SilkRoad 2 Taken down by Feds

[kokojie]

Nope, OB can be easily taken down, just arrest anyone who develops for it, it'll easily scare all developers into not touching OB. Without active development, OB is dead in the water.

Arresting people for writing code would be an interesting totalitarian thought experiment which would totally not backfire.   Writing code anonymously for a project is easy to do. Distributing code anonymously is also easy to do with torrents.

There is no stopping this.

Creating a website is writing code too, FBI had no issue arresting website operators.

If TOR didn't protect silkroad 1.0, 2.0 etc... what makes you think anonymous code contributors are safe?

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[inBitweTrust]

Creating a website is writing code too, FBI had no issue arresting website operators.

Ahh... This is where you are confused. With Openbazaar there is no website to shutdown. https://openbazaar.org is merely for information and ca easily change TLD's or to a .bit to promote the project.

There is no server hosting Openbazaar to shutdown either, the marketplace exists across all users.

If TOR didn't protect silkroad 1.0, 2.0 etc... what makes you think anonymous code contributors are safe?

Nothing is 100% secure with anything digital or physical. The point is to make it impractical because the costs are too high. The FBI can afford to spend millions of dollars to track one server but not thousands of users. The more they attack the first amendment buy jailing people for writing the more devs will join the cause.

The struggle is futile. How successful have they been with torrenting , wikileaks, and the war on drugs in general?

[kokojie]

Creating a website is writing code too, FBI had no issue arresting website operators.

Ahh... This is where you are confused. With Openbazaar there is no website to shutdown. https://openbazaar.org is merely for information and ca easily change TLD's or to a .bit to promote the project.

There is no server hosting Openbazaar to shutdown either, the marketplace exists across all users.

If TOR didn't protect silkroad 1.0, 2.0 etc... what makes you think anonymous code contributors are safe?

Nothing is 100% secure with anything digital or physical. The point is to make it impractical because the costs are too high. The FBI can afford to spend millions of dollars to track one server but not thousands.

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

[tacotime]

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

Until people make t-shirt sized implementations of it.

[bbit]

Creating a website is writing code too, FBI had no issue arresting website operators.

Ahh... This is where you are confused. With Openbazaar there is no website to shutdown. https://openbazaar.org is merely for information and ca easily change TLD's or to a .bit to promote the project.

There is no server hosting Openbazaar to shutdown either, the marketplace exists across all users.

If TOR didn't protect silkroad 1.0, 2.0 etc... what makes you think anonymous code contributors are safe?

Nothing is 100% secure with anything digital or physical. The point is to make it impractical because the costs are too high. The FBI can afford to spend millions of dollars to track one server but not thousands.

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

He brings up a good point . It isn't that hard to figure out who has what on OB and just arrest each person. I guess OB could be honeypot in a way ?

[inBitweTrust]

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

I know many developers that will specifically drop involvement in their current projects and work on Openbazaar specifically because they are using violence to censor speech.

I would be one of them.

[msin]

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

OB is very different.  It's intent has nothing to do with illegal activity.  Why is BitTorrent a company operating freely here in the US with no arrests?

[inBitweTrust]

He brings up a good point . It isn't that hard to figure out who has what on OB and just arrest each person. I guess OB could be honeypot in a way ?

Not really a good point as there have been many failed attempts at stopping code in the past. DeCSS is one example out of many.

[kokojie]

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

I know many developers that will specifically drop involvement in their current projects and work on Openbazaar specifically because they are using violence to censor speech.

I would be one of them.

Why aren't you building for silkroad then? (or maybe you are, then I'm wrong). Silkroad isn't just for drugs neither, there's plenty of legal products on it, pretty similar to OB.

[trout]

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/

Almost all of the deep web’s major drug marketplaces are currently offline, raising the possibility that the FBI has caused severe disruption to the online drug trade. Agora, Alpaca, BlueSky, C9, Hyrda, Pandora, and the Silk Road are all currently offline.

Damn, is that true? Are they all down as well? 

agora and evolution appear to be online.
Hydra displays a "hidden site seized" notice.

Don't know about the rest.  

[Quickseller]

Silkroad 1 closed, bitcoin price skyrocketed and saw ATH, now Silkroad 2 close, I can't imagine

the price skyrocketed because people found out that you can buy illegal drugs using Bitcoin in a safe manor.

[inBitweTrust]

Why aren't you building for silkroad then? (or maybe you are, then I'm wrong). Silkroad isn't just for drugs neither, there's plenty of legal products on it, pretty similar to OB.

I prefer working on decentralized projects and silkroad was a centralized marketplace. Yes, I have been testing on OB, and yes, I don't fear being kidnapped by thugs for developing and working on any project I choose.

These intimidation tactics both scare and attract developers.

[kokojie]

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

OB is very different.  It's intent has nothing to do with illegal activity.  Why is BitTorrent a company operating freely here in the US with no arrests?

Doesn't reallly matter. Silkroad has plenty of legal products on it too.

As soon as one illegal product show up, and OB developer ignore a cease and desist, then OB will possibly become illegal.

Plenty of BitTorrent website and companies has been shutdown/arrested over the years.

[msin]

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

OB is very different.  It's intent has nothing to do with illegal activity.  Why is BitTorrent a company operating freely here in the US with no arrests?

Doesn't reallly matter. Silkroad has plenty of legal products on it too.

As soon as one illegal product show up, and OB developer ignore a cease and desist, then OB will possibly become illegal.

Dude, you're not getting it, OB is a platform for others to buy and sell, it isn't hosting anything.  Again, look at BitTorrent, I can download a # of things illegally, yet BitTorrent team is a Silicon Valley company with no arrests. 

[Quickseller]

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/

Almost all of the deep web’s major drug marketplaces are currently offline, raising the possibility that the FBI has caused severe disruption to the online drug trade. Agora, Alpaca, BlueSky, C9, Hyrda, Pandora, and the Silk Road are all currently offline.

Damn, is that true? Are they all down as well?

appearently several of the illegal dark net sites were all taken down around the same time. Law enforcement is claiming to be running an operation to take down several darknet sites in the next 24 hours

[inBitweTrust]

Plenty of BitTorrent website and companies has been shutdown/arrested over the years.

thepiratebay is still going strong after illegal raids, arrests, domain seizures, bribes to corrupt politicians, ect...

Sure there have been outages of a few hours here and there in 11 years...lol...

[kokojie]

The FBI can shut it down by arresting the operator, OB is no different. FBI can just arrest the developer of OB, and announce that anyone writing code for OB will be arrested. No developer will touch OB, and without active development, OB is dead in the water.

OB is very different.  It's intent has nothing to do with illegal activity.  Why is BitTorrent a company operating freely here in the US with no arrests?

Doesn't reallly matter. Silkroad has plenty of legal products on it too.

As soon as one illegal product show up, and OB developer ignore a cease and desist, then OB will possibly become illegal.

Dude, you're not getting it, OB is a platform for others to buy and sell, it isn't hosting anything.  Again, look at BitTorrent, I can download a # of things illegally, yet BitTorrent team is a Silicon Valley company with no arrests. 

Plenty of BitTorrent website and companies has been shutdown/arrested over the years. BitTorrent software itself is just a protocol, much like TOR, is not illegal by itself. It's what's built upon it, that could potentially be illegal. The protocol can't control what other people are doing with it.

From what I understand, OB is not a protocol, but THE platform itself, the developer can directly control what goes on in the marketplace by using code. Is it possible for others to develop alternative clients that also works?

[inBitweTrust]

From what I understand, OB is not a protocol, but THE platform itself, the developer can directly control what goes on in the marketplace by using code. Is it possible for others to develop alternative clients that also works?

OB is a protocol, being that it is merely open source code run on individual computers. The devs cannot control anything because the users can fork or simply not upgrade to the newest version at any time just like with Bitcoin.

The FBI would have to raid individual users homes to try and slow the growth of the OpenBazaar marketplace. Such attempts are futile.

[kokojie]

From what I understand, OB is not a protocol, but THE platform itself, the developer can directly control what goes on in the marketplace by using code. Is it possible for others to develop alternative clients that also works?

OB is a protocol, being that it is merely open source code run on individual computers. The devs cannot control anything because the users can fork or simply not upgrade to the newest version at any time just like with Bitcoin.

OB is not blockchain based right? how does it hardfork without having a chain?

[inBitweTrust]

OB is not blockchain based right? how does it hardfork without having a chain?

Forking doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Bitcoin or blockchain technology. It is a term used in open source code.

But to answer your question OB does indeed use Bitcoin and DHT as methods for decentralization and security.

Additionally, I plan on selling many legal items on Openbazzar to support the marketplace and specifically go out of my way to use this marketplace to distribute products and services which would be political and social suicide to shutdown or stop.