11 ms·

Using Silk Road

368 points by HockeyPlayer 14y ago

damian2000 14y ago
Interesting video and article here from the point of view of Australian customs http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-05/dark-internet-linked-to-drug-seizure-spike/4410872 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-05/dark-internet-linked-t...
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Slightly OT: "Computer expert" Chris McDonald is actually Professor Chris McDonald. He holds appointments at the University of Western Australia and at Dartmouth. I was lucky to have him as a lecturer for several course and as my honours supervisor. http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~chris/ http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~chris/ He's nominated for teaching awards with comical regularity. If you ever get a chance to take one of his courses at UWA or Dartmouth, take it.
- gwern 14y ago
  I greatly appreciate Australia and NZ's police agencies being public and specific about interception & arrest rates; I wish America could be as informative - as things stand, I have no references on either.
veb 14y ago
That was an awesome read. Always fun to read about drugs, but this seems like it was written quite a while ago... wonder if anything has changed since.
- drakeandrews 14y ago
  I was written May 2011 from the top of the article, but some of the footnotes have been updated recently.
- xaver 14y ago
  A lot of the stuff on the cypherpunks was added fairly recently I believe. At least, I don't remember those sections being there the last time I read it. Gwern has an interesting approach to writing articles where he continually updates and adds to them so that they improve over time. See: http://www.gwern.net/About#long-content http://www.gwern.net/About#long-content
cnp 14y ago
Everyone needs to read the rest of the site. It's one of the most interesting domains I've ever come across. Fascinating guy through and through, and his short stories are excellent.
- vitno 14y ago
  One of my favorite sites. If you aren't familiar with it already, it will probably lead you to lesswrong.com. Also worth a good amount of time input.
  - tekromancr 14y ago
    Lesswrong is a weird place. I can read an awesome, insightful article one moment, then something completely bat-shit insane the next.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      Example of batsheet?
      - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
        http://www.target.com/p/batman-sheet-set-twin/-/A-13999144 http://www.target.com/p/batman-sheet-set-twin/-/A-13999144 Sorry, it had to be done.
      - alsothat 14y ago
        A good example of LW going off the deep end is "Roko's basilisk" and Yudkowsky's response http://kruel.co/2013/01/12/rokos-basilisk-everything-you-need-to-know/ http://kruel.co/2013/01/12/rokos-basilisk-everything-you-nee... http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
        Tichy 14y ago
        That sounds scary, but not crazy?
mrmagooey 14y ago
I wonder if the current little spike in the bitcoin price (from https://mtgox.com/ https://mtgox.com/) could be attributed to this article being posted on HN
- cnp 14y ago
  The Bitcoin price has been dramatically spiking for the past two weeks. Very curious as to why.
  - SlipperySlope 14y ago
    Look at the transaction volume as charted by blockchain.info. You will see a good correlation between that and the price of bitcoins. A good part of the recent bitcoin transaction volume is due to online gaming startups that use bitcoins, especially to work around US online gambling restrictions. The bitcoin economy is very rapidly growing from a miniscule base, first in illegal and gray-market trade, and then in international trade where low transaction costs and lack of credit card fraud appeal to global merchants.
  - pudquick 14y ago
    Both Mega and reddit have recetly announced acceptance of bitcoins for payment. Not saying that's the reason, but I'm sure it contributes.
  - csmattryder 14y ago
    Whatever it is, it's made a few people (myself included) rather rich. Bought a fair few BTC at ~1/6th of the current price, just trying to figure out when to cash it in.
- gwern 14y ago
  No. The price has been increasing gradually and abruptly for the last 2 or 3 months. As well, over the past 2 days GA says there's been 26,107 unique visitors to my Silk Road page; if 1% actually buys bitcoins (in line with the famous 1% rule of the Internet), that's just 260 people buying bitcoins. http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address= http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u... suggests that daily bitcoin blockchain transactions make up something like $8m; much of this is just people shuffling bitcoins around of course, but even so, 260 people aren't going to push the exchange rate to $29!
deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
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- cnp 14y ago
  The forum / feedback system WORKS. It pushes sketchy / lower-quality products out and if anything, that's why I feel Silk Road is a positive change in the ever-dangerous world of drugs. That said, there are many friends who I would hesitate to tell about the site; it's just too easy to get mixed up in more dangerous or addictive classes of drugs there. Be careful.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Man, SR is one of those things I look at in awe. I'm not sure I'd ever have the cojones to have something shipped to me... The comments on the blog post are sad in a "Good god people are effing stupid" sort of way. Also, if you're getting on Tor, I recommend Tails [1]. Most people aren't aware of all of the things they need to be wary of when getting on Tor and not leaking their identity. [1] Tails: http://tails.boum.org http://tails.boum.org
- barbs 14y ago
  A similar linux distribution: Liberté. This one's based off of Gentoo (Tails is based off of Debian) http://dee.su/liberte http://dee.su/liberte
SlipperySlope 14y ago
What is most interesting about this article is how to set up the Tor browser. Privacy is very, very, important - especially for those who are oppressed, and even for those living in democracies.
sruser 14y ago
(throwaway account) I've spent over $50,000 USD on SR in the past year, and I'm happy to answer any questions people have about the site or community.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Presumably you are either a dealer, or you have a gigantic drug habit?
  - sruser 14y ago
    I'd prefer to answer questions about SR, not about myself.
    - fusiongyro 14y ago
      I think mentioning the $50K figure invites some questions.
      - sruser 14y ago
        I am not a dealer. As the OP said, I have a gigantic drug habit. I suspect that, like many HN readers, I am a young guy who works in technology and makes more money than is good for him. I am single and unattached, so I've got plenty of disposable income. And I seem to be good (so far) at remaining a stable, productive employee despite my habit.
        fusiongyro 14y ago
        Thanks. My curiosity is sated.
        b6 14y ago
        Please be very careful. <3.
handsomeransoms 14y ago
Silk Road is very interesting from a design perspective, particularly the way it leverages different open source cryptographic tools to satisfy its complex security/privacy/anonymity requirements. I gave a talk about this at the Oakland Cryptoparty back in October. The slides are a little patchy and based entirely on perusing the site (read: speculation), but it inspired a lively discussion from amongst all the participants. It seems there's nothing like illegal drugs and the black market to get people interested in learning more about crypto! I'm planning on giving an updated version of this talk at "SF Cryptoparty II" on March 23rd (attend or sign up to talk! https://cryptopartysf.org/ https://cryptopartysf.org/). I will definitely incorporate ideas from (and link back to) this article. Feedback appreciated! Slides: http://garrett.im/static/pdf/silkroad_oakland_cryptoparty_slides.pdf http://garrett.im/static/pdf/silkroad_oakland_cryptoparty_sl...
- gwern 14y ago
  I've read your slides. I think your Farmer's Market summary is outdated: it used Tor hidden service, for a short period only and after the investigation started (reading the indictment), and it's pretty clear now that Hushmail rolled over and then the garnered information was used to extract the Paypal & Western Union financial transactions. See my discussion of Farmer's Market in OP. Slide 14 should mention the SQL injection attack on SR back in November or December 2012; I also disagree that DDoSes would be ineffective. Slide 23: IIRC, someone has a verifiable anonymous mixer. I forget its name because it charges more than others. Slide 27: Mtgox has been hacked and lost bitcoins, but haven't they always made up their users' losses? That's pretty important.
cnp 14y ago
Here's an academic analysis of Silk Road. After crawling the site for a few months they came up with this: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-CyLab-12-018.pdf http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-... "Abstract We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods being sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics, and that most items sold are available for less than three weeks. The majority of sellers disappears within roughly three months of their arrival, but a core of 112 sellers has been present throughout our measurement interval. We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month; this corresponds to about USD 92,000 per month in commissions for the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over our measurement interval. We discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results, including ethical considerations for future research in this area."
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  $1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic. Still, it seems like the risk far outweighs the gain here.
  - OGinparadise 14y ago
    $1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic. apples and oranges. This is illegal and their take is maybe enough to pay one criminal lawyer for a month.
nannasin28 14y ago
number of sellers overall increasing over our measurement interval. http://www.hqew.net http://www.hqew.net
codygman 14y ago
It's very annoying that the back button doesn't work on your site.
- gwern 14y ago
  I didn't do anything to break it, and it seems to work fine in my Debian Iceweasel.
  - codygman 14y ago
    Fair enough, I'm using: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l Google Chrome Version 24.0.1312.57 Not sure why the back button doesn't work. Great site/content though! Just a minor annoyance that I thought was on purpose.
    - gwern 14y ago
      Well, if you figure out what was going on (could be Cloudflare doing optimization, or maybe Hacker News inserting a redirect?), please contact me. Since I'm on Iceweasel I don't always see issues in other browsers - for example, apparently all my MathML was broken for the longest time in Chromium because they just didn't support it.
A1kmm 14y ago
I think the easiest attack on SR would not be one of the attacks mentioned in the article (although similar to their second attack, but focused on legal implications instead of fraud), but rather: a. Law enforcement creates a large number of vendor and customer accounts. Due to the pseudonymity, they can create as many as they like and they can't be linked (they may need to create them over time to avoid making the pattern too obvious). b. The fake customer accounts buy from the fake vendor accounts and leave positive comments, building up a reputation for the fake vendors. This would give money to the operators of SR for fees, but aside from fees there would be no loss for the operators. c. Eventually, the number of fake vendors could be sufficient that it makes up most of the volume of SR. d. The fake customers buy from some real vendors and claim that the goods never arrived or that they got arrested and it looks like the vendor tipped the police off. e. Any real customer who buys from a fake vendor gets their details sent to their local police. f. Most vendors, real and fake, accumulate comments saying that they tipped people off to the police, with no way to tell which vendors are real vendors with mostly genuine good feedback and a few forged complaints of being police run, and which have a few real complaints of being police run and mostly forged good feedback. g. Police forces issue press releases announcing how many people they have caught buying things on SR, and buying becomes a highly risky proposition.
- Cushman 14y ago
  That's a pretty nice playbook, but it fails for the reason every attack against SR fails: It doesn't get you the vendors, and they're the only big fish there to catch. At best, you can spend time and money just treading water to keep them in check, but it will never shut them down.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    No it removes the incentives to buy there -- the idea that SR is safe -- kills the customer base and so the sellers will leave.
    - alexmat 14y ago
      It'll just create demand for a stronger web of trust. When the price on reputation goes up, people will find better ways of appearing reputable. Also, vendors that have been around for a long time will be able to raise prices and/or take on more demand.
DanBlake 14y ago
. Option #1 : I am aware many exchanges/markets do 'bitcoin mixing' to get around this, but the local authority could just as easily subpoena/force someone like mtgox into giving up the info of where the coins are going. As always, the folks who cant hide behind tor and want to appear legit are going to be weakest. (mtgox/bitpay/coinbase/etc..) - Those are the companies that will be 'compelled' to comply if it gets to that point. . Option #2: Inspect the packages you receive for fingerprints. You will likely find a postal workers prints and be able to continually track it back to the sourced post office. Then you just correlate the time the package was likely sent and watch security footage, looking for something that matches the shape/look of your package. . Also- Please dont take the above post too seriously. I have mostly no idea what I am talking about when it comes to bitcoin.
- jerguismi 14y ago
  > I am aware many exchanges/markets do 'bitcoin mixing' to get around this, but the local authority could just as easily subpoena/force someone like mtgox into giving up the info of where the coins are going. The coins are mixed _before_ they arrive to mtgox or some exchange, I would guess. > Even if you mix the coins a few times through a few sites, its still going to be the best way to find them. Any arguments here? The authorities would need information from every web site that has been involved with the transfer. The mixers can reside in the tor network, so it is impossible to get the connecting information.
- toomim 14y ago
  No, you can't. The coins are mixed before they get to mtgox. Mtgox doesn't know where they came from. In fact, you don't even need to use mtgox. Mtgox is just where you swap bitcoins for cash. If I sold drugs, it would be smart to just keep the money in bitcoins. And you can also exchange money for bitcoins with an anonymous physical person in your city. Just go to localbitcoins.com, find someone near you with one or the other, and swap with them.
  - DanBlake 14y ago
    How are the coins mixed before exactly? Also, I think its extremely impractical to think that a volume drug dealer is going to do physical exchanges. Even if they did opt for that route- Track the guy he did the exchanges with, then beat him with a wrench to find out who he bought from.
juanramon 14y ago
Talking about Tor; you can built your own Silk Road with http://osclass.org/ http://osclass.org/ (it's a software for creating your own classified site) and using the Tor plugin http://blog.osclass.org/2013/01/21/anonymous-with-tor-plugin-for-osclass/ http://blog.osclass.org/2013/01/21/anonymous-with-tor-plugin.... Disclosure: I participate in Osclass.
- arcadeparade 14y ago
  thanks for the link. Any links on creating a .onion link and the rest of whats needed?
  - acebarry 14y ago
    https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en I set up a hidden service once to bypass a university firewall. It's surprisingly easy.
LatvjuAvs 14y ago
There is no other place where I can safely buy military grade sniper rifle with delivery to my door, than tor network!
- gwern 14y ago
  Didn't the Armory shut down because it was hard to compete with all the offline sources of military-grade guns...?
sc0rb 14y ago
This makes me wonder what other 'interesting' business ideas people can come up with to operate as a hidden service? Throwing anonymity into your business plans could turn up some interesting ideas....
etherael 14y ago
This article was very well written and easy to digest and has some of the most succinct descriptions of the political underpinnings and implications of the cypherpunk movement I've ever seen without the sweeping oratory that tends to go with such things. That said, this single section; Fortunately, I don’t think LE is authorized to engage in cyberwar (#1) or mass entrapment & fraud (#2). And who knows, maybe SR could survive both. Where he discusses the degree to which the state will restrain itself from "bad behaviour" strikes me as a little naive in light of history. I'd be more concerned about attacks along the lines of the liquor poisoning that the state engaged in during alcohol prohibition. I imagine if someone wanted to cause serious bodily harm to the potential buyers in this marketplace it wouldn't be too difficult to do, and they've proven historically they're prepared to go to this extent. I also imagine it would have quite a high impact on the risk assessment of silk road buyers if people started ending up dead from their purchases.
espadagroup 14y ago
The first rule of Silk Road is you don't talk about the packaging...or post pictures of it...

368 points by HockeyPlayer 14y ago

damian2000 14y ago

Interesting video and article here from the point of view of Australian customs http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-05/dark-internet-linked-to-drug-seizure-spike/4410872 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-05/dark-internet-linked-t...

jacques_chester 14y ago
Slightly OT: "Computer expert" Chris McDonald is actually Professor Chris McDonald. He holds appointments at the University of Western Australia and at Dartmouth. I was lucky to have him as a lecturer for several course and as my honours supervisor. http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~chris/ http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~chris/ He's nominated for teaching awards with comical regularity. If you ever get a chance to take one of his courses at UWA or Dartmouth, take it.
gwern 14y ago
I greatly appreciate Australia and NZ's police agencies being public and specific about interception & arrest rates; I wish America could be as informative - as things stand, I have no references on either.

veb 14y ago

That was an awesome read. Always fun to read about drugs, but this seems like it was written quite a while ago... wonder if anything has changed since.

drakeandrews 14y ago
I was written May 2011 from the top of the article, but some of the footnotes have been updated recently.
xaver 14y ago
A lot of the stuff on the cypherpunks was added fairly recently I believe. At least, I don't remember those sections being there the last time I read it. Gwern has an interesting approach to writing articles where he continually updates and adds to them so that they improve over time. See: http://www.gwern.net/About#long-content http://www.gwern.net/About#long-content

cnp 14y ago

Everyone needs to read the rest of the site. It's one of the most interesting domains I've ever come across. Fascinating guy through and through, and his short stories are excellent.

vitno 14y ago
One of my favorite sites. If you aren't familiar with it already, it will probably lead you to lesswrong.com. Also worth a good amount of time input.
- tekromancr 14y ago
  Lesswrong is a weird place. I can read an awesome, insightful article one moment, then something completely bat-shit insane the next.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    Example of batsheet?
    - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
      http://www.target.com/p/batman-sheet-set-twin/-/A-13999144 http://www.target.com/p/batman-sheet-set-twin/-/A-13999144 Sorry, it had to be done.
    - alsothat 14y ago
      A good example of LW going off the deep end is "Roko's basilisk" and Yudkowsky's response http://kruel.co/2013/01/12/rokos-basilisk-everything-you-need-to-know/ http://kruel.co/2013/01/12/rokos-basilisk-everything-you-nee... http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
      - Tichy 14y ago
        That sounds scary, but not crazy?

mrmagooey 14y ago

I wonder if the current little spike in the bitcoin price (from https://mtgox.com/ https://mtgox.com/) could be attributed to this article being posted on HN

cnp 14y ago
The Bitcoin price has been dramatically spiking for the past two weeks. Very curious as to why.
- SlipperySlope 14y ago
  Look at the transaction volume as charted by blockchain.info. You will see a good correlation between that and the price of bitcoins. A good part of the recent bitcoin transaction volume is due to online gaming startups that use bitcoins, especially to work around US online gambling restrictions. The bitcoin economy is very rapidly growing from a miniscule base, first in illegal and gray-market trade, and then in international trade where low transaction costs and lack of credit card fraud appeal to global merchants.
- pudquick 14y ago
  Both Mega and reddit have recetly announced acceptance of bitcoins for payment. Not saying that's the reason, but I'm sure it contributes.
- csmattryder 14y ago
  Whatever it is, it's made a few people (myself included) rather rich. Bought a fair few BTC at ~1/6th of the current price, just trying to figure out when to cash it in.
gwern 14y ago
No. The price has been increasing gradually and abruptly for the last 2 or 3 months. As well, over the past 2 days GA says there's been 26,107 unique visitors to my Silk Road page; if 1% actually buys bitcoins (in line with the famous 1% rule of the Internet), that's just 260 people buying bitcoins. http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address= http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u... suggests that daily bitcoin blockchain transactions make up something like $8m; much of this is just people shuffling bitcoins around of course, but even so, 260 people aren't going to push the exchange rate to $29!

deleted 14y ago

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deleted 14y ago

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cnp 14y ago
The forum / feedback system WORKS. It pushes sketchy / lower-quality products out and if anything, that's why I feel Silk Road is a positive change in the ever-dangerous world of drugs. That said, there are many friends who I would hesitate to tell about the site; it's just too easy to get mixed up in more dangerous or addictive classes of drugs there. Be careful.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Man, SR is one of those things I look at in awe. I'm not sure I'd ever have the cojones to have something shipped to me... The comments on the blog post are sad in a "Good god people are effing stupid" sort of way. Also, if you're getting on Tor, I recommend Tails [1]. Most people aren't aware of all of the things they need to be wary of when getting on Tor and not leaking their identity. [1] Tails: http://tails.boum.org http://tails.boum.org

barbs 14y ago
A similar linux distribution: Liberté. This one's based off of Gentoo (Tails is based off of Debian) http://dee.su/liberte http://dee.su/liberte

SlipperySlope 14y ago

What is most interesting about this article is how to set up the Tor browser. Privacy is very, very, important - especially for those who are oppressed, and even for those living in democracies.

sruser 14y ago

(throwaway account) I've spent over $50,000 USD on SR in the past year, and I'm happy to answer any questions people have about the site or community.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sliverstorm 14y ago
Presumably you are either a dealer, or you have a gigantic drug habit?
- sruser 14y ago
  I'd prefer to answer questions about SR, not about myself.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    I think mentioning the $50K figure invites some questions.
    - sruser 14y ago
      I am not a dealer. As the OP said, I have a gigantic drug habit. I suspect that, like many HN readers, I am a young guy who works in technology and makes more money than is good for him. I am single and unattached, so I've got plenty of disposable income. And I seem to be good (so far) at remaining a stable, productive employee despite my habit.
      - fusiongyro 14y ago
        Thanks. My curiosity is sated.
      - b6 14y ago
        Please be very careful. <3.

handsomeransoms 14y ago

Silk Road is very interesting from a design perspective, particularly the way it leverages different open source cryptographic tools to satisfy its complex security/privacy/anonymity requirements. I gave a talk about this at the Oakland Cryptoparty back in October. The slides are a little patchy and based entirely on perusing the site (read: speculation), but it inspired a lively discussion from amongst all the participants. It seems there's nothing like illegal drugs and the black market to get people interested in learning more about crypto! I'm planning on giving an updated version of this talk at "SF Cryptoparty II" on March 23rd (attend or sign up to talk! https://cryptopartysf.org/ https://cryptopartysf.org/). I will definitely incorporate ideas from (and link back to) this article. Feedback appreciated! Slides: http://garrett.im/static/pdf/silkroad_oakland_cryptoparty_slides.pdf http://garrett.im/static/pdf/silkroad_oakland_cryptoparty_sl...

gwern 14y ago
I've read your slides. I think your Farmer's Market summary is outdated: it used Tor hidden service, for a short period only and after the investigation started (reading the indictment), and it's pretty clear now that Hushmail rolled over and then the garnered information was used to extract the Paypal & Western Union financial transactions. See my discussion of Farmer's Market in OP. Slide 14 should mention the SQL injection attack on SR back in November or December 2012; I also disagree that DDoSes would be ineffective. Slide 23: IIRC, someone has a verifiable anonymous mixer. I forget its name because it charges more than others. Slide 27: Mtgox has been hacked and lost bitcoins, but haven't they always made up their users' losses? That's pretty important.

cnp 14y ago

Here's an academic analysis of Silk Road. After crawling the site for a few months they came up with this: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-CyLab-12-018.pdf http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-... "Abstract We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods being sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics, and that most items sold are available for less than three weeks. The majority of sellers disappears within roughly three months of their arrival, but a core of 112 sellers has been present throughout our measurement interval. We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month; this corresponds to about USD 92,000 per month in commissions for the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over our measurement interval. We discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results, including ethical considerations for future research in this area."

waterlesscloud 14y ago
$1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic. Still, it seems like the risk far outweighs the gain here.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  $1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic. apples and oranges. This is illegal and their take is maybe enough to pay one criminal lawyer for a month.

nannasin28 14y ago

number of sellers overall increasing over our measurement interval. http://www.hqew.net http://www.hqew.net

codygman 14y ago

It's very annoying that the back button doesn't work on your site.

gwern 14y ago
I didn't do anything to break it, and it seems to work fine in my Debian Iceweasel.
- codygman 14y ago
  Fair enough, I'm using: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l Google Chrome Version 24.0.1312.57 Not sure why the back button doesn't work. Great site/content though! Just a minor annoyance that I thought was on purpose.
  - gwern 14y ago
    Well, if you figure out what was going on (could be Cloudflare doing optimization, or maybe Hacker News inserting a redirect?), please contact me. Since I'm on Iceweasel I don't always see issues in other browsers - for example, apparently all my MathML was broken for the longest time in Chromium because they just didn't support it.

A1kmm 14y ago

I think the easiest attack on SR would not be one of the attacks mentioned in the article (although similar to their second attack, but focused on legal implications instead of fraud), but rather: a. Law enforcement creates a large number of vendor and customer accounts. Due to the pseudonymity, they can create as many as they like and they can't be linked (they may need to create them over time to avoid making the pattern too obvious). b. The fake customer accounts buy from the fake vendor accounts and leave positive comments, building up a reputation for the fake vendors. This would give money to the operators of SR for fees, but aside from fees there would be no loss for the operators. c. Eventually, the number of fake vendors could be sufficient that it makes up most of the volume of SR. d. The fake customers buy from some real vendors and claim that the goods never arrived or that they got arrested and it looks like the vendor tipped the police off. e. Any real customer who buys from a fake vendor gets their details sent to their local police. f. Most vendors, real and fake, accumulate comments saying that they tipped people off to the police, with no way to tell which vendors are real vendors with mostly genuine good feedback and a few forged complaints of being police run, and which have a few real complaints of being police run and mostly forged good feedback. g. Police forces issue press releases announcing how many people they have caught buying things on SR, and buying becomes a highly risky proposition.

Cushman 14y ago
That's a pretty nice playbook, but it fails for the reason every attack against SR fails: It doesn't get you the vendors, and they're the only big fish there to catch. At best, you can spend time and money just treading water to keep them in check, but it will never shut them down.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  No it removes the incentives to buy there -- the idea that SR is safe -- kills the customer base and so the sellers will leave.
  - alexmat 14y ago
    It'll just create demand for a stronger web of trust. When the price on reputation goes up, people will find better ways of appearing reputable. Also, vendors that have been around for a long time will be able to raise prices and/or take on more demand.

DanBlake 14y ago

. Option #1 : I am aware many exchanges/markets do 'bitcoin mixing' to get around this, but the local authority could just as easily subpoena/force someone like mtgox into giving up the info of where the coins are going. As always, the folks who cant hide behind tor and want to appear legit are going to be weakest. (mtgox/bitpay/coinbase/etc..) - Those are the companies that will be 'compelled' to comply if it gets to that point. . Option #2: Inspect the packages you receive for fingerprints. You will likely find a postal workers prints and be able to continually track it back to the sourced post office. Then you just correlate the time the package was likely sent and watch security footage, looking for something that matches the shape/look of your package. . Also- Please dont take the above post too seriously. I have mostly no idea what I am talking about when it comes to bitcoin.

jerguismi 14y ago
> I am aware many exchanges/markets do 'bitcoin mixing' to get around this, but the local authority could just as easily subpoena/force someone like mtgox into giving up the info of where the coins are going. The coins are mixed _before_ they arrive to mtgox or some exchange, I would guess. > Even if you mix the coins a few times through a few sites, its still going to be the best way to find them. Any arguments here? The authorities would need information from every web site that has been involved with the transfer. The mixers can reside in the tor network, so it is impossible to get the connecting information.
toomim 14y ago
No, you can't. The coins are mixed before they get to mtgox. Mtgox doesn't know where they came from. In fact, you don't even need to use mtgox. Mtgox is just where you swap bitcoins for cash. If I sold drugs, it would be smart to just keep the money in bitcoins. And you can also exchange money for bitcoins with an anonymous physical person in your city. Just go to localbitcoins.com, find someone near you with one or the other, and swap with them.
- DanBlake 14y ago
  How are the coins mixed before exactly? Also, I think its extremely impractical to think that a volume drug dealer is going to do physical exchanges. Even if they did opt for that route- Track the guy he did the exchanges with, then beat him with a wrench to find out who he bought from.

juanramon 14y ago

Talking about Tor; you can built your own Silk Road with http://osclass.org/ http://osclass.org/ (it's a software for creating your own classified site) and using the Tor plugin http://blog.osclass.org/2013/01/21/anonymous-with-tor-plugin-for-osclass/ http://blog.osclass.org/2013/01/21/anonymous-with-tor-plugin.... Disclosure: I participate in Osclass.

arcadeparade 14y ago
thanks for the link. Any links on creating a .onion link and the rest of whats needed?
- acebarry 14y ago
  https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en I set up a hidden service once to bypass a university firewall. It's surprisingly easy.

LatvjuAvs 14y ago

There is no other place where I can safely buy military grade sniper rifle with delivery to my door, than tor network!

gwern 14y ago
Didn't the Armory shut down because it was hard to compete with all the offline sources of military-grade guns...?

sc0rb 14y ago

This makes me wonder what other 'interesting' business ideas people can come up with to operate as a hidden service? Throwing anonymity into your business plans could turn up some interesting ideas....

etherael 14y ago

This article was very well written and easy to digest and has some of the most succinct descriptions of the political underpinnings and implications of the cypherpunk movement I've ever seen without the sweeping oratory that tends to go with such things. That said, this single section; Fortunately, I don’t think LE is authorized to engage in cyberwar (#1) or mass entrapment & fraud (#2). And who knows, maybe SR could survive both. Where he discusses the degree to which the state will restrain itself from "bad behaviour" strikes me as a little naive in light of history. I'd be more concerned about attacks along the lines of the liquor poisoning that the state engaged in during alcohol prohibition. I imagine if someone wanted to cause serious bodily harm to the potential buyers in this marketplace it wouldn't be too difficult to do, and they've proven historically they're prepared to go to this extent. I also imagine it would have quite a high impact on the risk assessment of silk road buyers if people started ending up dead from their purchases.

espadagroup 14y ago

The first rule of Silk Road is you don't talk about the packaging...or post pictures of it...