything to be fair. I do wonder if there's an expected price rally, though. Or a stock market tumble (stimulating a price rally  )

I think Andy is just trying to be sensationalist and get views, not trying to spread FUD. Overall his attention to Bitcoin has a been a positive thing for us.

[Mike Hearn]

In fairness, his point is that starting from something that's easy for a government to obtain, the fact that he deposited to the SR was "easy" to find (assuming the cops can use the same analysis that the academics did). Hence he could easily have been "busted" if only the DEA repeat those trivial steps.

He then goes on to point out that whether there's a case or not is questionable - proving he bought drugs and not something else is harder. But then if you know someones identity from coinbase, that they used SR, perhaps that's sufficient to get a search warrant and get more evidence from your house.

Also, it's probably more interesting for them to just require coinbase (or whoever) to hand over *all* bitcoin addresses on file, and then look for any links between the SR cluster inbound to Coinbase. Receiving money from the mix is probably more likely to lead to successful prosecutions than looking for deposits. They didn't do that experiment though.

[Carlton Banks]

Concerted campaign across the board to spread FUD and bizarre disinformation? Anyone would think this was all in anticipation of a known future event... which could be anything to be fair. I do wonder if there's an expected price rally, though. Or a stock market tumble (stimulating a price rally  )

I think Andy is just trying to be sensationalist and get views, not trying to spread FUD. Overall his attention to Bitcoin has a been a positive thing for us.

Think of it this way, what about the people that mostly don't read the Bitcoin articles? They still read the headlines, and as already mentioned, that's going past sensationalism as a headline, it is misleading to headline skimmers. My post isn't quite clear enough either, I'm referring to all of the recent media output in respect of Bitcoin, not just this article.

[Nigeria Prince]

Dictator Barrack Obama should ban the Bitcoin.

[kjlimo]

Forbes just lost my respect for a stupid article with a stupid headline

I feel like I read this comment daily now...