The Silk Road Is Back 261
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Silk Road is rising from the dead. After the FBI seized the deep web's favourite illegal drug market and arrested its alleged founder Ross Ulbricht last month (for, among other things, ordering a hit through his own website), the online-marketplace-cum-libertarian-movement has found a new home and opened for business at 16:20 GMT this afternoon. In the wake of the original Silk Road's closure, everything became a little turbulent for its users. First, they had to get used to not getting high-quality, peer-reviewed drugs delivered direct to their sofas. (Though presumably they didn't stop getting high, instead forced back to the 'mystery mix' street dealers and surly ex-Balkan war criminals who have spent years filling cities with drugs at night.) Some users were pissed off that they'd lost all the Bitcoin wealth they'd amassed, or that paid-for orders would go undelivered, while small-time dealers freaked out about how they suddenly lacked the funds to pay off debts owed to drug sellers higher up the food chain."
Yea, Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen nor participated in Silk Road. But, you'd have to be an utter moron to participate in the Silk Road "Phoenix"! It is sure to be either an FBI honey pot or a scammer looking to steal BitCoin.
Go ahead, prove me wrong.
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I am surprised that law enforcement allowed it to be shut down in the first place. They should have taken it over, and run it for a few months, track every transaction, and then come down hard on all the dealers.
Or just sit back and bust the top seller every month. Someone else will always step up to fill the gap, and some smart cop looks like a hero to his/her superiors.
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They already got all the site data, I guess they didn't like the idea of using as a farm to raise easily bustable kingpins with.
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The internet equivalent of sitting on the stash house and making cases off the mules going in and out? Unfortunately, most modern law enforcement doesn't have a view of a horizon that far away. They go for the low hanging fruit and move on, instead of taking down the whole ring.
Maybe the CIA... (Score:2)
...has taken it over and going to run it as a profit center to support whatever off-the-books black ops they are running, as well as provide a long-term intelligence gathering center for transnational organized crime and drug dealing.
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How? It's not like the sellers need to leave their street adress, and if they're halfway smart, they launder their Bitcoins before cashing them in.
They could potentially catch a few buyers by pretending to be sellers, but even then it would require them to have a stash when ordering because someone send you something illegal do
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I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they did.
Re:Yea, Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the old saying goes: You follow drugs, you get drug dealers and drug users. You start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna go.
Re:Yea, Right! (Score:4, Informative)
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"God exist! Go head, prove me wrong!"
It doesn't work like that.
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"It's a trap!"
- Admiral Gial Ackbar
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Given the general intelligence level of the average criminal, "utter moron" probably isn't much of a stretch for a lot of the silk road users. Committing crimes in a medium that can conceivably record most, if not all, of your actions is crazy.
Someone will attempt to correct me with a comment about how conniving criminals are, but for the most part, they are dumber than a sack of bricks. Sure there is a genius or two, but even the smart ones can get caught if they keep at it and eventually slip up.
Not really news (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of silk roads have opened up since the original one was raided. Some have taken orders, collected the money and done a runner with it. Some presumably are still operating. Some will be fronts and honeytraps set up by various law enforcement bodies around the world. Some will be real genuine marketplaces. Nobody knows for sure which ones are the genuine ones.
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That seems to be the way it was setup.
The anonymity that protected the Silk Road now protects scammers and police.
The Silk Road Is Dead. (Score:3)
Long Live The Silk Road.
Re:The Silk Road Is Dead. (Score:5, Funny)
to be clear, i do not support the Silk Road.
The only thing that would make sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is that this instance is run by FBI.
I don't see other reason why anyone would take the risk without - at least - a massive security technology change.
Re:The only thing that would make sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'massive security upgrade' could be that this one isn't run by a goddamn moron....
Re:The only thing that would make sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
This. The guy was a multi-millionaire but couldn't be assed to make fake ID cards in-house or separate his identity as Silk Road admin from one he used on the web to promote the site, among many other things. Someone smart behind the wheel would have made it unstoppable.
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A real-life public defender instead of a Saul Goodman [wikia.com]?
I don't get it.
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The 'massive security upgrade' could be that this one isn't run by a goddamn moron....
So true. I was banging my head against the table as details came out. Well figuratively, but not literally.
But lets make one thing clear, this is not THE Silk Road. This is A Silk Road. One of a number of wanna that want to step into the place of the original.
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According to the FBI, Ulbright pulled in $85m of commissions in about three years.
With profits like that, I suspect quite a few people will be happy to risk a little bit of jail time.
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Re:The only thing that would make sense... (Score:5, Informative)
The technology was not what got the Silk Road raided. The technology is fine, it's user error that's the problem. Ulbricht failed to fully compartmentalize his Dread Pirate Roberts identity, and that's what got him busted.
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I have nothing but praise for Fabulous Bud Industries. Fast shipping, good stealth, would buy again.
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In central Florida there's a company called "Florida Business Interiors" with vans all over the place. Those always cracked me up.
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Back in the day, the Merry Pranksters used to drive around SF Bay in a van marked International Cocaine Importers & Exporters SA / San Francisco - Ciudad Juárez - Lima.
Seems legit.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seems legit.. (Score:5, Funny)
FBI tradition? (Score:2, Interesting)
Traditionally, domains and servers sized by the FBI become honeypots afterwards, right?
I would be disappointed if they were to break with this convenient reallocation of resources now.
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These are the same users who supposedly knew the difference between Java and JavaScript...?
Wait---they never did... so I guess some /. traditions remain safe, eh.
Others have already taken over (Score:3)
Other have already taken over. It might not yet be as trusted as Silk Road was, but there are alternate platforms that were just waiting for the big one to go away and took over without a problem. Too much money to be gained in a fairly secure market. Just don't be from the US but from Russia or somewhere where they don't bother going after someone mostly facilitating sales in the US and Europe.
Oh, good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, good (Score:5, Funny)
Waitaminute. I didn't post that.
Okay, maybe I did, but I was probably in a drunken stupor when it happened so that's okay.
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I may have done that while in a drunken stupor
Is going to replace suspots as my go-to excuse for all and anything from now on. Since apparently it's acceptable justification for even the most unacceptable of behavior.
Hell, I see a resurgence in the three-martini lunch from here on out.
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Does the subscription include 3 martinis daily? If so, I might also be interested.
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Who do you think you are? Obama?
Good try, but this was a little further north [google.com].
I suspect this will be looked at as one of the great political suicide speaches of all time.
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How could this guy:
But until Tuesday, Rob Ford, the mayor of multicultural, eco-conscious, politically correct Toronto, had vehemently denied a persistent report about a video that showed him smoking crack cocaine.
Get elected as mayor of Toronto?
But until this one, the episodes only seemed to reinforce Mr. Ford’s standing among his core constituency, what he calls the Ford Nation, of disenchanted, right-of-center suburbanites. Now his mayoralty is in serious doubt.
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Because elections are about selecting the lesser evil, and a candidate using crack is unlikely to even register on that scale, as long as they are functional enough to run their campaign.
Weighing the possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
It could be a honeypot, but since everything done through a site like Silk Road is anonymous except receipt of delivery of items, the only users of the site the FBI would catch would be the drug buyers. Sellers, provided they're not using an OS or browser with the vulnerabilities that the FBI has used to de-anonymize TOR users in the past, and provided they don't do something dumb when they mail a package like reveal their identity, are safe. And since when is the FBI interested in going after drug buyers? Typically they only bust such small-time participants in the drug trade to get them to rat on their dealers, but that obviously won't work when your dealer is anonymous.
Or am I missing something here? My understanding was that Silk Road did things entirely through TOR and Bitcoin, meaning that those ends of the transactions are (excepting user stupidity) completely anonymous.
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You have to look at what they have now that they didn't have before, assuming it's a honeypot. Likely, they have detailed information of the transactions of their users, everything from the IP of the incoming TOR node to the amount and type of transactions a particular user was party to. And they can probably
I think they're still waiting for their users to slip up, reveal their real names or do some other silly thing to expose themselves. But now they don't need to set up sting operations on any potential s
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Whoops, never finished that thought. They can probably determine which time zone the user mostly is in from the logs alone.
With dopers? (Score:2)
They can probably determine which time zone the user mostly is in from the logs alone.
With drug users working on Doper Substandard Time? That would be a stretch.
Re:Weighing the possibilities (Score:5, Informative)
There is the glaring privacy hole.
At some point, the physical package will be shipped from Point A to Point B.
It's obvious that carriers like UPS and FedEx already track every detail of a package from pickup to delivery. You can get those details from their web site with the tracking number.
Shipping using USPS seemed "safer". It came out a few months ago that it isn't. [nytimes.com]
A private courier is more expensive, and adds the ability to track the package closer, especially if the feds are the sending party.
Even in the case of the Dread Pirate Roberts hiring a hitman, there is a real-world endpoint. They know who has the contract on their head, they'd only have to investigate why to find out who ordered it.
So even if TOR was perfectly anonymous (It's good, but...), and if bitcoins were anonymous (again, good, but...), it's still easy to catch one or both ends of the transaction.
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But I don't know any Bosnian war criminals. Where am I suppose to purchase gently used fully automatic weapons at rock bottom prices?
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Well, we don't seem to have a lot of African warlords around here. ATF employees though, we have plenty. I keep calling asking to buy, but they always laugh and hang up. Should I be telling them I'm willing to spend up to 10 whole dollars? :)
Drugwars (Score:2)
Obligatory Drugwars [wikipedia.org] link
lost all their bitcoins (Score:2)
If they kept it in wallets controlled by the Silk Road site, they have only themselves to blame. Preventing that kind of thing is what bitcoin is designed for.
I'd never order from such a "service" (Score:2)
I'd never order my medication from a place like "Silk Road." I don't like the idea of giving my address out to some anonymous stranger that I've never chatted with or met.
Silly me. Being paranoid like that.
Remember: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you.
silk road wasnt the problem (Score:2)
The problem really wasn't with silk road, it was no more or less illegal than your street corner. The problem is it was being run by some guy who was violating laws, and got caught. If you do something to piss off the man, you really need to stay clean.
Its too bad the dealers lost their $, but that can happen in real life too if your supplier gets busted before he delivers.
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People have a product to sell.
Other people desire this product.
Person A sells this product to person B.
This is capitalism. it's not evil. Nobody is directly harmed in this transaction, and both parties got what they wanted. This is a good thing!
note, I said "directly harmed." it is possible somebody may have been indirectly harmed by violence perpetrated by deranged criminals who are involved in the supply chain due to the fact that this activity is currently deemed illegal. note, it's not illegal because i
Re:YAY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like being illegal does not automatically make something unethical, being illegal but in demand does not automatically make something ethical either.
Re:YAY !! (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that we shouldn't be banning reasonably safe in-demand products because having products that mainstream people want only available though the black market, enables the terrible things that also go on there. A drug should have to be really destructive like Meth to be banned.
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True. The freakiest thing I saw when taking a look at SR was large amounts of cyanide from one vendor. I haven't heard about mass-poisonings, but making it that easy for a crazy to hurt a lot of people is very worrying.
Does cyanide have no uses other than poisoning? I don't know, but I presume someone who does know and is interested in playing with the stuff would rather pick it up black market than try to procure it legally and be added to a watch list somewhere.
recover gold from electronic waste (Score:3, Informative)
key resource in many street level recovery industries - cheap, dangerous and dirty, unfortunately.
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Right, they sell it on SilkRoad for those who want to make other people dye.
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A while back there was a research group trying to devise a chemical cocktail that had the pleasant recreational elements of various drugs (they were working on booze specifically) but without the addiction or health issues. Now there would be a blockbuster that could change the world....
Re:YAY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
There already exists recreational drugs without addiction or health issues... they are also all illegal.
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"If someone wants to use drugs and walk out a window that is their business."
it never is that simple, is it?
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and there are laws about alcohol's use
would you support a law saying LSD/ psilocybin/ other psychedelic use is legal, as long as you have a responsible sober babysitter?
i would
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if i suddenly got interested in cyanide, i'd be a bit worried that the seller on that site sits in some fbi office and would try to talk me into poisoning something right after that.
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This is capitalism. it's not evil. Nobody is directly harmed in this transaction, and both parties got what they wanted. This is a good thing!
This is debatable, at best. Modern capitalism is theoretically founded in modern economics, which, guess what, uses utilitarian ethics for value. The utility A and B derived from the transaction may or may not offset the utility lost to everybody else. If it doesn't, then the transaction is not efficient, and rational actors should not perform it.
Of course, this is
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"Of course, this is where libertarianism falls flat on its face. Your transaction incurs costs on others, and you are irrational if you do not take those costs into account."
I would agree with you if GP's comment were actually a reflection of "libertarianism", but it's not.
Where do you get the idea that libertarians (or an even more egregious error, Libertarians) have no ethics?
Oh, yeah... the liberal media that paints them all as anarchists. Well, I have news for you: [A] what you call "modern" economics is largely bunk (seriously... Keynes and his "interventionist" theories have been so thoroughly discredited over the last 4 decades, it's just ridiculous), but that's ki
Mod parent up for ridicule. (Score:5, Insightful)
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A lefty wrote tbis.
Most of you are akin to chimpanzees jumping at the behest of memes to strip freedoms in the support of your meme's attempt at dominance.
And you are not? I am reminded of a newpaper cartoon I saw that was penned in the '60s. There was a whole row of young people, all wearing beads, vests, bell-bottom jeans, and long hair, saying in unison: "Look! We're non-conforming!"
Grow up and leave that tens of millenia old crap on the dustheap of history where it belongs. We, who do not recognize consenting crimes, are currently twisting the dagger in the corpse of anti-gay and anti-marijuana laws.
How about you grow up and read the philosophers who got there long before you? Like Lysander Spooner, who wrote "Vices Are Not Crimes" in 1875?
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there are plenty of things that a market exists for that are immoral
plutonium. child sex slaves. ricin. RPGs
just because a market exists for something does not justify it
you may say that you can't shut a market down, it will just go underground
yeah, and making rape, murder, and robbery illegal hasn't stopped them either. but we still do not legalize or accept rape, murder, or robbery
some things civilization will always be at war with. permanently
it's simply a maintenance function
you yourself are involved wi
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Why am I reminded of the people who turn the talk to child molesters when talking about homosexuality? Could it be that you're doing something similar here?
Mind-altering substances are unlikely to be amongst those. The very fact that you felt the need to provide a fallacious appeal to emotion above implies you don't believe it either and thus tried to give your argument weight it doesn't carry on its ow
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
it's moral for me to decide what people to with their bodies when i am forced to pay for their feeding and housing and healthcare when they destroy their lives with said substances
if substance abuse happened in a vacuum, it would be fine. but it does not. it has costs to society. this gives society the right to get involved
that being said, healthcare solutions are the proper approach to addiction, not jails
and nonaddictive substances like marijuana should be legal
but the people who sell the addictive substa
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The fact that you think that plutonium is somehow intrisnically immoral bothers me.
It's like if somebody in 1750 said that "crude oil will always be intrinsically immoral" because it was poisonous, smelled bad when you burned it in a lamp, and caused a stack of black, smoky pollution. There are reactor designs that exist right now which are capable of turning that plutonium into heat and short-lived decay products.
_Nothing_ is intrinsically immoral except for man perpetrating force or fraud against his fel
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Supposedly the transactions are safer this way. I'd rather them meet online than on the street where I live.
HOLY LOLI HONEYPOT EXPLOZION, BATAMAN! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Huh? Can't you read? The FBI's efforts have been thwarted.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin was at $130ish when Silk Road shut down. Then there was hand waiving about a "crash." It "crashed" all the way to $100.
As I write this it looks like Mt. Gox is $265.
You're whole posit is bullshit.
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This story is just another PR push for bitcoins by people who have invested heavily in bitcoins. Can we stop talking about bitcoins? It is not really a tech story and is a complete scam.
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Why do you think that?
Do you think regular currencies are a scam as well?
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You don't think it warrants attention on a nerd news site that a technology-backed currency based on peer-to-peer cryptography is still growing strongly five years after its inception? If nothing else, I find the technological aspects quite intriguing.
I'll grant you that the constant focus on the illegal aspects of bitcoin grows annoying, just like calling computer crackers, "hackers."
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Do the illegal aspects worry you because you are a bitcoin backer? Do you own bitcoins? I have never met anyone who does. I have no interest in owning them. The illegal uses is the only sensible reason for something like bitcoin existing. That said it probably makes it easier for governments to squash it.
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Well, what else is bitcoin good for? I can either buy goods and services using a stable currency that's accepted by everyone... or I can try to hide transactions using an obscure token whose value fluctuates wildly. Hard to believe the main uses of it aren't illegal.
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One of the big uses of bitcoin is the ability to send arbitrary amounts of wealth anywhere in the world with fees amounting to a few pennies. Need to send $10? No problem. Need to send $10,000? No problem.
For merchants, accepting bitcoins has zero fees, or if you want to use a merchant service and get the cash value deposited directly in your bank account, it's about 1 percent. Also, there is never any possibility of chargebacks. It is extremely attractive for merchants for these reasons.
These are a c
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Don't "regular" currencies have stories written about them 6 days a week in the Wall Street Journal and the Business section of the New York Times?
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what does that have to do with anything? my point remains. there is an active program to promote bitcoin in slashdot. It is an orchestrated campaign to make sure there is some news story every few days. Bitcoin is a scam and not a topic that slashdot should be wasting its time. I would be interested to know if each of these commentators have a vested interest. I personally do not own any bitcoins nor have i ever had.
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It's attached to perceived market conditions.
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Like tulip bulbs then?
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, exactly like tulip bulbs, gold or US dollars.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming (Score:4, Insightful)
Collective might of what? There's nothing wrong with creating a new currency, even one that is digital. The fact that gold has real world applications has no relevance to its value as a currency, despite how people keep insisting on finding some 'intrinsic value' in the currencies they use. The intrinsic theory of value was the theory people held before Adam Smith, and the economic equivalent of the Ptolemaic system in astronomy -- the ancients thought so, but they were wrong.
We now believe that objects have subjective value, and that it is determined by the market forces of supply and demand. And we also believe that currencies exist because they facilitate transactions, so that their demand does not depend on any use they have other than as a medium of exchange for other goods (I include here being a store of value). Some important characteristics that make up a good medium of exchange are:
You see that under these conditions, bitcoin is equivalent to gold (except for the size of the market - a lot lot more gold is traded daily). This is because what makes fiat currency fiat is the fact that its scarcity is artificial. The dollar is scarce because the Federal Reserve has promised not to print too many, and we have faith (fiat) in it. Gold is scarce because if we want any more, we have to dig it out of the gound with increased difficulty, and bitcoin are scarce because it takes computing effort to find more. Practical uses for these things do not even come into consideration here.
Finally we come to the size of the market. If a currency is useful only as a medium of exchange, then the more people you can trade with in that currency, the more useful and valuable it is. This is the reason for the dollar's supremacy, as for 50 years it was the currency of the largest market in the world, and so it got established as the basis for international reserves. Because of this, the dollar maintains its primacy even now that it has been demoted to the second largest market. But this does not mean that it has intrinsic value, only that its demand as a medium of transaction is further boosted by transactions at the nation level
My point is that there is nothing wrong with bitcoin as a currency. It is as good as gold, as good as the dollar. But it just has a smaller market for now, which gives it the flaws people point out here. Any new currency would have the problems bitcoin is having. It may fail in the end, but that does not mean it was a bad idea.
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And you think that's what drives gold's price? It isn't the selling of an idea to everyone that it is precious, and should be worn around the neck?
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The value of money isn't attached to anything either. It's a collective fiction.
Poppycock. The value of money* is attached to a government's ability to raise taxes.
[*money, that is, in the sense of legal tender, i.e. to only exchange technology the state accepts in satisfaction of tax liability]
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Very few currencies are, except to other currencies. I mean, I suppose you could say the value of the US Dollar is attached in some vague way to the military power of the US, and thus their ability to force people to accept the currency, but that's hardly a useful conversion for daily use.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming (Score:4, Insightful)
Bitcoin value isn't attached to anything.
Actually, if you understand political-economy, neither do the various fiat currencies we have today. All we have is a shared psychological conditioning that attaches a value to something (pieces of artistic paper) that have no inherent value of their own. When a fiat currency goes bad, you don't see people burying it in the backyard hoping it will have value again in the future. OTOH, you do find precious metals, gems, jewelry, sometimes other works of artistic value, and the odd person with some Swiss Francs. Now I'd add a flash drive with a few bitcoins.
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and i thought it was a liberterians wet dream - true market forces in action, the market self regulating itself by supply and demand.
Sort of. Libertarians (capital L) would rather see a return to something like the gold standard, near as I can tell with actual gold, silver, possibly other precious metals, in circulation. Bitcoins still fall under fiat currency as it has nothing more, or less, than a perceived (psychological) value, It's a bit more since there are only supposed to be some absolute maximum number that can be in circulation which isn't true of most (all?) fiat currencies.
drugs are bad mkay (Score:2)
drugs are bad mkay
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Personally I don't do drugs. But I use medical cannabis to manage my migraines and arthritis.
There is nothing quite as effective as traditional herbal medication.
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Does that mean workaholics should be forbidden to work, since they get high from it?
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Leeches never really left the drugstore. They evolved into the strange lifeforms we now call "Health Maintenance Organizations".
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GMT is soooo last century.
And so is Swatch Internet Time [wikipedia.org], thank goodness.