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."
Re:Silk Road down? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's s Honey Pot.
Re:Missing the point (Score:2, Interesting)
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 0-day, no identifying information can be obtained. Whonix is great in that the Workstation VM doesn't have a non-torified NIC, so it's impossible to leak your real IP. Restore to a snapshot after every use so any exploits are non-persistent.
As a risk for the buyer, sure, the seller could be the feds, but it's unlikely (they usually go after the sellers, not the buyers). Use a fake name if your mail carrier will deliver it (many in bigger cities will). Or use a friend's address with a fake name. It's not a crime to receive things you didn't order, you can't control who sends things to your address. If you're ordering personal use sized quantities, it's not worth the trouble to setup a sting anyway.
The risk for the seller is pretty low as well, since they never give up identifying information period. Now if the feds want to devote a lot of resources to a single seller, they could do that and do test purchases and slowly trace down the origin and physically watch the location where the packages are being mailed from, then follow the person home. But again, that's pretty unlikely unless the seller is one of the large ones and is based in the US, and even then I feel like they wouldn't bother since the seller is pretty low level in the grand scheme of things and the resources are better spent going after someone higher up or lower hanging fruit.
As for tracing the bitcoins, use one of the tumbling services. It looks like these marketplaces tumble the coins anyway, but that won't help if the whole site is compromised. Or buy/sell bitcoins with cash (localbitcoins.com), either in person or using the greendot refills (then take the cash out at an ATM without a camera... many of the non-bank owned ATMs don't have a camera).
So if you're smart about it and take the proper precautions, it's pretty safe and the risk of being caught is very very low.
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]