Take the Silk Road Home

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So far, the administrators have done a pretty good job of keeping everything running and maintaining the balance.

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The community is what determines whether Silk Road will decline or continue growing with the general growth of Bitcoin. Tor and Bitcoin and encryption are a challenge to use for most people, and older people have contacts they know how to use when they want various drugs. Is Silk Road just about scoring drugs safely or you and other users feel you are making a greater statement about society the drugs law? I know other users disagree and take it only as a useful service or something of a FU to The Man, but many of us do see it as a principled statement. I believe that I am capable of researching and evaluating drugs, that I can accept the risks, and see how they do or do not work, and that the government should not be coercively imposing its beliefs on me.

I am also horrified by the effects of the War on Drugs, which has been a greater disaster than Prohibition which we at least had the sense to repeal after a few years. Buying on the Silk Road and writing about it is, if you will, my bit of patriotism. On 29 November , journalist Mike Power of Drugs 2. The cultural impact is that even more people are aware of SR. This part of the pro-drug movement in America right now, in conjunction with the fact that marijuana legalization seems to be basically working out in the West, with minimal reefer madness , is helping normalize illicit drug consumption and make a mockery of the War on Drugs.

Bitcoin seems to be going from strength to strength. As an admirer of Bitcoins from when I first learned of them in , I am pleased by its success and I think it will make the Internet much more useful for commerce. The question is whether they are willing to use that capability on DNMs. How would you summarise and characterise your experiences with LSD microdosing? Do you feel that governments have the right to police the computer activity, or the mindstates, of those who elect them? I think computer activity is, like any other activity, subject to government intervention if it is really justified which it rarely is ; taking place on a computer does not make it unreal or exempt.

Policing mindstates, on the other hand, should basically be banned for all the same reasons we have free speech. What do you think of the marketplace, over on I2P? From 26 May , for a Guardian article:. The DNM scene is overall growing, although it has fragmented a great deal. Judging by the decreasing technical competence of users on the relevant forums and subreddits, the DNMs seem to be reaching a wider audience and not just geeks.

Why do you think people use them? Is it the quality of drugs sold, the buzz of adding a bunch of illegal stuff to a basket, the minimal risk of capture, or the variety and purity of the offering? The current fastest growing market seems to be Evolution. Its main advantage seems to be that it grew out of the Tor Carding Forum community, which had been doing person-to-person trades for drugs and fraud-related items until the forum was hacked, and this meant the market had a community from day 1, which helped it pick up sellers and then buyers, and network effects have helped it grow ever since.

I answered as best I could:. What about it struck you as unsustainable? In general, DNMs are not very stable: The SR model, with a single centralized site both buyers and sellers have to trust, did work but that trust can be abused by the site operator So inherently one expects DNMs to have fairly short lifetimes.

They are surprisingly like regular businesses or websites in this respect. It was exactly the sort of rookie error I expected from someone with a casual attitude to security: Simply by being so closely associated with a server that could only have been set up by someone working with SMP, he forfeited most of his anonymity and claims to innocence. To understand what I mean by most of the work , it may be helpful to read my hopefully-entertaining essay on anonymity in Death Note. I had a bit of difficultly understanding the facts and significance of the Clearnet site.

Would you help me understand that? The clearnet site is very similar to how altoid posted on some forums about a new site called Silk Road, was the first identifiable person to ever discuss Silk Road, and then proved to be the account of a guy called Ross Ulbricht. While it is a reasonable trigger for why Tomas might decide to grab the money and run, and we saw a similar hack prompt backopy to decide to close down BMR fully, the problem with the story is that no one seems to have ever dealt with an EBOOK, EBOOK has not left any taunting messages or clues like the BMR hacker did, and SMP in retrospect seems to have been orchestrating the scam for at least a week in advance by shutting down withdrawals on the pretext of adding tumbling , coaxing people into depositing even more money, and delaying tactics like adding a fancy countdown timer.

I only know what my informant has told me; since he presented a convincing case for Tomas to me which he did not have to, I assumed he was also telling me the truth about him telling the FBI and them being very interested in what he had to say. So I assumed that they were on the case and understood the need for prompt action. But the FBI has issued no statements on the topic, I have not contacted Christopher Tarbell myself, and thus far there have been no arrests or other law enforcement action I am aware of.

I am a little bewildered by the complete silence. So I no longer have any idea on their role. You should ask Tarbell. It was a real chase, but neither of them are very familiar with blockchain analysis, and so they wound up eventually reaching false conclusions like Sheep stole 97k bitcoins. This is a common problem with blockchain analysis. As well, my precommitment and reputation meant that any posting would mean more coming from me. So, I would take the liberty of asking some questions about the SMP scam and black markets in general.

As I told it before: According to this report the chase for the thief went wrong. What happened was simple: At any transaction, control can be transferred without any visible sign. The blockchain merely records transactions among addresses and it does not give you any meaning beyond that.

People forget the limitations and escalating uncertainty, and so the Sheep chasers found themselves at a BTC-E cold wallet address. If the chasers traced the wrong amount of bitcoins: Do you think he sold it? The amount in Bitcoins can be easily hidden: The evidence remains largely the same, I think. If he or his group would be part of it: A lot of people are angry….

One last question concerning black markets: What do you think is their motivation? It may be that we overestimated the value of running a marketplace, that the incentives to scam first-generation marketplaces without multi-signature escrow are too great. I suspect most users strongly agree with the libertarian position on the War on Drugs, but maybe not much beyond that. Where did the most vendors go to?

What can they do against it? Do they have any possibilities? Do you think the deep-net-market-scene will still exist in 5 years? When current markets are busted or go down, given how many people have tasted the forbidden fruit, there will still be plenty of demand for replacements. Periodically people sketch out designs for fully distributed DNMs; none of them have made any serious progress, but on the other hand, people were speculating about digital currencies for many years before Bitcoin came along….

Jordan Pearson, Motherboard , What is your motivation for releasing the torrent file [of the Evolution marketplace and forums ]? How will this help with the Evo fallout? What was your role on Evo vendor? Scrapes of the market are useful for people trying to cope with the fallout. I had no role on Evo I was, if anything, a critic. Pretty much from when it opened to buyers to when it shut down a few days ago: And during this time you noticed some stuff that alerted you to the notion that the admins could pull an exit scam?

Exit scams are always a possibility for centralized-escrow markets. Evolution had a multisig option, but it was not true multisig and no one used it. I expected them to die well before this, however, and even odds of it dying by LE raid. These dealers are ostensibly moving to different markets, some of which are popping up right now i.

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What do you think of that? A lot of chatter right now about moths rushing to the latest flame in terms of scammy sites. Right now the big question is whether Agora will last: By bespoke market, I assume you mean a vendor shop. Those are definitely dead ends - they do not solve the trust issues of rating and escrow. For example, one scam is to set up a vendor shop and tell customers to use an obscure third-party escrow service; naturally, this escrow service is run by the same people, and when the mark sends the bitcoins to buy something, they keep it. Vendor shops have never scaled, and never will without solving decentralized markets.

You could never trust any of the big markets. Evo exit scamming is just people waking up from their dreams and learning from history the hard way. All this has happened before, and will happen again. They work in theory but not practice. Market exit scams, for all the hyperbolic media coverage, are simply an ordinary and acceptable cost of doing business. So I guess Lelantos is just the best balance available? A list of tips from an anonymous Redditor, presented for what they are worth not all are necessarily important:.

It came from a person who claimed that the carding forum carder.

This is perfectly plausible as one of the standard law enforcement strategies to take down carding or drug forums is infiltrating forums eg. They also mentioned that after contacting the SR admins, they were blocked from accessing SR under that or other accounts. This rumor struck me as unusually detailed, plausible, and interesting. It would also be cool to scoop an investigation. A counter-objection is that celtic-KoC might have deliberately dropped Nevada IDs and non-bitcoin payment to throw off anyone familiar with the previous identity.

But in this scenario, presumably the absence would be for public consumption and anyone requesting either would get what they asked for as they became juicy targets for his investigation. This can be easily tested just by asking; so 2 throwaway accounts messaged KoC on those issues:. Ideally with UV and hologram. While his consistent disavowal of both non-bitcoin payments and making Nevada licenses might simply be trying to be consistent in his persona, that would imply considerable paranoia on his part about being recognized - and makes this possibility that much more unlikely.

When will we know? The KoC account is listed as 1 year old and consistent with that, he has initial forum posts dating back to March That suggests any busts will come March , up to In October , SR1 was raided and its operator Ross Ulbricht was arrested; a few months later, several employees were also arrested. Part of the initially released evidence was a photograph of several fake IDs for Ulbricht purchased on SR1 which he seems to have used for buying server hosting which had been intercepted by Customs around 10 July This was confirmed in a December filing in his trial Moore has provided his original R source code , his exchange data , and anti-money-laundering-laws data , so his original analysis can be replicated by anyone interested in the topic.

The reduction could be tiny, or it could be huge. To do this, I need to estimate the revenue each day, the expenses each day, the commission each day, and the exchange rate each day. Then I can multiply revenue by commission, subtract the expense, and sum the left overs to get an estimate of the total bitcoins available to DPR which he could or could not have spent.

The task of hosting the sites does not seem to be too bandwidth or disk-space intensive, and servers are extremely cheap these days. The use of DataClub. As you can see, the employees are by far the most expensive part of running SR in my estimate, which makes me wonder if maybe Libertas was the only employee. Assuming the details about DPR hiring hitmen in the indictments are reasonably accurate, we can throw in two large expenses:.

Through further messages exchanged on March 31, , DPR and redandwhite agreed upon a price of 1, Bitcoins. Table 3 provides a breakdown of the feedback ratings from , feedback instances we collected…In Figure 12, we plot an estimate of the daily commissions collected by Silk Road operators as a function of time. We simply reuse the previous estimates, and apply both the fixed 6. We find that the new schedule turns out to yield on average a commission corresponding to approximately 7. As the most famous exchange, any FBI estimate almost certainly used it.

Wikipedia says These transactions involved , unique buyer accounts, and 3, unique vendor accounts. Commissions collected from the sales by Silk Road amounted to , bitcoins. But what about 23 July ?

Virtually all of these transactions are labeled commission. Or we can run the estimate the other way: The fewer sales and commissions early on, the less of a fixed number of bitcoins will be sold. On 30 October , I offered to any comers 4 escrowed Bitcoin bets relating to whether BlackMarket Reloaded and Sheep Marketplace would survive the next year. I posted it to. Reactions were generally extremely negative, accusing me of scamming, being LE, pretending to be the escrow nanotube, etc. No one took any of the bets and I shut the books on 6 November For posterity, I am archiving a copy of my statement below.

I am publicly betting that they will fail in the near-future. If you think I am wrong, just try to take my money and prove me wrong! Otherwise, spare us your cheap talk. A signed version of this 30 October post will be posted as a comment, because I wish to use Markdown formatting; my PGP key is available. That said, I am concerned by the accumulating pattern I am seeing around BMR and Sheep, and by the delusional optimism of many of the users. Atlantis shut down because they were worried about contacts from LE, and thus far this shut down seems to have saved them; but BMR has been around several times longer than Atlantis - would it not beggar belief if LE had not made contacts, attempted SR-style stings, or infiltrated BMR staff?

Or consider the claims being made about the Project Black Flag Leaks, where someone claims to have accessed a laundry list of information from its internals - only after Metta DPR decided to rip-and-run. If this is what we see publicly for BMR, what on earth is going on behind the scenes? He has learned nothing. What, exactly, is his exit strategy? What goals does he have and when will they ever be satisfied?

He has been running BMR for more than 2 years now, and has not left. How does this story end: And hardly anyone seems troubled by this! The BMR subreddit is full of bustle; people are even hailing backopy as a hero for allowing withdrawal of bitcoins. How generous of him. Is Sheep any better? BMR is troubled and probably infiltrated at this point, but Sheep may well be a dead market walking at this point.

No one has a good word to say about its coding, so there may well be BMR-style issues in its future.

Silk Road (marketplace)

It uses almost the same exact technology, and the official explanation is that they had fans fans? He left that to onion. I am putting my money where my mouth is. The exact definition of not operating includes but is not limited to this: If deposits or new accounts or purchases are not allowed or not possible, it is not operating. At his own discretion, the arbitrator can take into account other factors, like widespread reports that a market has been raided and turned into a sting operation.

If you disagree and are man enough to take our bets, post the amount you are betting on which bet, and Nanotube will supply an address for you to transfer your bitcoin to. When it arrives in his wallet, then our bet will be in effect. Neither approach is extremely reliable, but they can help us figure out what are reasonable-looking estimates and we can increase or decrease them based on the observed security issues to get a final estimate which will be better than either random guessing based on gut-feel or blind acceptance of numbers spat out by a model. In my bet, I used an earlier version of this analysis, and after looking at the various results, settled on gut-estimates as follows:.

After expanding the data to include Deepbay and continuing to observe the DNMs, I would personally decrease the risk for BMR and increase for Sheep a choice vindicated when Sheep shut down with a scam in late November, not long after my analysis. The risk does seem to be higher odds ratio of 1. See also the followup looking at DNMs in general: The emergence of deep web marketplaces: At the end of and during , the Energy Control team was aware of the growing popularity of DWMs through information provided by recreational drug users.

During the first quarter of , a specific protocol with objectives, procedures, methods and techniques was elaborated using TEDI Transnational European Drug Information: TEDI, guidelines as a reference. All samples were analysed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The fee for a simple analysis was EUR 50 to be paid in bitcoins. All funds raised were put back into running the project. A one-year pilot project started in April ; drug users who purchase drugs in DWMs were the target population.

An email address for users to contact the service for detailed information about the process was made available. After submitting samples for analysis, users receive a detailed report with drug test results and specific and individualised harm reduction information. Users were encouraged to engage with Energy Control experts by emails or in DWM forums in order to resolve their questions.

Users are asked about the type of substance they believe they have purchased. In the remaining 9, the sample contained another drug, a mixture of substances was detected or it was not possible to determine the composition of the sample with the analytical techniques employed. The main results of the drug testing are shown in Table 7. MDMA samples in both pill and crystallised forms showed high levels of purity, and no adulterants or other active ingredients were detected.

Results for MDMA pills, showing very high dosages of MDMA that can lead to significant adverse or toxic effects, are similar to those reported by other harm reduction groups offering drug testing programmes TEDI, The high frequency of non-adulterated cocaine samples is also notable, although levamisole contamination seems to be a widespread problem, as reported in the rest of the global drug market…Another interesting aspect is the low frequency of legal highs in samples submitted for analysis.

So far, unfortunately, their system has been somewhat successful, said a federal law enforcement source involved in the investigation into the site. Federal charges have yet to be brought against the site or its administrators, but another law enforcement source involved in the Silk Road probe said high-tech investigative methods used by the government are helping investigators build a case. Those methods include encryption-cracking technology and the exploitation of security weaknesses in some encrypted email and instant message software used by Silk Road customers, the source said.

Efforts to find any known operator of Silk Road were unsuccessful. For example, the British Channel 4 writes in How illegal drugs are bought and sold on the dark web:. However, Silk Road is still up and running. A source close to the FBI told Channel 4 News that it has exceptionally good operational security , and its owners avoid personal meetings in order to stay under the radar.

At one point during our eight-month pre-interview courtship, I offer to meet him at an undisclosed location outside the United States. Meeting in person is out of the question, he says. A poster on the SR forums claims:.

The beauty of this system is that the buyer has no idea who is selling them the drugs. I still talk to some people I used to work with and they talk about this place. In general, the police are interested in getting drug dealers. They will arrest buyers to get to the dealers. They try to flip small time dealers to get to bigger dealers, but that rarely happens.

Usually they are just getting other small dealers. The only way I know of that they could prove you were using SR is by seizing your computer and finding evidence on it or by you telling them. SR is very frustrating to law enforcement. DPR publicly claims the attack was sophisticated and featured zero-days; from his Forbes interview:. What can you tell me about the cyberattack that hit the Silk Road in May?

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How big was it? How long did it last? Is it still going on? Do you know anything about who is responsible? It lasted nearly a week if I recall correctly. Hackers and scammers are constantly trying to attack Silk Road anyway they can. This has been a blessing and a curse. For one, our systems are incredibly resilient to attack and are constantly being tested.

On the other hand, we are on the front-line dealing with and reacting to all of the latest exploits. We do our best to stay at least one step ahead, but as we saw last month, sometimes we get taken by surprise by someone with a zero day exploit. So this was not merely a distributed denial of service attack? It was a zero day exploit? Did it gain access to any data or simply knock the site offline?

The effect of the attack was to block access to Silk Road. Do you believe the attack was orchestrated by your competitors at Atlantis, as many have suggested? They are as tight as we can make them without sacrificing the integrity of the market. Could they be a little tighter? Maybe by a week or two, but please think through the implications of policy changes before you call for them.

In analyzing the configuration of the Silk Road Web Server, the FBI has discovered that the server regularly purges data from these databases older than 60 days.

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Thus, the image of the Silk Road Web Server possessed by the FBI contains data reflecting only 60 days of user activity, counting back from the date the server was imaged…However, the FBI has also discovered computer code on the Silk Road Web Server that periodically backs up data from the server and exports that data to another server. Based on analysis of the backup script, it does not appear that previously backed-up data is deleted when new back-ups are made.

The bad thing about. In particular, SR has been the target of many phishing attacks, where a random. For example, one such site has already been linked in the comments on this page; it was easy to detect as it was even slower than SR since there are two hidden servers involved , and it blindly forwarded me to the real SR.

A example of such a phishing page:. A research paper documented how to observe traffic volumes to particular hidden services, so a blogger observed hidden node traffic April-May , and recorded what. Incidentally, the darknet markets seem to make up a large fraction of content available as Tor hidden services; see the above traffic estimates and also Spitters et al Naturally, nothing stops the. This is a fundamental security problem: Specifically, one that will be very difficult to brute-force the hash. Mixing services are run by various people and not always reliable.

Addresses ought always to be encrypted, and further, one must do the encryption oneself. If a single person, tool, or site is doing the encryption for your SR ordering, and only SR encryption, then they are an obvious target for attackers like law enforcement. This is a very real concern: Hushmail either provides or runs the encryption code for the user, and as such, can compromise users at any time, and indeed, has turned over decrypted emails to law enforcement in the past Operation Raw Deal yielded 12 CDs of emails.

I personally stopped using Hushmail when this was revealed in , but it seems the defendants did not. The litany of detailed financial records in the indictment is also a vivid demonstration of how insecure non-Bitcoin services can be. Finally, Tor Mail was popular with DNM users for providing a hidden service, and while it did not betray its users, its French servers were seized in the Freedom Hosting raid and its emails have since been employed by the FBI.

I only used the standard Bitcoin escrow. Needless to say, Paypal is completely out of the question. But how does volatility affect DNMs? Volatility upwards is, of course, largely a good thing for DNMs, as they produce a wealth effect. Why would Bitcoin becoming more valuable be bad for a Bitcoin-based economy? The buyers, who have been holding or obtaining bitcoins to prepare for future drug purchases, now have a more valuable asset; and the sellers, who are typically holding even larger sums, get an unearned windfall profit.

The really bad thing is when prices crash. The Central Asian music scene is alive and roaring. A documentary about rap crews, rockstars, and their fans in the northwest of China. Open call for documentary topics: Would your research make a great film? Are you excited to see your research translated into a documentary film?

Take the Silk Road Home : Barry Terenna :

Have you come across a story, an issue, a person or a place that should be shown to a broader audience? Retrieved 19 October Retrieved 20 October Retrieved 9 August Retrieved 11 June Retrieved 2 October Retrieved 6 October That's the end of the discussion", said federal public defender Brandon LeBlanc, who is representing defendant Ross Ulbricht.

Retrieved 19 December Silk Road Part 3 - Casefile: Retrieved 5 February Retrieved 7 October Retrieved 25 October Retrieved 13 June Retrieved 8 July Ulbricht admits founding the site, but says he isn't DPR". Gox founder "set up" Ulbricht". Retrieved 30 January Retrieved 30 Jan The New York Post. Retrieved 11 February Retrieved on March 31, Retrieved 31 May Supreme Court turns away Silk Road website founder's appeal".

Retrieved 19 April Guardian News and Media. Retrieved 1 July Retrieved 30 May A Vicious Blow to the War on Drugs". Retrieved 30 October Retrieved 1 August Retrieved 18 October Retrieved 30 December Retrieved 1 January Retrieved 14 February Using this, the hacker was able to spam the link and exponentially credit their account with more and more bitcoins, taking them out of the section of Silk Road that stored the currency while it was being traded According to Silk Road staff members, 50 percent of the hack victims had been completely repaid as of April 8, and users themselves have been continually reporting payments since the breach, posting on the site forum when they receive their payment.

Since February 15, the administration of the site has not made any commissions on sales. Instead, every time a purchase is made, a five percent slice of the cost goes directly into the account of a randomly determined hack victim. Ferris, and Adam R. Broadhurst, Roderic, et al. Dasgupta, Nabarun, et al. Is blood thicker than water? An International Journal Phelps, Amy, and Allan Watt. Van Buskirk, Joe, et al.

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