Head of Silk Road 2.0 Says It Will Be Back In Minutes If Shut Down 222
Daniel_Stuckey writes "It only took a month for the Silk Road 2.0 to go live after the now infamous Silk Road marketplace shuttered. One month. Should the budding deep-web bazaar experience the same fate as its predecessor, and be knocked out by authorities still whack-a-moling their way through the online front of the war on drugs, the Silk Road 3.0 would be up and running in 15 minutes, tops. That's according to the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous head of SR 2.0. In what are arguably his most breathy public remarks to date the 'new' DPR, who either cribbed his handle from the DPR of SR 1.0 fame or who is indeed the original DPR, opened up to Mike Power on his long-term vision for the site."
Silk Road down? (Score:3, Insightful)
They keep using that word. I don't think it means what they think it means.
I for one, welcome the new Dread Pirate Roberts.
Re:Silk Road down? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was intentional, the choice of "Dread Pirate Roberts" for a handle was truly inspired. There will always be a black market underlying any economy, and I'm betting there will be an internet version of one going forward. While I wouldn't try to predict what it will look like, I have a suspicion that it will be called Silk Road for quite some time, one way or another.
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There will always be a black market underlying any economy, and I'm betting there will be an internet version of one going forward.
That statement is only true for as long as we allow prohibitions and remain an "ignorant" bunch of sheople. I think the hope long long ago was that humanity would be educated and included in their own societies. Both of those things have become laughable concepts to today's "elite" class.
That said, I too welcome Dread Pirate Roberts! If people can realize how asinine prohibition is, we have a chance to gain intellect discussing alternatives.
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There will always be a black market as long as government tries to regulate commerce.
There is a illegal trade in unstamped / untaxed cigarettes. For money of course.
There is a illegal trade in unpasteurized whole milk (and the associated chesses.). Not sure why anybody would be against pasteurization but a few are.
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Some people attribute unlikely properties to raw milk ("it cured me of lactose intolerance"). I suspect that for anything the government outlaws there will be some group who figures it must be great, because that's how the government works: the outlaw everything you actually want. Credibility is just one more casualty of the drug war.
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Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Dread Pirate Roberts a 'good' guy posing as a 'bad' guy? This has FBI shill all over it.
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Re:Silk Road down? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's s Honey Pot.
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Re:Silk Road down? (Score:5, Funny)
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No doubt. Who is going to be high enough to fall for this... oh right.
That is, after all, why going after drug users is so important to law enforcement. It's just too damned easy. Murder and Burglar investigations take all kinds of time and resources, screw that.
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Of course, because all law enforcement resources are interchangeable. The financial guys are just fantastic in high-speed chases.
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It is not. Entrapment would be if the police went to someone and said," I really want you to sell me some drugs and then convinced them to do so". Just saying "hey do you have any drugs to buy" is not. Trapping people is perfectly legal. Convincing them to break the law is not.
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That would depend.
For instance saying "I know you have good stuff so come on man" is okay.
Telling them where they can get a supply and what a good way to make money dealing is then probably not. Proving entrapment is really hard so never bet on it.
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That is not the court's opinion and that is what counts.
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And you would be wrong.
Dread Pirate Roberts (Score:4, Funny)
We'll you know the last Dread Pirate Roberts wasn't the original Dread Pirate Roberts anyway. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia.
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a working web site doesn't accomplish anything if nobody uses it, for fear of going to jail.
Silk Road 1.0 didn't just get shut down. The Feds had complete access to it for months. If you use Silk Road 2.0 and end up in jail, it's your own fault.
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If you take the proper precautions, then it doesn't matter if they have access to it. It's through tor, so they don't have your IP. Use a completely new username and password for your account that you haven't ever used before. Encrypt any communication with the seller/buyer, such as the shipping address or tracking number, with GPG. That way only the seller/buyer see each other.
Access the site through a secure machine (Tails LiveCD or a VM setup like Whonix) so that even if the browser is compromised with a
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Law enforcement agencies around the world are arresting Silk Road sellers, and have promised to continue doing so.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/08/silk-road-busts/2946925/
Buyers are at significantly less risk, but without sellers the site isn't going to function.
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Buyers are at significantly less risk, but without sellers the site isn't going to function.
Where there is money to be made, there will be people willing to take the risk.
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Buyers are at significantly less risk, but without sellers the site isn't going to function.
Where there is money to be made, there will be people willing to take the risk.
Also worth noting that the buyers seem to be taking a bigger risk. Sellers can get paid in bitcoin and drop the package in a corner mailbox, and should be able to stay fairly anonymous if they do it right. Buyers need to provide an address for delivery.
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They had the ability to shut it down for quite a while but didn't because they were gathering information and building cases on individual sellers.
Goverment? So what. (Score:2)
If its CIA - for doing their own drug smuggling [wikipedia.org], it's unlikely they'll blow their cover by sharing with your Oregon's PD.
If it's NYPD - they won't care outside of NY.
If it's NSA - they won't blow their cover for fear of more bad PR.
And that's just US agencies. Even if it is government, it's just as likely it's China's government. Or Singapore's. Or Russia's.
Or Afghanistan's, now that someone stopped the Taliban who were cracking down on Heroin.
And even if it is - wouldn't buy
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There's this agency called the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They handled cases where drugs cross state lines. I understand why you might not have heard of them, since they were only created 105 years ago.
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Ron, let me clue you in: When you transport drugs across state lines, it falls under federal law. They can kick your ass so hard your kids will be born dizzy for that; In California, you can go from clean record to life imprisonment thanks to their whack-ass "three strikes" law, because I can think of at least half a dozen federal laws that are being broken from postal regulations to schedule I drug possesion, back to interstate transportation, and all the way across to "How do you plead?"
And even if it is - wouldn't buyers and sellers take precautions to keep their privacy even from the guys (who are very likely criminals) running Silk Road anyway?
You're asking me i
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Re:Missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite a bold statement that has no real basis in reality:
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/14/high-iq-linked-to-drug-use/ [cnn.com]
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Many of the same risks you identify applied to intelligent people across history who have engaged in seemingly "self-destructive" behaviors in order to further beliefs they believed were right: Galileo (loss of money/reduced opp
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and nothing has the long-term mortality of nicotine
With a BS in neuroscience and an IQ of 151, I made the foolish assumption that you would have been informed enough to know that nicotine isn't what kills tobacco users; it's the countless carcinogens and ancillary destructive compounds in said products that produces fatalities. Nicotine alone, in the dosages consumed by routine users of products containing the chemical, is no more harmful from a physiological perspective than caffeine. Perhaps you should educate yourself further before posting again.
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Try using facts rather than just making up what you want to believe
To be fair to GP, he may not be making it up. He's likely an American, and the truth is that we've been having that bullshit shoved down our throats (at least) since Ronny decided that Nancy needed a hobby.
Dread Pirate Roberts is a very appropriate name (Score:4, Informative)
I think that keeping the name Dread Pirate Roberts is very appropriate to the movie it came from.
Dread Pirate Roberts:
Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he told me his secret. 'I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts' he said. 'My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.'
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Amazon AWS (Score:2)
Sounds like Silk Road joins the illustrious company of ThePirateBay as one of those indispensable services running on Amazon Web Services without Amazon particularly noticing.
(I wish Amazon hadn't called it AWS. It's not recognizable enough without spelling out Amazon, and you end up effectively writing Amazon Amazon Web Services or people don't know what you're talking about.)
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(I wish Amazon hadn't called it AWS. It's not recognizable enough without spelling out Amazon, and you end up effectively writing Amazon Amazon Web Services or people don't know what you're talking about.)
I always call it EC2, and more or less, everyone in the computing business knows what that is.
Silk Road! (Score:2)
Bah, there Intellectual Property rights there and a worldwide reputation that's being infringed you know. The Silk Road was built on the work of the DPR and he deserves to be paid for his intellectual endeavors!
The new site is a cheap copycat fraud that fails to respect others rights. They threaten more clones like a game of whack a mole. No respect for intellectual property at all. How can you trust that kind of operation? Next thing you know the FBI will replace with front page with "It's a trap" and even
A new Silk Road? (Score:2)
A new Silk Road went online and the value of bitcoins dipped nearly USD$50 around 24~48 hours ago. Is it related?
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The value of bitcoins was obviously spiking in the past few days. So no. A drop was entirely expected irrespective of any silkroadyness.
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Most of the increase in value has been attributed to the adoption of Bitcoin in China as well as fears in Europe over quantitative easing of the Euro.
This caused Bitcoin to spike nearly 4x in value before coming down slightly by $50 yesterday. This is typical of a market "correction" when a security has become overvalu
Re:really (Score:5, Insightful)
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The last time Prohibition was repealed, it took a constitutional amendment.
It looks like this Prohibition will be just as difficult to get rid of as the last one.
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Drug prohibition have never existed in the first place if they needed to get a constitutional amendment.
That's like saying,"Thank got none of my doors have locks, because it is now much easier to get rid of the burglar that's currently in my house without having to deal with a bunch of pesky locks."
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That's because it's not really prohibited. You just need to get your Pot stamp to be allowed to buy or use Pot. The fact that the stamps are not made is not the governments fault.
I realize this is no longer the case, but it is how he marijuana prohibition started out. They just started out regulating it with tax stamps that were impossible to get. They like to find ways to skirt the law to their own desires. Nevermind the fact that skirting the law is called breaking it if we do it. It's basically the same
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Actually if you search you'd find that they DID make them. Run of 100 with 10 retained as samples against counterfeiting... The other 90 were sold to various research firms.
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You need to brush up on your history... Prohibition needed an amendment to repeal because it was an amendment that put it in place. The 18th amendment started prohibition and the 21st repealed it.
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That was irony, son.
I know, Alanis Morissette has forever confused people.
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It took a Constitutional amendment, because Prohibition was enacted through a Constitutional amendment. There's only one way to change what the Constitution says - changing it again. And the Founders (rightly) made that hard to do.
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The consequences and (in)effectiveness of banning one mind altering chemical consumed by humans is quite similar to the consequences and (in)effectiveness of banning other mind altering chemicals consumed by humans.
The current ban was also instituted with broad popular support. Similar. The current ban closed down industries, many of which did not survive at all. Similar. The current ban started out targeting only sales, production and importation. Similar. Different only in recent years.
None of those
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It's hard to use absolute arguments on this kind of subject. Take your argument to one extreme and you get something like "The problem isn't having easily-available nuclear bombs, the problem is those people who would use them." This statement goes too far at least in one way, that while drugs use causes some collateral damage so to speak, not nearly as much as nukes.
Another problem with legalized (free market) drugs is that many are physically addictive, so users are quickly unable to make free choices reg
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That might mean something here if drugs were the only "products" for sale on Silk Road. There'd still be people selling murder for hire, stolen credit cards, and other such things that I doubt you'd want to see legalized.
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Please try to keep up. There a growing movement among the judiciary and state elected officials to reduce the prison pop. especially for non-violent drug offenders. Even that hero of the right, Richard Viguerie is behind the effort. Some are on board for the usual liberal causes, some are on board because it is expensive keeping people locked up.
Re:really (Score:5, Informative)
The only people who earn money on prison inmates are prison operators who charge the government for each inmate they take.
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And these bureaucrats are making money because the taxes revenue allotted to them X is less than their expenses Y, and the rest is their salaries Z. X - Y = Z. If there were not as many people in jail, X is smaller, but so is Y. You can have the same or even larger Z with a smaller X and a smaller Y, and everyone would benefit. In fact, the government could take the same amount of money X, free all the non-violent prisoners, making Z even higher, and rather than costing money, some of those ex-prisoners
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Not to say it doesn't cost the tax payer anything. But there certainly are some groups of people that get a lot of extra money. Just imagine how much higher the military budget would have to be if they were to buy everything through normal channels and no longer prison work.
Citation please on the US Military buying anything standardly made by prison labor. The biggest source we buy from is 'Skilcraft' which employes the blind, not prison workers, and the supplies are an average of ~10% more expensive than standard commercial.
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What!? The government doesn't make any income from prisons. They're spending thousands of our tax dollars lining the pockets of the for-profit prison industry.
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"The government" as in "every government employee" doesn't profit from this. The politicians profit from this with the bribes they are paid in the form of campaign contributions and whatever they get under the table. Maybe you could say that prison guards benefit, but that's very short sighted. If we didn't need so many prison guards they would have probably learned skills for other more productive careers.
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Sad but true: I guess what Xicor should have said is that we need the government to stop being so corrupt, but that's less likely than if they stopped being dumb.
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Uhh, hello? Each occupied prison place is income for said prison, lawyers and judges.
FTFY
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They learned a different lesson - keeping the police unions fed with fresh police from the academy, and keeping the private prison operators fed with tax dollars does much more for keeping incumbent politicians as incumbent politicians. The rest is just spin to keep the voters thinking that it's a good policy.
This seems to be a lesson that other people are incapable of learning.
Re:really (Score:4, Insightful)
No, what we need is full legalization. The two most addictive and dangerous drugs known to man are currently available at almost every gas station in the country. It's a policy that works, and every other drug should be treated the same way.
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Are you referring to nicotine and alcohol? I don't believe these are either the most addictive or the most dangerous on an individual usage basis. You may be right if you count aggregate effect (total number of people addicted to smoking or drinking) but this makes a good argument against legalization.
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I believe he is referring to petrol. It can get quite addictive if consumed regularly.
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I hear there's petrol in Krokodil. That's pretty addictive and dangerous.
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Just because a policy has negative effects doesn't mean it's not a net positive.
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Yeah. Well you are going to hell, druggie.
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You might be surprised to know that there is a such thing as a left libertarian.
That and that in the U.S. the right seems to be more hard line on drugs than the left(ish).
I'm a Left Libertarian (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a left libertarian. Here are some of my views.
For social. Society should, at a minimum, provide the poor and homeless with the level of care that prisoner's receive. Maybe prisoner's should receive less care, so be it. But at least respect the unfortunate, they suffer. Obviously our drug enforcement culture needs to end.
For politics. Possibly only use public funds for political campaigns. How would it work? I have no idea. But prevent, 100%, campaign donations from companies and dissolve all PACs. They are poison to the system. Possibly use a different Federal level voting system, we need more parties in contention badly. Make lobbying illegal, if a business wants to talk directly to a government official, that's fine, but no external parties being funded. Enact a balanced budget amendment (goodbye Military Industrial Complex, but so be it).
For business. Reform the patent system (how? I'm not sure, there are others that know more than I, but I can spot a failed/failing system). Gut the Fed. Reduce "barriers to entry", gut Sarbanes-Oxley and other "established business benefit programs".
For legal. Reform the entire thing, businesses control the system to their whims. RIAA, MPAA, you are who I'm referring to, at least to start with.
For security. Gut it all. Restore the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. NSA and TSA need to be shuttered, as good first steps.
"I have a dream" (TM, Martin Luther King Jr.), but I have little to no optimism regarding true progress under the current system. We have one national party split into two sects, divided primarily by social values. Reality is a voracious destroyer of dreams. I get by.
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I realize, given the article this is tied to, that it isn't worthwhile to go on, but I feel the need (and the kids are in bed).
On education. The fact of the matter is that different children have different intelligence (among types of intelligence) and trying to box everyone into a standardized education is not possible. I can't find the passage, but Danial Quinn (Ishmael/Beyond Civilization) had an idea of a school designed to allow children to delve into what they were interested in (I believe it may ha
More of a Center/Right libertarian here (Score:2)
Social: I've come to the conclusion that fixing the problem(reform) has to be cheaper than warehousing prisoners. So pretty much ditto, though I'd actually treat prisoners better. The current treatment system actually causes mental damage and additional crime. Law enforcement, courts, and prison is expensive. Let's do the 'fix' right the first time.
As an ancillary, I'd stand up what I call the 'fedjobs' program. Historically the military was the biggest source of skilled craftsmen going. Today our pro
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Oh the horror of it all, someone who made enough money to support a small (or large) country through the benefits of society and the work of many might have to chip in a few bux to keep people from dying in the streets. OH the HUMANITY!
Re:really (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah but it's taking like FOREVER to get Godwinned.
If it doesn't happen soon I'll have to do it myself.
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I agree that leaving children hungry is a disgrace, but I'm not sure comparing these two things actually accomplishes anything. Putting people in jail over a plant is a disgrace without need for qualifications and comparisons.
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But it does say something (very bad) about a society that prioritizes putting people in jail for smoking plants over making sure children don't go to be hungry.
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it says even more that putting people in jail for a plant is a priority at all. Comparing it to a legitimate concern is less useful, as it implies it even deserves to be on the prioritization lists in the first place.
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No, not at all.
I know this is shocking to the mom-discovers-one-sneaky-trick crowd, but police can legally lie to you and misrepresent themselves! They also don't have to tell you they're cops, no matter how many times you ask.
What they cannot legally do is convince someone who is otherwise lawful to break the law. They can provide opportunities, but they can't legally force or coerce the person to break the law. That's entrapment. Running a fake drug operation isn't.
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What kind of "journalist" doesn't even google a pirate name?
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That's what I was thinking. Since they have the OG DPR and they've already got a confession / guilty plea from a key player on the website side [myfoxphoenix.com] I'd say that it's highly probable.
Re:can we say sting op (Score:4, Funny)
and this doesn't scream Sting or front to anyone?. not to mention its just a bad idea in the first place
Dream of the Blue Turtles, or are we going back to Message in a Bottle?
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Or legal goods.. that you didn't want to broadcast that you bought them. The ability to not be tracked ( easily ) in your purchases is nothing to be sneezed at.