2013-10-09 FBI goes after SR sellers

[Luno]

8 arrests made today more to come:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/10/09/0415235/8-users-of-silk-road-arrested-many-more-to-come

[kjlimo]

makes sense.

[RodeoX]

I would also expect the FBI to turn over data on sellers outside the U.S. Euro arrests may take a few weeks though. My guess is that much more is coming.

[Luno]

Bitcoins usefulness as an intelligence tool will be common knowledge. No more "total anonymous and un traceable".

What I fear is that some big SR customers have left a "bit trail" that leads trough exchanges and OTC sites, thus attracting heat to the legitimate Bitcoin infrastructure.

If it is provable that Btcoins earned on SR is a substantial part of the total economy and they are laundered to fiat, then we can all be in trouble.

The focus on money laundering has been on fiat being laundered trough Bitcoin which has so far not been provable or very likely. If it turns out that there is a money flow the other way; Bitcoins earned on crime being turned into anonymous fiat, we have boat loads of crabs in our laps too!

Why I think this is relevant now and not earlier this week when DPR was arrested, is that law enforcement now have proven means and intent in unravelling Bitcoin transactions to follow criminal transactions.

Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested presumable by ordinary police forensics. Blockchain info was not used . Now it is!

[chufchuf]

Why I think this is relevant now and not earlier this week when DPR was arrested, is that law enforcement now have proven means and intent in unravelling Bitcoin transactions to follow criminal transactions.

Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested presumable by ordinary police forensics. Blockchain info was not used . Now it is!

First of all these are 8 sellers, not users. Second of all, I read somewhere that they were made within hours of DPR's arrest, so that all the sellers wouldn't start taking precautions. No blockchain is being used anyways, if that isn't enough proof though, all they're probably using is SR's site logs or something like that. And if they don't use BTC, they can easily peasily switch to something even more untraceable like Zerocoin, or, like they did, use tons of laundry addresses.

[giantdragon]

I think other anonymous marketplaces will learn lesson from it and stop saving customers' physical addresses and real names in the plain text.
The best solution would be client-side (in browser) public key crypto: seller generates keypair and saves private key on his PC, public key is being stored on marketplace's server and used when a buyer enter his delivery address, then encrypted message saved in the database. To view the address seller must enter his private key which will be used to decrypt buyer's address right in the browser, therefore even if the server will be seized, FBI will not find any sensitive customers' data.

[Luno]

Damned, I'm not going to participate in a thread about how to make internet drug purchases safer for the customers..

Despite my strong believes in freedom of will, your right to get high, destroys the lives of others!!

The suggestions here are also relevant for citizens being prosecuted for human rights reasons, so yes the suggestions are also relevant from a more general perspective.

Please carry on without me.