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What happens when someone creates a decentralized darknet marketplace that transacts using zero knowledge proofs? This is such a waste of resources. Just make a

What happens when someone creates a decentralized darknet marketplace that transacts using zero knowledge proofs? This is such a waste of resources. Just make all drugs legal and regulate them like anything else. How many times have I bought weed off a dealer in the last two years? The answer is zero, because I purchase my weed legally from a reputable company that follows all applicable regulations.

onion2k 6y ago
This is such a waste of resources. It's a very profitable waste of resources.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  It's really not DEA budget 2B in 2018 Cash + property that can be liquidated: 340M in 2018
  - gruez 6y ago
    The implication is that it's profitable for the contractors, not for the public.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    It means the public lost 2.34B and DEA gained 2.34B
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      There are a lot of people on HN that would take serious issue with any implication that any given tax dollar has anything less than a net-neutral effect for the taxpayers as a whole. Oddly they seem to keep really quite when the topic of the war on drugs comes up.
      - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
        To be fair saying something is not profitable doesn't mean that it isn't a net-benefit for the country. I personally don't think that our current approach to drugs produces a net-benefit, but figuring out the true effects of alternatives is really not simple at all.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    It's profitable for the footsoldiers, just not the taxpayer. Pro cops get paid bank.
- e40 6y ago
  It's a zero sum game, though. One profit is another's loss.
  - pfundstein 6y ago
    Not in terms of lives lost. The war on drugs is a waste of money, time, and lives. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
    - e40 6y ago
      I completely agree. I was responding to this: > It's a very profitable waste of resources. Which implied that someone was profiting from the war on drugs, and my point was that many people lose in the war on drugs.
vmception 6y ago
These reasons are why these busts have to get more elaborate and have to be a precision strike all at once, because the governments know that they get one chance before the industry hardens itself in reaction. The best practices are completely known, people just have no pressure to implement them until external pressure reveals itself. Right now the user experiences suck for more secure things. Monero multisignature is hardly refined, so it cannot replace centralized escrow just yet, but now people might prioritize developing it. For example. This is antifragility in play, and a war of attrition for the state: the costs to make the busts get higher and the take gets smaller.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jimbob45 6y ago
>all drugs Maybe not all drugs. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater here. There are very dangerous drugs that can cause addiction such that people will kill for more (and can never get enough). That said, wiping away weed, peyote, and LSD from the list of criminal substances should make the DEA’s job much more realistic.
- 8note 6y ago
  Doctors can already prescribe dangerous and addictive drugs. I don't see why we can't let them also prescribe other dangerous and addictive drugs.
  - pfundstein 6y ago
    Who's gonna offer those doctors kickbacks to sell heroin baggies? Ohh right probably pharma companies [1] [2] [3] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m409 https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m409 [3] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/opioids-doctors-prescriptions-payments/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/opioids-d...
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      If you take a snapshot of the state of things at the height of opioid prescriptions and a snapshot now it's hard to say that it wasn't a hell of a lot better. People weren't ODing or engaging in petty crime with anywhere near the same frequency when they could get their fix from their doctor. The feds cracked down and people turned to the black market and that gets us to where we are today. Obviously manufacturers giving doctors kickbacks for getting people onto addictive substances is far from ideal but the enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.
- syshum 6y ago
  Punish Abuse not use. While yes there are very dangerous drugs that can cause addiction there is ZERO evidence that large scale criminal prohibition reduces the number of people addicted to those drugs, assists anyone to become clean or does anything at all to resolve the issue of addiction In contrast there is A LOT of indications that even for very dangerous drugs that can cause addiction criminal drug prohibition makes the problem WORSE, creates worse outcomes for the general public, erodes basic human rights, and wastes resources that should be put into treatment instead of criminalization
Aerroon 6y ago
I've actually run into issues with drug laws from a side I never even thought about: prescription medication. I have asthma, but I don't have health insurance. Asthma inhalers in my country require a prescription. I know what inhaler I need and I know how to use it, but I cannot legally purchase it. I have to go make a doctor's appointment, pay them a bunch of money so they can write a note that permits me to buy that inhaler. It's a lot of hassle and some cost. The end result is that I just don't have an inhaler. If I get difficulty with breathing I'll just drink coffee and wait until it goes away. Without prescriptions being required for something like this (eg more relaxed drug laws), I wouldn't have this issue.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  I ran into the same issue. And Dr.s offices have pretty much become churn factories for insurance billing, so I hate the fact that I have to go through them. To get around them, I found that Mexican and Indian pharmacies would send me inhalers. The only issue is that it took so long to get to the US, but it seemed to be as good as the US stuff.
- agency 6y ago
  The comedian Hannibal Buress (who has asthma) has a funny bit about this in his most recent special [1]. He talks about how asthma gets a raw deal compared to other illnesses and isn't taken seriously at all (nerdy stereotypes etc) and how insane it is that you need to keep renewing a prescription for such a necessary and life-saving substance. As if there are people out there getting messed up on albuterol. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVc4-05Agf0&t=18m33s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVc4-05Agf0&t=18m33s
  - derefr 6y ago
    You know what's bizarre for requiring a prescription? Peridex — chlorhexidine mouthwash. You can buy chlorhexidine gluconate concentrate (which is still not all that "concentrated" — something like 2% w/v) in the form of a medical or veterinary scrub — or even a floor cleaner — over the counter. But dilute it to 0.15% (at which concentration it would now become not-painful to put it in your mouth; but also would cause it to expire after a couple of days) — and then add the stabilizers and preservatives to it necessary to have it last a few months at STP? Well, now it's a prescription product. As far as I'm aware, there are no risks from "chronic" use of Peridex as one's every-day mouthwash. Chlorhexidine does the same thing the alcohol in regular mouthwash does — it kills bacteria in your mouth. The only difference is that chlorhexidine sticks around keeping your mucus membranes aseptic for around eight hours (if you don't eat anything), compared to an alcoholic mouthwash's couple-of-minutes. So it actually protects you on a long-enough timescale for your body to get in there and clear out any biofilms causing you gingivitis, canker sores, enamel erosion, etc. — rather than just treading water in the fight against those. I almost wonder whether the mouthwash companies are in some sort of mutually-assured destruction arrangement, where they all would like chlorhexidine mouthwash to be something they could sell OTC, but they don't want their competitor to be the first to sell it OTC (and win the market by advertising increased effectiveness), and they're willing to lobby to keep it prescription-only so that that doesn't happen.
Klinky 6y ago
I think decriminalization and treatment programs are the answer. I don't think allowing direct sales of things like fentanyl, meth, and coke are the answer though. Perhaps treatment programs can provide safe product to addicts, but picking it up causally at a local dispensary seems a bit much. They're just not on the same level as weed.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  Indeed, Portugal did this and it's working [1], it's time to face the fact that the War On Drugs is a waste of time and money. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
  - sbarre 6y ago
    People often cite Portugal in these discussions, but isn't that citing one example out of, what, hundreds(?) of societies around the world that all have different values, contexts, social structures and constructs, etc... Don't get me wrong, I also believe the war on drugs is probably doing more harm than good overall, but I also don't think that we can naively assume that "let's do what Portugal did" will just work for everyone.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      Portugal AFAIK ain't legalizing a thing, just making possession a non-crime. And obviously very limited possession. Which is a progress compared to US' creation of whole jail-for-money industry in the past where few joints could easily ruin rest of your life, but far cry from what consumers really want - just go to shop and buy the god damn thing, legally, with safety and purity guarantees, and all constraints applied (ie age). Ie if you want to smoke a joint, you still have to go to same illegal drug dealers as everywhere else. Just police won't bother you if they find you with that joint, they will just take it from you (some places like Switzerland can put a fine on top of that, decriminalization has many flavors around the world).
    - 6y ago
annoyingnoob 6y ago
In my state, weed dealers can offer a better experience than a retail shop because of too much regulation. The black market still thrives and quality/trust is not an issue. There is a balance somewhere, legalization with over regulation isn't quite the right answer.
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  Weed is kind of a special case because you pretty much know what you are getting just by looking at it. This is not the case for most other drugs.
  - shoulderfake 6y ago
    Not quite. A lot of weed commercial weed is sprayed to smitherins with chemicals and actually just tastes and smokes really poorly. You cant tell that just by looking at it. Here in Canada, every single order I've gotten from government and private licensed shops has been average quality at best. Dealers have at least as good quality.
gexla 6y ago
This is a decentralized market? Drug markets have a lot of links. The feds likely found a way to uncover one node and followed that thread. I wouldn't assume that the "darknet" itself was compromised. There are still lots of bad targets out there which have long been in operation. The cops found another way to get inside the network.
cortesoft 6y ago
There are still physical goods being exchanged. Someone is selling the product and someone is receiving it. They can still track people via that.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  Easier said than done. The goods are usually exchanged via post and cryptocurrency. The seller generally drops off the goods in random post boxes using prepaid [express] envelopes and usually disguising the packages in some form such as by masquerading as an ebay seller or with a real/fake company as the source address. This is very difficult to track, especially if the seller does a good job distributing the drop offs over a wide area and by using a large set of random source addresses. Of course, if the packages are detected in the postal system the recipient can be unmasked, but small time buyers are of little interest to authorities. There's nothing that the authorities can do to unmask the sellers even with all the information a buyer is able to provide them.
ARandomerDude 6y ago
> Just make all drugs legal and regulate them like anything else. When those regulations are broken, should we just decriminalize that? I bring this up because "enforcement is a waste of resources," consistently applied, quickly approaches anarchy. We need other reasons for deciding whether a behavior should be criminal.
- MacsHeadroom 6y ago
  Yes, we should. Marijuana went criminal > faux "medical" > decriminalized > legal. Now, all tryptamine and phenylamine plants and fungi are well along in the same process; with Ketamine, LSD, and MDMA following close behind. Anarchy isn't problematic. What is problematic is sudden anarchy where complex systems used to exist. The way to avoid that is to loosen restrictions iteratively.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Can you find a victim without doing tons of mental gymnastics? If not then it's not worth the tax dollars to send the cops after it. And FWIW anarchy is a lot like children and terrorists. It makes a good heuristic for detecting unsound arguments.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    Yes. I have family members whose brains were damaged from methamphetamine abuse. I had another family member who died from opioid addiction. Not all drugs are equal.
    - intotheabyss 6y ago
      I have a friend whos a raging alcoholic who's almost died from alcohol intoxication, and I have a cousin who has overdosed on prescription pain killers. I also know a few acquaintances who have died from prescription fentanyl. The answer here isn't to make alcohol illegal, or to ban prescription pain killers, because that would surely exacerbate the problem. I don't know why Americans seem to think that banning substances and jailing people who use them is the answer to this problem.
akvadrako 6y ago
> What happens when someone creates a decentralized darknet marketplace that transacts using zero knowledge proofs? You still need a market for reputation; how do you trust a vendor? How do you know decentralized reviews are not fake?
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  You can't. But you can trust that negative reviews are not fake. No one would give themselves a negative review on purpose. And this is key. I worked out these problems a few years ago, but never followed up. Both due to lack of ability and due to, y'know, enjoying being able to sleep at night without wondering whether it's my last day on this pillow.
  - ukoki 6y ago
    Competitors will give someone a fake negative review... it happens all the time on Amazon
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      You’d have to choose to do business with a competitor. And that won’t happen more than once.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        Or do business with any newbie on the network, who might be a competitor. Or do business with any customer who gets their account hacked.
    - notional 6y ago
      In this world the customer base is a lot smaller. If there is a question about that reviewer being unauthentic, a request to see a label, or tx block is straightforward way to weed out bad actors. It's a lot harder to get away with fraud in a smaller customer base operation and the people who run the marketplaces are not interested in allowing fraud to persist, they also have an incentive to squash that, unlike amazon.
bawolff 6y ago
Its unclear from the article, but it sounds like what happened is they seized some servers that had address info of some drug dealers. Zero knowledge proofs aren't really relavent. If the market works in such a way it needs the address, zkp's wont change that. If its just a middle man, then old fashioned public key crypto would have been sufficient. (If the site was taken over for an active attack, then MITM is a possibility, but there are things you can do to make that detectable if you have out of band communications)
UrSuchAGenius 6y ago
> This is such a waste of resources. Just make all drugs legal and regulate them... Everybody knows that, what you don't realize is that drugs are the perfect excuse for many things.
brightball 6y ago
The regulations on anything that’s so addictive it’s debilitating would probably be to make it illegal. I realize it’s not the case for all drugs, but a lot of them fall under that umbrella.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  So liquor and oxycontin?
metadatabad 6y ago
It's extremely unsettling that my tax dollars go to waste like this to essentially ruin someone's life. The people now have records and all the unnecessary paperwork to go along with it. The furthest I would be willing to compromise with this regime (won't call them a proper government) is to allow them to tax our substances. It's better than what they are getting as it is, because all they are doing right now is locking poor, innocent people up. Prohibition and criminalization of mere substances never has, and will never work for us. Everyone I know who wishes to take drugs does so without as much as a single thought to the law.
- notional 6y ago
  But this feeds to prison industrial complex and having private prisons in your district is a good way to raise campaign funds from those lobbies. It's in the (certain) lawmakers interests to keep the war on drugs going so they don't lose their own dealer.
  - kryogen1c 6y ago
    > But this feeds to prison industrial complex i wish people would stop saying this. it draws attention to wealth and corporatism, which is not in any way the problem. for-profit prisons are a solution to an _already existing_ problem, which is the government and it's legal system generating record numbers of prisoners. the war on drugs has caused more harm and destruction in america, mexico, and south american drug countries than everything short of the bloodiest wars in history. the scope is staggering. TWOD has racist roots, it widened the schism between police and policed, it entrenched generational poverty in poor neighborhoods by destroying families for non-violent crimes, exploded the prison population, set back the medicinal research of THC and psychedelics, aided and abetted the homelessness problem, and surely more. the elevator pitch to fixing BLM issues is ending the war on drugs. EDIT: oh lets not forget no-knock warrants or civil asset forfeiture.
    - DenisM 6y ago
      Re civil forfeiture, I dunno if you saw this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana
HashingtheCode 6y ago
darkweb <> weed darkweb = everything illegal in todays society

onion2k 6y ago

This is such a waste of resources. It's a very profitable waste of resources.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
It's really not DEA budget 2B in 2018 Cash + property that can be liquidated: 340M in 2018
- gruez 6y ago
  The implication is that it's profitable for the contractors, not for the public.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  It means the public lost 2.34B and DEA gained 2.34B
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    There are a lot of people on HN that would take serious issue with any implication that any given tax dollar has anything less than a net-neutral effect for the taxpayers as a whole. Oddly they seem to keep really quite when the topic of the war on drugs comes up.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
      To be fair saying something is not profitable doesn't mean that it isn't a net-benefit for the country. I personally don't think that our current approach to drugs produces a net-benefit, but figuring out the true effects of alternatives is really not simple at all.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  It's profitable for the footsoldiers, just not the taxpayer. Pro cops get paid bank.
e40 6y ago
It's a zero sum game, though. One profit is another's loss.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  Not in terms of lives lost. The war on drugs is a waste of money, time, and lives. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
  - e40 6y ago
    I completely agree. I was responding to this: > It's a very profitable waste of resources. Which implied that someone was profiting from the war on drugs, and my point was that many people lose in the war on drugs.

vmception 6y ago

These reasons are why these busts have to get more elaborate and have to be a precision strike all at once, because the governments know that they get one chance before the industry hardens itself in reaction. The best practices are completely known, people just have no pressure to implement them until external pressure reveals itself. Right now the user experiences suck for more secure things. Monero multisignature is hardly refined, so it cannot replace centralized escrow just yet, but now people might prioritize developing it. For example. This is antifragility in play, and a war of attrition for the state: the costs to make the busts get higher and the take gets smaller.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jimbob45 6y ago

>all drugs Maybe not all drugs. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater here. There are very dangerous drugs that can cause addiction such that people will kill for more (and can never get enough). That said, wiping away weed, peyote, and LSD from the list of criminal substances should make the DEA’s job much more realistic.

8note 6y ago
Doctors can already prescribe dangerous and addictive drugs. I don't see why we can't let them also prescribe other dangerous and addictive drugs.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  Who's gonna offer those doctors kickbacks to sell heroin baggies? Ohh right probably pharma companies [1] [2] [3] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m409 https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m409 [3] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/opioids-doctors-prescriptions-payments/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/opioids-d...
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    If you take a snapshot of the state of things at the height of opioid prescriptions and a snapshot now it's hard to say that it wasn't a hell of a lot better. People weren't ODing or engaging in petty crime with anywhere near the same frequency when they could get their fix from their doctor. The feds cracked down and people turned to the black market and that gets us to where we are today. Obviously manufacturers giving doctors kickbacks for getting people onto addictive substances is far from ideal but the enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.
syshum 6y ago
Punish Abuse not use. While yes there are very dangerous drugs that can cause addiction there is ZERO evidence that large scale criminal prohibition reduces the number of people addicted to those drugs, assists anyone to become clean or does anything at all to resolve the issue of addiction In contrast there is A LOT of indications that even for very dangerous drugs that can cause addiction criminal drug prohibition makes the problem WORSE, creates worse outcomes for the general public, erodes basic human rights, and wastes resources that should be put into treatment instead of criminalization

Aerroon 6y ago

I've actually run into issues with drug laws from a side I never even thought about: prescription medication. I have asthma, but I don't have health insurance. Asthma inhalers in my country require a prescription. I know what inhaler I need and I know how to use it, but I cannot legally purchase it. I have to go make a doctor's appointment, pay them a bunch of money so they can write a note that permits me to buy that inhaler. It's a lot of hassle and some cost. The end result is that I just don't have an inhaler. If I get difficulty with breathing I'll just drink coffee and wait until it goes away. Without prescriptions being required for something like this (eg more relaxed drug laws), I wouldn't have this issue.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
I ran into the same issue. And Dr.s offices have pretty much become churn factories for insurance billing, so I hate the fact that I have to go through them. To get around them, I found that Mexican and Indian pharmacies would send me inhalers. The only issue is that it took so long to get to the US, but it seemed to be as good as the US stuff.
agency 6y ago
The comedian Hannibal Buress (who has asthma) has a funny bit about this in his most recent special [1]. He talks about how asthma gets a raw deal compared to other illnesses and isn't taken seriously at all (nerdy stereotypes etc) and how insane it is that you need to keep renewing a prescription for such a necessary and life-saving substance. As if there are people out there getting messed up on albuterol. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVc4-05Agf0&t=18m33s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVc4-05Agf0&t=18m33s
- derefr 6y ago
  You know what's bizarre for requiring a prescription? Peridex — chlorhexidine mouthwash. You can buy chlorhexidine gluconate concentrate (which is still not all that "concentrated" — something like 2% w/v) in the form of a medical or veterinary scrub — or even a floor cleaner — over the counter. But dilute it to 0.15% (at which concentration it would now become not-painful to put it in your mouth; but also would cause it to expire after a couple of days) — and then add the stabilizers and preservatives to it necessary to have it last a few months at STP? Well, now it's a prescription product. As far as I'm aware, there are no risks from "chronic" use of Peridex as one's every-day mouthwash. Chlorhexidine does the same thing the alcohol in regular mouthwash does — it kills bacteria in your mouth. The only difference is that chlorhexidine sticks around keeping your mucus membranes aseptic for around eight hours (if you don't eat anything), compared to an alcoholic mouthwash's couple-of-minutes. So it actually protects you on a long-enough timescale for your body to get in there and clear out any biofilms causing you gingivitis, canker sores, enamel erosion, etc. — rather than just treading water in the fight against those. I almost wonder whether the mouthwash companies are in some sort of mutually-assured destruction arrangement, where they all would like chlorhexidine mouthwash to be something they could sell OTC, but they don't want their competitor to be the first to sell it OTC (and win the market by advertising increased effectiveness), and they're willing to lobby to keep it prescription-only so that that doesn't happen.

Klinky 6y ago

I think decriminalization and treatment programs are the answer. I don't think allowing direct sales of things like fentanyl, meth, and coke are the answer though. Perhaps treatment programs can provide safe product to addicts, but picking it up causally at a local dispensary seems a bit much. They're just not on the same level as weed.

pfundstein 6y ago
Indeed, Portugal did this and it's working [1], it's time to face the fact that the War On Drugs is a waste of time and money. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
- sbarre 6y ago
  People often cite Portugal in these discussions, but isn't that citing one example out of, what, hundreds(?) of societies around the world that all have different values, contexts, social structures and constructs, etc... Don't get me wrong, I also believe the war on drugs is probably doing more harm than good overall, but I also don't think that we can naively assume that "let's do what Portugal did" will just work for everyone.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    Portugal AFAIK ain't legalizing a thing, just making possession a non-crime. And obviously very limited possession. Which is a progress compared to US' creation of whole jail-for-money industry in the past where few joints could easily ruin rest of your life, but far cry from what consumers really want - just go to shop and buy the god damn thing, legally, with safety and purity guarantees, and all constraints applied (ie age). Ie if you want to smoke a joint, you still have to go to same illegal drug dealers as everywhere else. Just police won't bother you if they find you with that joint, they will just take it from you (some places like Switzerland can put a fine on top of that, decriminalization has many flavors around the world).
  - 6y ago

annoyingnoob 6y ago

In my state, weed dealers can offer a better experience than a retail shop because of too much regulation. The black market still thrives and quality/trust is not an issue. There is a balance somewhere, legalization with over regulation isn't quite the right answer.

travisoneill1 6y ago
Weed is kind of a special case because you pretty much know what you are getting just by looking at it. This is not the case for most other drugs.
- shoulderfake 6y ago
  Not quite. A lot of weed commercial weed is sprayed to smitherins with chemicals and actually just tastes and smokes really poorly. You cant tell that just by looking at it. Here in Canada, every single order I've gotten from government and private licensed shops has been average quality at best. Dealers have at least as good quality.

gexla 6y ago

This is a decentralized market? Drug markets have a lot of links. The feds likely found a way to uncover one node and followed that thread. I wouldn't assume that the "darknet" itself was compromised. There are still lots of bad targets out there which have long been in operation. The cops found another way to get inside the network.

cortesoft 6y ago

There are still physical goods being exchanged. Someone is selling the product and someone is receiving it. They can still track people via that.

pfundstein 6y ago
Easier said than done. The goods are usually exchanged via post and cryptocurrency. The seller generally drops off the goods in random post boxes using prepaid [express] envelopes and usually disguising the packages in some form such as by masquerading as an ebay seller or with a real/fake company as the source address. This is very difficult to track, especially if the seller does a good job distributing the drop offs over a wide area and by using a large set of random source addresses. Of course, if the packages are detected in the postal system the recipient can be unmasked, but small time buyers are of little interest to authorities. There's nothing that the authorities can do to unmask the sellers even with all the information a buyer is able to provide them.

ARandomerDude 6y ago

> Just make all drugs legal and regulate them like anything else. When those regulations are broken, should we just decriminalize that? I bring this up because "enforcement is a waste of resources," consistently applied, quickly approaches anarchy. We need other reasons for deciding whether a behavior should be criminal.

MacsHeadroom 6y ago
Yes, we should. Marijuana went criminal > faux "medical" > decriminalized > legal. Now, all tryptamine and phenylamine plants and fungi are well along in the same process; with Ketamine, LSD, and MDMA following close behind. Anarchy isn't problematic. What is problematic is sudden anarchy where complex systems used to exist. The way to avoid that is to loosen restrictions iteratively.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Can you find a victim without doing tons of mental gymnastics? If not then it's not worth the tax dollars to send the cops after it. And FWIW anarchy is a lot like children and terrorists. It makes a good heuristic for detecting unsound arguments.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Yes. I have family members whose brains were damaged from methamphetamine abuse. I had another family member who died from opioid addiction. Not all drugs are equal.
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    I have a friend whos a raging alcoholic who's almost died from alcohol intoxication, and I have a cousin who has overdosed on prescription pain killers. I also know a few acquaintances who have died from prescription fentanyl. The answer here isn't to make alcohol illegal, or to ban prescription pain killers, because that would surely exacerbate the problem. I don't know why Americans seem to think that banning substances and jailing people who use them is the answer to this problem.

akvadrako 6y ago

> What happens when someone creates a decentralized darknet marketplace that transacts using zero knowledge proofs? You still need a market for reputation; how do you trust a vendor? How do you know decentralized reviews are not fake?

sillysaurusx 6y ago
You can't. But you can trust that negative reviews are not fake. No one would give themselves a negative review on purpose. And this is key. I worked out these problems a few years ago, but never followed up. Both due to lack of ability and due to, y'know, enjoying being able to sleep at night without wondering whether it's my last day on this pillow.
- ukoki 6y ago
  Competitors will give someone a fake negative review... it happens all the time on Amazon
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    You’d have to choose to do business with a competitor. And that won’t happen more than once.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Or do business with any newbie on the network, who might be a competitor. Or do business with any customer who gets their account hacked.
  - notional 6y ago
    In this world the customer base is a lot smaller. If there is a question about that reviewer being unauthentic, a request to see a label, or tx block is straightforward way to weed out bad actors. It's a lot harder to get away with fraud in a smaller customer base operation and the people who run the marketplaces are not interested in allowing fraud to persist, they also have an incentive to squash that, unlike amazon.

bawolff 6y ago

Its unclear from the article, but it sounds like what happened is they seized some servers that had address info of some drug dealers. Zero knowledge proofs aren't really relavent. If the market works in such a way it needs the address, zkp's wont change that. If its just a middle man, then old fashioned public key crypto would have been sufficient. (If the site was taken over for an active attack, then MITM is a possibility, but there are things you can do to make that detectable if you have out of band communications)

UrSuchAGenius 6y ago

> This is such a waste of resources. Just make all drugs legal and regulate them... Everybody knows that, what you don't realize is that drugs are the perfect excuse for many things.

brightball 6y ago

The regulations on anything that’s so addictive it’s debilitating would probably be to make it illegal. I realize it’s not the case for all drugs, but a lot of them fall under that umbrella.

daniellarusso 6y ago
So liquor and oxycontin?

metadatabad 6y ago

It's extremely unsettling that my tax dollars go to waste like this to essentially ruin someone's life. The people now have records and all the unnecessary paperwork to go along with it. The furthest I would be willing to compromise with this regime (won't call them a proper government) is to allow them to tax our substances. It's better than what they are getting as it is, because all they are doing right now is locking poor, innocent people up. Prohibition and criminalization of mere substances never has, and will never work for us. Everyone I know who wishes to take drugs does so without as much as a single thought to the law.

notional 6y ago
But this feeds to prison industrial complex and having private prisons in your district is a good way to raise campaign funds from those lobbies. It's in the (certain) lawmakers interests to keep the war on drugs going so they don't lose their own dealer.
- kryogen1c 6y ago
  > But this feeds to prison industrial complex i wish people would stop saying this. it draws attention to wealth and corporatism, which is not in any way the problem. for-profit prisons are a solution to an _already existing_ problem, which is the government and it's legal system generating record numbers of prisoners. the war on drugs has caused more harm and destruction in america, mexico, and south american drug countries than everything short of the bloodiest wars in history. the scope is staggering. TWOD has racist roots, it widened the schism between police and policed, it entrenched generational poverty in poor neighborhoods by destroying families for non-violent crimes, exploded the prison population, set back the medicinal research of THC and psychedelics, aided and abetted the homelessness problem, and surely more. the elevator pitch to fixing BLM issues is ending the war on drugs. EDIT: oh lets not forget no-knock warrants or civil asset forfeiture.
  - DenisM 6y ago
    Re civil forfeiture, I dunno if you saw this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana

HashingtheCode 6y ago

darkweb <> weed darkweb = everything illegal in todays society