2012-08-06 forbes.com - Black Market Drug Site 'Silk Road' Booming: $22 Million

[julz]

A forbes article mentioning Bitcoin but not by Jon Matonis.. how about that!

Black Market Drug Site 'Silk Road' Booming: $22 Million In Annual Sales

Andy Greenberg
2012-08-06

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/06/black-market-drug-site-silk-road-booming-22-million-in-annual-mostly-illegal-sales/


...
The business takes significant precautions: Tor masks both the location of its servers and of its users by ricocheting Internet traffic through proxies, and Bitcoin makes its payments difficult to trace by avoiding traditional banks or payment companies.
...

[Clipse]

He forgot to mention in that article that regular Banks makes it easy for mexican cartel druglords to transfer drug money totalling in the billions.

[kiba]

I thought it was written by Jon Matonis. 

It wasn't, and I never heard of Senator Joe Manchin until now.

[justusranvier]

This story will hit the front page of Slashdot shortly.

[grondilu]

This is great .  This market place is the best proof of concept one could imagine for bitcoin.

Long live Silk Road!


PS.  In the article I can read:
« His findings: the site’s number of sellers, who offer everything from cocaine to ecstasy, has jumped from around 300 in February to more than 550. »  The beautiful thing is that those 550 people most likely do not know each other.  This means they can do nothing to prevent one another to compete.  The only thing they can do is providing better products with lower prices.  In a physical market, such as a street drug dealing business, they'd probably fight each other to the death until the most vicious ones gets all the market.

Isn't anonymous economics awesome?

[istar]

But really, is it not because you are able to send postal packages with no analyzing of the content, that this service can go on.

Its not Bitcoin or Tor thats delivering the drugs to the buyers...