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How Drugs and Paranoia Doomed Silk Road
- zkms 9y agoIt'd be nice to read something about Silk Road written by someone who isn't a drug war fanboy. It gets annoying to read all the paternalistic and contemptuous banter that the author fires off at anyone who dares defy his fundamentalist prohibitionist ideology: > college-aged line of argumentation > precocious and edgy libertarian. > that he had been held accountable for his decision to destroy other people’s lives in order to protect his business, rather than being able to look the other way, as so many successful tech C.E.O.’s do > If there was one thing that stood out, it was Ulbricht’s inability to see how his creation was being used for evil, even when he was the one committing the sin > In the Age of Trump, Silicon Valley’s job is no longer to move fast and break things. Instead, it is to consider how its technologies can be used for horrendous evil. Sadly, Ross Ulbricht didn’t learn this until he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
- tptacek 9y agoI don't think "drug war fanboy" is a reasonable inference to draw from this, and I don't perceive any of the support for prohibition that you do.
- cortesoft 9y agoYeah, I am pretty sure the 'evil' the article is talking about is the hiring of hitman to kill people. I am pretty sure we can all agree that is bad.
- XorNot 9y agoYeah everyone who "has an issue" with coverage of Silk Road or the treatment of Ulbricht seems disturbingly eager to gloss over him trying to have people killed.
- 55555 9y agoThere are some people who remain open to the possibility that he never actually believed that people were being assassinated. It seemed to me that the whole assassination thing was a barely believable backstory used for a shakedown. Ulbricht conceivably paid the ransom to prevent the leak of user data, knowing full well that nobody was being killed. I came to this conclusion after reading a lot about this story; not just headlines (I did not read this article however). I'm just explaining that many people are not just "glossing over" that. But who knows what really happened. In the event that he thought someone really was being killed, it doesn't detract from the motivations he had in the beginning. Power corrupts, he created a monster, etc.
- tptacek 9y agoI know I can't write a comment that will settle this particular controversy but I feel compelled to point out that it's only on an internet message board that someone could believe that an elaborate shakedown involving the creation a record of having ordered and verified multiple assassinations, a shakedown in which your eventual vindication depends on a favorable account from the person shaking you down, is the less likely explanation of events than someone simply ordering someone's assassination --- which, if you follow the news, is something that happens all the time, and something that almost always has this exact outcome. This particular debate reminds me of the epistemological certainty people had about Hans Reiser's serial killer friend, and the notion that the police were fixated on Reiser and not the serial killer because they were put off by nerds.
- zkms 9y agoI don't gloss over it, but like I explained here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14216073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14216073, he was never formally charged nor convicted of it, there were multiple federal agents (Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force IV) whose corruptness was intimately involved with the hitmen incident, and finally, violence in the drugs trade is a product of prohibition, not one inherent to darknet drug markets or the drug trade in general. Tbh after this nonsense happened I'm utterly sure that everyone involved in darknet markets firmly avoids doing anything involving hitmen anyway, given how literally every so-called "hitman" online is either a fed, a scammer, or a corrupt fed.
- MichaelGG 9y agoThough wasn't that because the targeted person was threatening to harm thousands of other people? Edit: Nevermind, this is one of the other hits. I was thinking of the "Chemist" one. Certainly killing the guy over money isn't right.
- throwaway287391 9y agoThen could you please explain how you interpret the phrasing "college-aged line of argumentation" used to describe the arguments against prohibition? I don't see any reason to say "college-aged" other than to casually dismiss these arguments as being childish (without actually having the courage to argue the opposite side).
- tptacek 9y agoHis arguments can be childish and their implications still correct. The strength of an argument is orthogonal to its consequences. It's easy to formulate a bad argument for a valid idea. I don't know how many more ways to say that I can come up with.
- zkms 9y agoThe author literally gloats that Ulbricht will never live outside a concrete box, as due punishment ("he had been held accountable") for the sole "sin" (his word, not mine) of creating a drug marketplace. There is no mention that the internet hitmen saga is a predictable and avoidable negative effect of prohibition (having to resolve disputes by extrajudicial violence instead of having access to lawyers/courts/arbitration), there's no mention that none of the murders-for-hire had actually been done (every internet hitman is a fed and/or scammer) and he, AFAICT, hasn't even been convicted of the procuring murder charges.
- tptacek 9y agoThe article makes fun of the fact that the murders didn't take place, and were instead faked using canned food. I think you're reading into this a bit. (As I said upthread: you're incorrect about him never being confronted with the murder allegation in court).
- rsynnott 9y agoI mean, they were selling fentanyl. You don't have to be some sort of hard-line prohibitionist to think that making your living selling fentanyl to kids over the Internet is not in society's best interest.
- mirimir 9y agoOK, so I don't know the specifics. But the major problem with fentanyl is thinking that you're buying heroin, or some other weaker opiate, or another drug entirely. If the seller is honest about what they're selling, and clearly discusses safe dosages, fentanyl arguably isn't especially dangerous.
- DanBC 9y agoFentanyl is also dangerous because the lethal dose is close to the recreational dose so even knowing the purity and doses is risky.
- mirimir 9y agoThat doesn't seem to be the case. I find that the therapeutic index is ~270, vs ~70 for morphine and ~25 for heroin. The potency, however, is dramatically greater. So I would expect that dealers would cut it enough that easily measurable dosages would be required. It is notoriously hard to uniformly cut drugs as potent as fentanyl or LSD, I admit.
- DanBC 9y agoAh, thanks for this. The last bit of research I know about cutting agents is quite old now. http://www.cph.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/cut-a-guide-to-the-adulterants-bulking-agents-and-other-contaminants-found-in-illicit-drugs.pdf http://www.cph.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/cut-a-guide... That only has a couple of mentions of fentanyl, and seems to suggest that fentanyl is found in stuff that's sold as heroin.
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- olieidel 9y agoWired has quite a long piece on Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht [1], definitely a good read. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-untold-story/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-untold-story/
- mirimir 9y agoI've read other Wired coverage that was decent, but this article is horrible. > Silk Road was hidden in the so-called dark web, a part of the Internet that’s invisible to search engines like Google. That's not true. I've had a few onions that Google indexed, via various tor2web proxies. > To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software. OK, that's technically correct. But why not just say "Tor"? > Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, ... It wasn't anonymous, because you had to create an account, associate it with a Bitcoin address, and provide a mailing address to sellers. And Bitcoin payments are not at all "traceless", unless you mix adequately and use Tor.
- gotothedoctor 9y agoI am often critical of Nick Bilton's opinions, but he is not a "drug war fanboy" by any stretch of the imagination; nor does he have a "fundamentalist prohibitionist ideology." If Silk Road did not facilitate the sale of drugs at all, but still enabled the sale of guns, murder for hire, poison, weapons, child porn, would anyone defend it, at all?
- yock 9y agoI'd defend the sale of anything which doesn't inherently infringe on the rights of others. A couple of the items on your list fit that category, others don't. The issue here is what reasoning we use to prohibit a thing, and when those reasons extend to attempting to prevent harms we tend to have problems.
- zkms 9y agoThe production or use of {murder-for-hire, weapons, poisons, child abuse imagery} all involve grave and inherent harm -- regardless of the laws that regulate/prohibit them. The harm that drug use/manufacture causes is a lot more a function of the relevant policies/laws than the actual chemicals themselves. Indeed, most of the harm from illicit drug use comes from: 1. dose/concentration uncertainty or potential contamination with higher-potency drugs -- like unexpected fentanyl inside heroin 2. contamination with unwanted or dangerous chemicals (from manufacturing / distribution processes) -- such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP or cutting agents 3. Poly-drug use: combining any two of {opioids, benzos, alcohol} to exploit synergistic effects -- which can easily result in respiratory depression 4. Designer drugs / research chemicals -- the result of someone trying to make a drug that works on a given neurobiological target but without the result being similar enough to the molecules on a Controlled Substances list. The problem lies in the fact that many drugs with long histories of human use (opium, marijuana) have long histories of human use, and so they've been tested extensively and are known not to produce horrid adverse effects. It is hard to replicate the effects of a compound that has been selected and tested for efficacy and safety -- while being forced to make significant changes to the molecule. Examples of that include synthetic cannabinoids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids), which are a lot more dangerous than actual marijuana. All of these are either caused or significantly worsened by prohibition and can be much more readily avoided without prohibition. Those harms are not inherent to drug use; indeed, people who have adequate access to pharmaceutical-grade opioids can safely use them for decades without any major medical complications.
- wutbrodo 9y agoSeriously, this is one of the worst written articles I've read in a while (though I gather that it's an excerpt from a book: it's also worse than any book I've read in a while).
- darkr 9y ago> But Ulbricht wasn’t simply a precocious and edgy libertarian. He was also a gifted, self-taught computer programmer. Is it just me, or is the word "gifted" thrown around a bit too easily these days?
- tptacek 9y agoIt definitely was in this case.
- mirimir 9y agoHe made many truly stupid mistakes. But the article is generally clueless. Sure, the Silk Road server leaked the IP of that cafe. But adversaries wouldn't have known that unless his onion server had leaked its physical IP in an Apache error header. And then there were the posts on Stack Exchange and Bitcoin Forum that leaked his real name. Oh, and those fake IDs. Homeland Security found them, before the FBI had a clear bead on him, and he told them that he might have bought them on Silk Road.
- tptacek 9y agoIt's not that, it's just that Ulbricht and his team exhibited journeyman competence at their best. What implementation feature of Silk Road gives you the impression that it was out of the reach of pretty much any salaried Bay Area developer in the market? I'm simply agreeing: there's no evidence for Ulbricht's technical "gifts".
- cyberpunk 9y agoNone, right, but tptacek -- it's time to give this one up... I stopped getting annoyed a while ago about this stuff and I'm happier for it.. I mean.. Look. The difference between someone who, to us, just "threw up some crap php cms over tor then ended up having to outsource most of the technical 'tasks' involved in running said site to people who were barely better than he was, who then ended up blackmailing him while he was over his head" and ... say, the majority of us who could actually make such a site in a weekend completely anonymously (tech wise anyway, marketing/ad is a diff game I guess and today the competition has guns) is only even barely understood by most of the 'technical community' even. What do you expect journos respewing AP, making clickbaity titles will people such as Ulbricht other than 'genius' or whatever? This guy installed a browser plugin and ran mod_php on a VPS, d00d. To the dailymail or vanityfair, the difference between that and say, what the GPU compiler opti dudes at intel do is zero and we will NEVER be able to explain to difference to those people. All I'm saying is; give up -- it won't stop being annoying, next year another 19 year old will bruteforce "administrator/password" and get into a receptionist's email at NASA and then be jailed for 20 years as the 'hacker of the century'; desktop support will still wear 'genius' t-shirts and you'll still be expected to fix some 2000's printer for an aunt, and when you can't you will lose respect from your non-technical family even if your dayjob is programming distributed systems for 6 figures...
- angry-hacker 9y agoI only ask why is it necessary to write that garbage: ... it is a recruiting device for ISIS and undeniably helped elect Donald Trump. Similarly, Tinder was originally intended to allow unattached college kids to meet one another and maybe go on a date. The service has since been used by chauvinists to prey on women. Facebook’s newsfeed, likewise, was infiltrated by Russian operatives who fabricated stories that were used to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
- djrogers 9y agoYou need to call out the quote from the article, otherwise your post reads like a condemnation of the article as a 'recruiting device for ISIS' which 'undeniably helped elect Donald Trump'...
- 55555 9y ago> [Tinder] has since been used by chauvinists to prey on women. Um, how about all the women who use it to 'prey' on men? Who writes this drivel?
- mdb333 9y agoThis is just a teaser for the book obviously... as all this has already been written about multiple times over elsewhere. Perhaps the only additive here is the parallels they draw to SV starups in general and how business itself has become increasing ruthless and universally corrupting; turning wideeyed entrepreneurs into ravenous cash-eating beasts. Seems to beg the question to whether Ross was any different...
- sushisource 9y agoWhoa, that took a weird turn at the end: > But why would North Korea or Iran build a nuclear weapon when either can drive countless cars into one another at 100 miles per hour? What in the world is that about?