19 ms·

After Silk Road

67 points by 0cool 13y ago

GunlogAlm 13y ago
Is Atlantis still around? I can see that growing to replace Silk Road, Black Market Reloaded I admittedly know little about.
- TwoFactor 13y ago
  No, Atlantis dissapeared over a week ago without refunding user's money.
  - gwern 13y ago
    That's a bit debated. People did report withdrawing their funds, and other people reported bugs, random amounts showing up in accounts, etc. Given SR's immediate demise, I'm more willing to credit the theory that Atlantis got spooked and the site was falling apart when they announced the closure.
- CrunchyJams 13y ago
  Closed two weeks ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/20/an-online-illicit-drug-market-is-closing-says-leftover-user-cash-will-go-to-drug-related-charity/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/20...
- ledge 13y ago
  While Atlantis has disappeared, there are three other hidden services currently vying for marketshare: BMR: 5onwnspjvuk7cwvk.onion/index.php Sheep: sheep5u64fi457aw.onion/manager/login Deepbay: deepbay4xr3sw2va.onion/ P.S. federal agents, I don't use recreational drugs (anymore), I'm simply a longtime occasional reader of the SR forum... so please don't come kicking down my door.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    "P.S. federal agents, I don't use recreational drugs (anymore), I'm simply a longtime occasional reader of the SR forum... so please don't come kicking down my door." Saying this will not make a difference. Given the general lack of consequences when paramilitary raids occur against innocent people, and the strong financial incentives for attacking people and seizing their property, you would not be safe even if you had never been near illegal drugs in your entire life.
    - ledge 13y ago
      I know, it was a joke :) I've actually had my home raided before... not fun. Fortunately I no longer live in America.
    - stinkytaco 13y ago
      If the goal were to do as you say, the FBI could have easily kept operating it as a honeypot. They did not, however, leading me to believe that the users of the Silk Road were not their concern and of little consequence to a law enforcement agency of that size. I think most drug busts are incidental: discovered when dealing with another crime (someone questioned for robbery, domestic violence or erratic driving). Large operations like this, or even medium ones on the local level, are generally about busting large gangs and even then it’s usually the violence that brings those gangs into law enforcements crosshairs. The sheer size of SR -- and the political pressure -- made it an exception.
GeorgeOrr 13y ago
Good article, it's nice to start looking forward. And to remain optimistic. I was never actually a customer, but it clearly filled a need many had. It would be a shame if the void it left isn't filled. But as covered in this article, it is far more likely that it will be filled and in fact improved on. The more they tighten their grip ...
sycren 13y ago
I find it surprising that instead of shutting it down they didn't turn it into a huge honey trap.
- Afforess 13y ago
  Why? DPR was a much bigger criminal threat than most of the users that went on the SR. You don't let the head of the cabal get away to nab the underlings, that's just plain stupid.
  - CodeCube 13y ago
    See, I don't know ... DPR was definitely a big fish, but only in a certain context. He obviously had the technical chops (and moral compass) to set things up the way he did, but at the end of the day, all he did was facilitate business for other (IMO) much bigger fish. I'm not in any way justifying his actions or anything like that. But I too was surprised that they just shut it down instead of just assuming control and going after what could have turned out to be cartels (assuming it wasn't just small time growers, etc.).
    - betterunix 13y ago
      More likely than not, some of the drugs sold on SR were produced by cartels. The SR sellers were probably so far down the supply chain that they could not have given the police any useful leads on the cartels. In case people have forgotten, SR itself was a target. There was pressure from Congress to shut it down, and it was probably the only goal of this operation: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Schumer-Calls-on-Feds-to-Shut-Down-Online-Drug-Marketplace-123187958.html http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Schumer-Calls-on-Feds-t...
    - wmf 13y ago
      DPR allegedly made over $80M from Silk Road; did any single SR vendor make more than that? When measured financially he's a pretty big fish.
      - 13y ago
gesman 13y ago
There is already a race underway for the new winner in this hungry, insatiable market. It's a cat and mouse game where mouse have an distinct edge.
- jerf 13y ago
  Actually, I think the cat & mouse metaphor is fairly apt. The cat actually has a powerful set of advantages... but the mice have numbers, persistence, and in violation of the metaphor, a lot of learning capability. This will not be the first market the feds will manage to destroy, but it will get harder each time. I am neither applauding nor deploring this; just predicting it. (One of the things the mice may learn is that the slightest identity leak can give them away. One mis-click on a Facebook login or something and that could well be that. If I were a mouse, I would be working on building something like an encrypted VM image that only contains "safe" software on it, like browsers configured with TOR or whatever, and make sure to do all my business in that VM, and only my business in that VM, while maintaining a "normal" identity on the outside of the VM. The best way to prevent identity leakage is not to share it at all. And I would not install clipboard sharing between VM and host, and I would not enable shared windows; I would deliberately leave the VM console up, and distinctly less than full screen, so it is very visibly obvious that I am either in or not in the VM. I would not use any of the conveniences designed to blur that line.)
  - finnw 13y ago
    It is probably cheaper to use a dedicated (physical) machine.
    - jerf 13y ago
      You mean safer?
      - finnw 13y ago
        I did mean cheaper (i.e. a low-end machine being cheaper to buy than the time it would take to install and configure the VM.) But yes, it is probably safer as well.
jrochkind1 13y ago
> While I don’t support what went on on the Silk Road – the hacking services and illegal gun trading alone made it more like the Wild West than Utopia, not to mention the alleged murder-for-hire plots – I do support its right to exist. No government should be able to shut down a conglomeration of like-minded people who wish to do business anonymously. We cannot judge the pot dealer or the LSD buyer any more than they can judge our habits and predilections. The morality of this can be debated but the right to an anonymous exchange cannot. This makes no sense at all. Why the heck can't the 'right' to an anonymous exchange facilitating illegal activities 'be debated'? Just cause the author says so, apparently. Why does he think no government should be able to shut-down a 'conglomeration of like-minded people' (what?) who want to buy and sell weapons, computer intrusions, and murders? I don't know, he doesn't say, it's just obvious, right? He doesn't 'support' people selling murder on an anonymous exchange, but does 'support' 'the right' to have an anonymous exchange where you sell murder? He thinks you can debate 'the morality' of 'this' (what?), but you can't 'judge' the people doing the thing whose morality you are debating, and in fact apparently can't (can't? ethically?) judge anything that can be described as a 'habit or predilection'? What does all that even mean? It's just nonsense put together into sentences. There might be some ethical defense of Silk Road that makes sense, but that sure wasn't it. This is what passes for thought on the techno-libertarian internet? Really, tech crunch?
- DizzyDoo 13y ago
  Western culture, generally, tends towards a "you can think what you like about morality, but don't you dare measure other people up to that standard" mindset. What you have noted is a good example of where such a mindset tends to snap. Additionally, the person making the statement "I don't think you should measure other people up to your own standard of morality" is actually doing exactly what they purport to rail against.
  - stinkytaco 13y ago
    >"you can think what you like about morality, but don't you dare measure other people up to that standard" This is an interesting thought because where I think it works well in our thought experiments and our online forums, it's the very business of government to do just as you say: measure people by a social standard. And it's not like government just popped up out of nowhere one night, the standards and institutions that it uses are ones that have evolved over time to deal with specific problems. It's an organic development and as such it has all the weird inconsistencies of an organic creature. So where I think lots of us (myself included) probably think what you say in our heads, I doubt many of us (if we were totally honest with ourselves) go about our daily business not actually measuring people by our standards and expecting the state to do the same.
wcfields 13y ago
Could someone explain how Silk Road handled it's transactions? I've been reading on it and it seems they kept in escrowe the Bitcoins until the package had been marked as "Shipped"? Was there a central wallet that one would send/receive coins from or was it flushed on the in/out through random wallets? Can the blockchain be traced to DRP's primary wallets?
- berberous 13y ago
  Check out the criminal indictment if you are interested, they explain it a bit. From memory (which may be wrong), it sounded like he had something like 11 internal hot wallets, but while the coins were in escrow he used a database to link what user had what amount of coins. The government seized those 11 wallets, and based on the average daily holdings, now have like $3mm worth of BTC which they transferred to a single wallet (if you google, you can find the public record of that govt controlled wallet). The indictment also explains that Silk Road used a "tumbler", which would route the BTC's through a series of random wallets so that it was not possible to match a user's initial sending of BTC to Silk Road with the eventual withdrawal by a seller of BTC's to another wallet or exchange.
  - veridies 13y ago
    What can the government do with seized BTC? They don't serve any purpose as evidence, obviously (since all the transaction info is public record). Can they be auctioned off? Sold?
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > What can the government do with seized BTC? They don't serve any purpose as evidence, obviously (since all the transaction info is public record). Can they be auctioned off? Sold? Government seized real and tangible personal property is regularly either used by government or auctioned off, so I don't see why bitcoins would be any different.
- JengaGov 13y ago
  The silk road did work like an escrow where SR would hold the bitcoins until the buyer finalized (FE for short). Bitcoin would have an internal tumbler that would generate multiple addresses and would make it difficult to track the transactions. Most vendors would ask for early FE or no product would be shipped but that was too risky for most buyers. FE was supposed to occur when the buyer received the product and gave it thumbs up.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

67 points by 0cool 13y ago

Is Atlantis still around? I can see that growing to replace Silk Road, Black Market Reloaded I admittedly know little about.

TwoFactor 13y ago
No, Atlantis dissapeared over a week ago without refunding user's money.
- gwern 13y ago
  That's a bit debated. People did report withdrawing their funds, and other people reported bugs, random amounts showing up in accounts, etc. Given SR's immediate demise, I'm more willing to credit the theory that Atlantis got spooked and the site was falling apart when they announced the closure.
CrunchyJams 13y ago
Closed two weeks ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/20/an-online-illicit-drug-market-is-closing-says-leftover-user-cash-will-go-to-drug-related-charity/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/20...
ledge 13y ago
While Atlantis has disappeared, there are three other hidden services currently vying for marketshare: BMR: 5onwnspjvuk7cwvk.onion/index.php Sheep: sheep5u64fi457aw.onion/manager/login Deepbay: deepbay4xr3sw2va.onion/ P.S. federal agents, I don't use recreational drugs (anymore), I'm simply a longtime occasional reader of the SR forum... so please don't come kicking down my door.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "P.S. federal agents, I don't use recreational drugs (anymore), I'm simply a longtime occasional reader of the SR forum... so please don't come kicking down my door." Saying this will not make a difference. Given the general lack of consequences when paramilitary raids occur against innocent people, and the strong financial incentives for attacking people and seizing their property, you would not be safe even if you had never been near illegal drugs in your entire life.
  - ledge 13y ago
    I know, it was a joke :) I've actually had my home raided before... not fun. Fortunately I no longer live in America.
  - stinkytaco 13y ago
    If the goal were to do as you say, the FBI could have easily kept operating it as a honeypot. They did not, however, leading me to believe that the users of the Silk Road were not their concern and of little consequence to a law enforcement agency of that size. I think most drug busts are incidental: discovered when dealing with another crime (someone questioned for robbery, domestic violence or erratic driving). Large operations like this, or even medium ones on the local level, are generally about busting large gangs and even then it’s usually the violence that brings those gangs into law enforcements crosshairs. The sheer size of SR -- and the political pressure -- made it an exception.

GeorgeOrr 13y ago

Good article, it's nice to start looking forward. And to remain optimistic. I was never actually a customer, but it clearly filled a need many had. It would be a shame if the void it left isn't filled. But as covered in this article, it is far more likely that it will be filled and in fact improved on. The more they tighten their grip ...

sycren 13y ago

I find it surprising that instead of shutting it down they didn't turn it into a huge honey trap.

Afforess 13y ago
Why? DPR was a much bigger criminal threat than most of the users that went on the SR. You don't let the head of the cabal get away to nab the underlings, that's just plain stupid.
- CodeCube 13y ago
  See, I don't know ... DPR was definitely a big fish, but only in a certain context. He obviously had the technical chops (and moral compass) to set things up the way he did, but at the end of the day, all he did was facilitate business for other (IMO) much bigger fish. I'm not in any way justifying his actions or anything like that. But I too was surprised that they just shut it down instead of just assuming control and going after what could have turned out to be cartels (assuming it wasn't just small time growers, etc.).
  - betterunix 13y ago
    More likely than not, some of the drugs sold on SR were produced by cartels. The SR sellers were probably so far down the supply chain that they could not have given the police any useful leads on the cartels. In case people have forgotten, SR itself was a target. There was pressure from Congress to shut it down, and it was probably the only goal of this operation: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Schumer-Calls-on-Feds-to-Shut-Down-Online-Drug-Marketplace-123187958.html http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Schumer-Calls-on-Feds-t...
  - wmf 13y ago
    DPR allegedly made over $80M from Silk Road; did any single SR vendor make more than that? When measured financially he's a pretty big fish.
    - 13y ago

gesman 13y ago

There is already a race underway for the new winner in this hungry, insatiable market. It's a cat and mouse game where mouse have an distinct edge.

jerf 13y ago
Actually, I think the cat & mouse metaphor is fairly apt. The cat actually has a powerful set of advantages... but the mice have numbers, persistence, and in violation of the metaphor, a lot of learning capability. This will not be the first market the feds will manage to destroy, but it will get harder each time. I am neither applauding nor deploring this; just predicting it. (One of the things the mice may learn is that the slightest identity leak can give them away. One mis-click on a Facebook login or something and that could well be that. If I were a mouse, I would be working on building something like an encrypted VM image that only contains "safe" software on it, like browsers configured with TOR or whatever, and make sure to do all my business in that VM, and only my business in that VM, while maintaining a "normal" identity on the outside of the VM. The best way to prevent identity leakage is not to share it at all. And I would not install clipboard sharing between VM and host, and I would not enable shared windows; I would deliberately leave the VM console up, and distinctly less than full screen, so it is very visibly obvious that I am either in or not in the VM. I would not use any of the conveniences designed to blur that line.)
- finnw 13y ago
  It is probably cheaper to use a dedicated (physical) machine.
  - jerf 13y ago
    You mean safer?
    - finnw 13y ago
      I did mean cheaper (i.e. a low-end machine being cheaper to buy than the time it would take to install and configure the VM.) But yes, it is probably safer as well.

jrochkind1 13y ago

> While I don’t support what went on on the Silk Road – the hacking services and illegal gun trading alone made it more like the Wild West than Utopia, not to mention the alleged murder-for-hire plots – I do support its right to exist. No government should be able to shut down a conglomeration of like-minded people who wish to do business anonymously. We cannot judge the pot dealer or the LSD buyer any more than they can judge our habits and predilections. The morality of this can be debated but the right to an anonymous exchange cannot. This makes no sense at all. Why the heck can't the 'right' to an anonymous exchange facilitating illegal activities 'be debated'? Just cause the author says so, apparently. Why does he think no government should be able to shut-down a 'conglomeration of like-minded people' (what?) who want to buy and sell weapons, computer intrusions, and murders? I don't know, he doesn't say, it's just obvious, right? He doesn't 'support' people selling murder on an anonymous exchange, but does 'support' 'the right' to have an anonymous exchange where you sell murder? He thinks you can debate 'the morality' of 'this' (what?), but you can't 'judge' the people doing the thing whose morality you are debating, and in fact apparently can't (can't? ethically?) judge anything that can be described as a 'habit or predilection'? What does all that even mean? It's just nonsense put together into sentences. There might be some ethical defense of Silk Road that makes sense, but that sure wasn't it. This is what passes for thought on the techno-libertarian internet? Really, tech crunch?

DizzyDoo 13y ago
Western culture, generally, tends towards a "you can think what you like about morality, but don't you dare measure other people up to that standard" mindset. What you have noted is a good example of where such a mindset tends to snap. Additionally, the person making the statement "I don't think you should measure other people up to your own standard of morality" is actually doing exactly what they purport to rail against.
- stinkytaco 13y ago
  >"you can think what you like about morality, but don't you dare measure other people up to that standard" This is an interesting thought because where I think it works well in our thought experiments and our online forums, it's the very business of government to do just as you say: measure people by a social standard. And it's not like government just popped up out of nowhere one night, the standards and institutions that it uses are ones that have evolved over time to deal with specific problems. It's an organic development and as such it has all the weird inconsistencies of an organic creature. So where I think lots of us (myself included) probably think what you say in our heads, I doubt many of us (if we were totally honest with ourselves) go about our daily business not actually measuring people by our standards and expecting the state to do the same.

wcfields 13y ago

Could someone explain how Silk Road handled it's transactions? I've been reading on it and it seems they kept in escrowe the Bitcoins until the package had been marked as "Shipped"? Was there a central wallet that one would send/receive coins from or was it flushed on the in/out through random wallets? Can the blockchain be traced to DRP's primary wallets?

berberous 13y ago
Check out the criminal indictment if you are interested, they explain it a bit. From memory (which may be wrong), it sounded like he had something like 11 internal hot wallets, but while the coins were in escrow he used a database to link what user had what amount of coins. The government seized those 11 wallets, and based on the average daily holdings, now have like $3mm worth of BTC which they transferred to a single wallet (if you google, you can find the public record of that govt controlled wallet). The indictment also explains that Silk Road used a "tumbler", which would route the BTC's through a series of random wallets so that it was not possible to match a user's initial sending of BTC to Silk Road with the eventual withdrawal by a seller of BTC's to another wallet or exchange.
- veridies 13y ago
  What can the government do with seized BTC? They don't serve any purpose as evidence, obviously (since all the transaction info is public record). Can they be auctioned off? Sold?
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > What can the government do with seized BTC? They don't serve any purpose as evidence, obviously (since all the transaction info is public record). Can they be auctioned off? Sold? Government seized real and tangible personal property is regularly either used by government or auctioned off, so I don't see why bitcoins would be any different.
JengaGov 13y ago
The silk road did work like an escrow where SR would hold the bitcoins until the buyer finalized (FE for short). Bitcoin would have an internal tumbler that would generate multiple addresses and would make it difficult to track the transactions. Most vendors would ask for early FE or no product would be shipped but that was too risky for most buyers. FE was supposed to occur when the buyer received the product and gave it thumbs up.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]