4 ms·
The Silk Road seizure demonstrated that the only reasonable way to participate in any online drug market is to assume the market itself is compromised and untru
by davmre 13y ago
The Silk Road seizure demonstrated that the only reasonable way to participate in any online drug market is to assume the market itself is compromised and untrustworthy. That means you never upload identifying information in cleartext (e.g., buyers encrypt their addresses with the seller's public key), and you run all bitcoins sent to or received from such a site through a third-party mixer.
Of course, there still has to be some level of trust on the part of a buyer, that the seller they're connecting to is actually a real drug dealer and not an undercover cop. But that was still an issue even on the original Silk Road. It was partially addressed by the feedback/review system -- which does involve a certain amount of trust in the site not to fabricate reviews -- but more importantly by the fact that high-level law enforcement is really only interested in tracking down sellers. And assuming the users are competent, running a honeypot gives you very little information about the sellers.
- draugadrotten 13y ago> It was partially addressed by the feedback/review system -- which does involve a certain amount of trust in the site not to fabricate reviews Many users over in Europe took to themselves to review sellers on trusted third-party sites, such as flashback.org. There trusted sellers were "greened", as it were, and word was quickly spread when some seller tried a bait-and-switch by giving good drugs to the first buyers and scamming the second wave. Full Disclosure: I am a user of flashback.org but I never used drugs or silk road.
- TylerE 13y agoWhat good does that do if the sellers are also fake?
- veemjeem 13y agoLaw enforcement would rather go after the vendors than buyers. There are probably too many buyers for officers to deal with, and they would have to make all the arrests simultaneously. In meat-space, they arrest buyers so that they will rat out their dealer. This is not possible on SR because the dealers do not expose any identifying info to buyers.
- davmre 13y agoThe fake seller issue is independent of the honeypot issue. There was nothing stopping anyone from creating fake sellers on the original Silk Road. I assume the main reason it didn't happen is that doing so would only help catch buyers, and governments really want to catch sellers.
- TylerE 13y agoI think you missunderstand me... I'm saying what if the sellers are also honeypots? Encryption means nothing if the NSA created the "sellers" key in the first place.
- davmre 13y agoMy point is that you don't have to control the marketplace itself in order to create honeypot sellers. There was nothing stopping law enforcement from registering honeypot sellers on the original Silk Road. Controlling the marketplace itself would let them avoid the (trivial) registration fee to create a honeypot seller, but doesn't otherwise give them any extra power.
- svantana 13y agoIs it really illegal to try to buy drugs? Doesn't an actual illegal substance need to be involved/seized for it to be a crime? Honeypot sellers don't really make sense to me.