BitCoin

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BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Oct 03, 2013 5:59 pm

.

BitCoin has been referenced a number of times within numerous threads; there seems to be an effort to push this concept further into the mainstream of late.

coffin_dodger posted a youtube clip in the "End of Wall Street Boom" of Karen Hudes, former World Bank lawyer, discussing [among other topics] discarding the Fed/current fiat money system and suggested the use of BitCoin [and metals, etc].

Here's another related clip of Hudes and BitCoin:

http://allthingsbitcoin.org/2013/09/18/ ... f-bitcoin/

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Former World Bank Senior Counsel Karen Hudes says, “It’s pretty clear where we’re headed, and that is something called permanent gold backwardation. That’s a fancy word for people losing confidence in paper currency. That means the value of currency in the future is less than today.” How bad is “permanent gold backwardation”? Hudes, who spent 20 years at the World Bank, says, “This is not just a bad event. This is like the meltdown of all meltdowns. What it means is you cannot finance international trade.” Hudes goes on to say, “Just think about what that would mean in terms of the jobless rate. It’s going to make any depression we ever had (the 30’s, 2008) pale in comparison.” Hudes says even though the credit ratings agencies rate U.S. debt high, they know just the opposite is true. Hudes contends, “This is actually an underhanded move because they know the U.S. dollar is going to lose its status as an international currency.” What would that look like to the man on the street? Hudes predicts, “Prices would change on a daily basis. They would double. The number of families that would be employed would be in the minority . . . there would be lawlessness.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with former World Bank lawyer Karen Hudes.


Then there's this simple little informational guide:



And some 'polarizing' comments post-article here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-0 ... rcle.html#!


COMMENTS

BigInMemphis 1 hour ago
The only advantage of a currency of this sort would be to by-pass the parasites of Wallstreet and to be able to move money around without the IRS seizing your account.
• Ed 3 hours ago
Mainstream politicians and big corporations have too much at stake to let Bitcoin succeed. In theory, it provides a level of free markets that the world has never seen. In reality, it is a threat to the Fed, and a conduit for criminal enterprises. Both doom this innovative idea.
o
o

• Nick Reil in reply to Ed 3 hours ago
Probably the biggest threat. I think it's rare that a technology comes along, though, that literally makes moving money more efficient, and new things possible, and that it get "beaten down". I thought we were out of the Dark Ages (though now it's the "State" that would be controlling knowledge/technology, and not the "Church").
Concerning "criminal enterprises", I don't think bitcoins are really as anonymous as people think. In fact, they're "pseudo-anonymous", as there's a public ledger of all transactions ever. You control this with policies like "know your customer", as with a traditional bank. Of course, people can always freely exchange bitcoins peer-to-peer (in person, say), but this is no different than cash in hand.
o
o

• Nick Reil 3 hours ago
Bitcoin is an internet-based protocol, similar to TCP/IP. It's a "techno tour de force", to quote Bill Gates. TCP/IP has and never will be replaced, but rather it's been built on top of over the years (http, etc.). Similarly, technology can be built on top of bitcoin.


• Dale H. (Day) Brown, A post-polio medical marijuana posterboy 3 hours agoCollapse
Install the Bitcoin mainframe and server on a solar powered dirigible that can maintain a position over the high seas where the USA has no jurisdiction. The altitude offers wireless communications unaffected by surface weather.
o Like
o Reply
o F

• Matt Gonglach 4 hours ago
Hi guys, it's incorrect that Ripple 'runs on Bitcoin' - they're both cryptocurrencies but are very different.


• • Jonathan 4 hours ago
I will admit, I know very little about bitcoins, but if 99% of what normal consumers buy/spend their money on can't be had with bitcoins, how on earth will bitcoin ever become mainstream?


• • Nick Reil in reply to Jonathan 3 hours agoCollapse
[20 years ago]: "I will admit, I know very little about the internet, but if 99% of what normal consumers buy/spend their money on can't be had on the internet, how on earth will the internet ever become mainstream?"
• Jonathan in reply to Nick Reil 3 hours ago
That's not even close to the argument. The internet wasn't a substitute for anything. It was something brand new.
o

• Nick Reil in reply to Jonathan 3 hours ago
If the Bitcoin protocol is not something "brand new", please educate everyone on another decentralized, "programmable money" that's existed prior. We'll all wait here...
o

• Nick Reil in reply to Jonathan 3 hours agoCollapse
It's a perfect comparison. I'd recommend reading Satoshi's original paper if you want to better understand the underlying technology. Bitcoin is an internet-based protocol, and it is a new technological paradigm. It's also a solution to the "Two Generals Problem" in the computer science realm.
o
• Disqus in reply to Jonathan 4 hours ago
Think about it as physical gold. You can use it to do business with anyone and it's not controlled by any central authority. The advantage of it over gold is that you don't have to carry a heavy metal in your pocket.
o

• Jonathan in reply to Disqus 4 hours ago
That is incorrect. I can't buy groceries with it, can't pay my utilities, the gas pump won't take it, my landlord won't accept it, and I can't use it on the train for my ticket. I suppose there are some businesses who could possibly value it as a medium of exchange, but eventually there will be commodities they can't buy with bitcoins. You will then have to find away to convert them to actual currency, and that will most definitely involve a spread, and then the whole concept is defeated.
o

• Jonathan in reply to Jonathan 3 hours agoCollapse
Yes that is the caveat. More people have to start accepting it for it to catch on, but I think there are a lot of hurdles. My main contention was with the comparison to gold, because you can't really purchase things with gold.
o

• Disqus in reply to Jonathan 4 hours ago
It depends on how popular it gets. If people can trade between themselves with a different medium, and this medium becomes widely accepted because of its freedom from any central controllers, some day you might buy groceries, etc... with it.

• • Disqus 4 hours ago
Sooner or later debtors will start leveraging bitcoins the same way banks did with gold in the last centuries. Bitcoin "certificates" will start being traded and that will be the end of its independence from banks. Fractional lending of bitcoins will destroy it because most societies are used to the never ending expansion of the currency base.


• • elixer8062 7 hours agoCollapse
What happens when the next digital currency comes around? What's to stop others from joining the party? Will people start shunning bitcoins to the point that they're almost worthless?

• manpro broker 9 hours ago
As long as the Fed can create money/dollars out of thin air and as long as someone /markets accept them then what is the problem ? I believe it was Chairman Bernanke that said that he was not printing money , it was only electronic transaction/credit to an account. What is the difference here ? I guess it is like anything else, it works until it doesn't ! Look out below when it doesn't !
o

• Rob Monroe in reply to manpro broker 6 hours ago
The difference here is that US law forces everyone (banks, business, and even you and I) to accept $USD as payment. You can always barter for things, but you can't refuse $USD and force that purchaser to pay you in another currency. If your employer offers $USD, you MUST accept it. That isn't true for bitcoin.
What gives US dollars value, the ones printed out of thin air, is the fact that US law forces you to accept and to use them. US law doesn't do that for bitcoin, so the bitcoins made out of thin air are just that, nothingness.
Until there is a change in US law, bitcoin is a speculative bet, like beanie babies or hockey cards, and not an investment in a currency, and definitely not a store of value.
o

• clooneysfolly in reply to Rob Monroe 5 hours ago
Truly bitcoin is like gold--relying solely on peoples' acceptance of it, not some legal mandate.


• Rob Monroe in reply to clooneysfolly 1 hour ago
Steward Pid -
Gold of $100 USD if you're going backward in time. You'd take neither (or you should take neither). You'd take canned goods, a shotgun, some bottled water, some soap. Frankly, if you wanted to bring real stored value with you, you'd bring some antibiotics, some anti-malaria drugs, and some baby formula. Those three things would be worth an infinite amount of gold in the past. Being able to save people's lives, that is true stored value. You'd be able to have anything you wanted ... or you could bring some gold, and be the somewhat less poverty stricten malaria victim ...


• Stewart Pid in reply to clooneysfolly 4 hours ago
Dumb analogy ... earlier this week I saw a good example of the true value of gold.
Think of a time machine that someone invents and you can go back 500 years in the past ... should you take a couple of hundred bucks cash or the equivalent gold? Bitcoins are the same except they aren't legal tender.


• Buzz Leapyear2 20 hours agoCollapse
"Bitcoin’s future is largely in the hands of regulators"
Bullchit. Bitcoins are in the hands of the people and that is what is driving the "regulators" apechit.
It's world wide and nobody gives a fcck what the USA has to say about it.
The World Wide Web is global and despite the NSA it is not "regulated" by one group of tightazzes in DC.
• johnmichael2 21 hours ago
Let's see how long it takes this bubble to pop.


• Dorlan H. Francis 21 hours ago
This is a NONSENSE FAD. Currency MUST be created by governmental authorities. Why aren't economists speaking out against this idiotic idea. Is it because they do not know the danger of this fad?

• Disqus in reply to Dorlan H. Francis 4 hours agoCollapse
Government stopped issuing currency in 1913. You need to do some studying.

• C. H. in reply to Disqus 3 hours ago
The Fed Issues currency. Who appoints the Feds president? Seems like goverment to me...


• • Disqus in reply to C. H. 2 hours ago
Again... "Appoints" doesn't mean "chooses". FED is independent from government. If government issued its own currency, it would not have to borrow it from the FED at interest and charge you taxes to pay for it.

• • Dominik Z in reply to Dorlan H. Francis 8 hours agoCollapse
Actually one of Hayek's last books is about private currencies... he won a Nobel prize in economics...
• Guest 21 hours ago
Just like anything else, if the politicians don't get their cut, they'll eventually shut it down.

• p-reid 21 hours ago
If the Winklevoss boys are in it, I don't want to be!
o

• gsoros510 in reply to p-reid 18 hours ago
For all those people saying this is a fad, have you actually used it?
You will see how much better it is than any existing payment system when you actually use it.
Transferring money between two people in an untraceable anonymous way is has many use cases.
I cannot see this thing disappearing anytime soon

• C. H. in reply to gsoros510 3 hours ago
Bitcoin is very much NOT untracable and anonymous. They keep record of EVERY transaction. If not the goverment would have shut it down long ago. (Moneylaundering charges anyone?)
Also I doubt anonymous transactions were ever the idea behind bitcoin. Who needs anonymity except when breaking the law? The idea behind bitcoin was to go around the banking system that is miliking everyone for nothing (why does a wire cost so much, especially to a foreign county? I bet you not a single employe of a bank actually spends even 10 seconds of work on your wire, its all electronically automated. Doesnt stop them from charging what you would pay someone for working a couple of hours.) and to circumvent the system where money can be created out of thin air, like is the case with fiat currencies.


• Stewart Pid in reply to gsoros510 4 hours agoCollapse
Can you get me some good dope ... I'll pay in bitcoins.
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Re: BitCoin

Postby wordspeak2 » Fri Oct 04, 2013 7:34 pm

This isn't directly bitcoin, but I'm sad to report that the Silk Road web site has been taken down by the powers-that-be, and its proprietor, Dreads Pirate Robert, arrested. The current reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/commen ... cussion_2/
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Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Oct 04, 2013 7:47 pm

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http://nation.time.com/2013/10/04/a-sim ... y-the-fbi/

On Wednesday the federal government raided and shut down online drug marketplace Silk Road and arrested its alleged proprietor, Ross William Ulbricht. Silk Road had been in operation since roughly January 2011, but was obscured from normal web traffic because it was hosted on something called the “Deep Web.”

If you’ve never heard of Silk Road or the Deep Web, or have heard of them but have trouble grasping the technology or concepts involved, this explainer is for you.

So what is Silk Road?

Silk Road is an online marketplace where users can purchase everything from illegal drugs to unlicensed firearms. It is hosted on the “Deep Web,” a collection of websites that are not indexed by search engines and thus hidden from public view. The deep web is accessible only by downloading special software called Tor, which anonymizes web traffic.


How does the Deep Web work?

Think of every message sent through the Internet–whether it be an email, a tweet or traffic to a website–as being a mailbag full of letters. Your I.P. address, or “Internet Protocol” address, can be likened to the letters’ return address. When a user uses the Tor Browser bundle (which provides the Tor software plus a browser) instead of a regular browser like Chrome or Firefox, the letters become encrypted so that the content of the letters can’t be read. The encryption also obscures the return address, making it impossible to tell where the letters came from.

Tor then takes these encrypted letters (technically called “packets”) and passes them through a large network of routers, which are intermediaries that direct Internet traffic, much like a post office directs letters. The routers pass the letters back and forth between one another, further obscuring the letters’ source. Each time a letter passes through a router, it’s decrypted slightly, so that the router knows where next to send it, and re-encrypted. Eventually, each letter will reach a router designated as an “exit node,” where the final layer of encryption is decrypted, revealing the original. The letter is then stamped with the exit node’s IP address (like a new return address), and is sent to its destination.

This means that if a user accesses websites using Tor, their activity online is virtually anonymous and much more difficult to track than traffic passed through a typical browser like Chrome. People who want to do illegal things on the Internet, such as purchase drugs through Silk Road, use Tor so that their online activity is more difficult to track.

Websites on the Deep Web also have a different URL construction than websites on the “surface web,” the web we use every day. Domains on the Deep Web end with the extension “.onion” instead of the popular “.com”, and the text before the domain, such as “time” in “time.com,” is a series of randomly generated numbers and letters. Silk Road’s domain, for example, was http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion.

If you try to go to a .onion URL on a normal browser like Chrome, it will not work. .onion URLs only work using the Tor software.

Who uses the Deep Web?

Though the Deep Web does have its share of criminals and hackers (just like the surface web), it also serves some pretty important functions. For one thing, Tor software can be used by citizens in countries with governments that closely monitor their Internet activity and curtail their free speech. The Tor project, the 501c3 nonprofit that maintains the Tor network and software, states on their website that journalists, militaries, law enforcement, activists and whistleblowers use Tor.

Who made the Deep Web?

The “Deep Web,” or Tor network, was actually originally funded by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which developed the network with the hope that it could properly protect and encrypt government communications. From 2004 to 2005 it was supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but is now run by the Tor Project. To this day it is still largely funded by government organizations across the world, including the United States.

Okay, so what can you buy on Silk Road?

Any sort of illicit drug like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine could be procured on Silk Road before its shuttering, alongside illegal firearms, hacking tools like keylogging software, the services of hackers who promised hacks like infiltrating the Facebook or Twitter profiles of your choice, fireworks, forged documents and more.

How do you buy things on Silk Road?

If you wanted to purchase anything on Silk Road, you would first have to possess a type of online money called Bitcoin:

Created by a Japanese programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym) in 2008, bitcoin is what’s known as a cryptocurrency. It’s both a decentralized currency and a payment system that exists entirely online, allowing users to exchange money anonymously.

Instead of inputting their credit card numbers, which even on the Tor network would make their purchases easy to track, Silk Road users instead purchased Bitcoin from an exchange like Mt. Gox, and then used those to make purchases on Silk Road. Silk Road also uses a special money laundering function called a “tumbler” that further anonymizes transactions.

Bitcoin’s value is based on the market; currently, one Bitcoin is worth about $115. Bitcoin can easily be exchanged for cash online.

What does Silk Road look like?
Once you downloaded Tor and navigated to http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion, you’d be greeted with a login screen asking for your username and password. If you wanted to register for a new account, you’d follow the link for new users and all Silk Road required you enter was a username, password and country, and you would be registered as a new buyer. New seller accounts are limited, however, and must be purchased at auction.

Once inside, Silk Road looks like an average ecommerce website, albeit one stocked with drugs and guns and hacking equipment instead of clothes and home goods. In the complaint filed by the FBI yesterday, the agent responsible for investigating Silk Road included an example of what Silk Road looks like:

Image

Image

Is Tor still private?

Yes and no. Technically web traffic is still private on Tor as the network itself remains unchanged, but that doesn’t mean Tor users are completely untraceable, as Ulbricht’s arrest indicates.

This all sounds interesting. I think I’m going to download Tor and poke around Silk Road.

Glad you’re curious, but after the feds arrested Ross William Ulbricht, the alleged operator of Silk Road, they seized the website and shut down all operations. When you head to Silk Road now, all you’ll find is this message:

Image

Oh okay, I wouldn’t want to get arrested anyway.

Going on the Deep Web won’t get you arrested. Plenty of people use Tor to access normal surface websites–like Time.com!–but opt to access the Internet through Tor, rather than directly with Chrome or other browsers for privacy reasons. Tor Browser can function like a normal browser, but it can also access “deep web” websites.

The Deep Web has become infiltrated with cybercrime because it is much more private than the surface web, allowing criminals to operate in the shadows. We don’t recommend exploring the Deep Web if you’re not very knowledgable about it, as it could leave your computer open to cyberattacks. If you do decide to explore the Deep Web, make sure you don’t click on any suspicious links, or you could end up looking at illegal and upsetting material like child pornography or snuff films.



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Re: Silk Road / DPR

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:20 pm

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[Any way I can still change the title of this OP?]

I include the below article primarily due to the comments section that followed it...

http://gawker.com/silk-roads-downfall-k ... 1441310875

Image

It's a dark time on the Dark Net. This Tuesday the FBI shuttered Silk Road, a drug market that operated for more than two years with impunity. The Silk Road helped popularize the Dark Net as the Mall of Anarcho-Capitalism, where illegal drugs, stolen credit cards, child porn and weapons are traded openly. But a series of high-profile busts has seriously undermined the premise of the Dark Net.

In fact the mood on the shadow web went sour weeks ago. "There's been so much doubt about it recently," I was told by a guy who calls himself Heisenberg 2.0 last week, before the Silk Road fell. Heisenberg has been directly affected by the Dark Net blues. He was the former social marketing maven for the underground online drug market Atlantis, a Silk Road competitor, but now he's out of a job. Atlantis abruptly shut down last month, citing "security reasons", in a move that now seems eerily prophetic.

In the days leading up to the Silk Road bust, even some Silk Road administrators were voicing doubts about the Tor Network, the technology on which the Dark Net rests. "I was reading some Silk Road administrator saying, 'Seriously, this is not suitable for the purpose anymore and they needed to work on something else,'" Hesienberg said. This Tuesday, the FBI announced they'd tracked down Silk Road's alleged mastermind, 29-year-old San Francisco geek Ross Ulbricht, who went by the handle "Dread Pirate Roberts."

"I guess the last words Atlantis admins said about DPR being in way over his head ring more true now," Heisenberg said today over email.

The Silk Road postmortems have delved deep into the technical details of the FBI's affidavit, but the story of Silk Road is more a classic tale of hubris than futuristic hacker-noir. Silk Road used the Tor Network, but nothing about the bust suggests Tor has been broken. Tor protects internet users' identities by shuffling traffic among many computers in a high-tech shell game. It is used by activists and journalists and drug dealers who want to remain hidden online. Even the NSA can't break the technology, though they've tried, according to new documents revealed by the Guardian.

Silk Road used Tor's Hidden Services feature, which lets operators host their sites without revealing their ip addresses. The collected .onion sites form the Dark Net. (Or Deep Web, or Deep Net, there are a lot of names.) Only other Tor users can visit Tor Hidden Services, which all use the odd .onion domain. You can too, all it takes is downloading and installing the Tor Browser bundle.

Silk Road's downfall was not embedded in the Tor Networks' code, but in the unrealistic hopes Tor inspired in people like Dread Pirate Roberts: The Dark net is built on the irresistible cyberpunk premise that tech-savvy users can be simultaneously extremely visible and entirely anonymous online. Full capability, no responsibility. Ulbricht was perhaps the most vocal proponent of the Dark Net's utopian/dystopian promise.

"Stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market," he told me in an article I wrote about Silk Road in 2011, which first brought it to public attention. Ulbricht appears to have been strongly influenced by the free-market economist Ludwig Von Mises, who believed "there is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about." For Ulbricht, Silk Road was a revolutionary political statement as well as a hugely profitable business. On his LinkedIn profile he described his current project, presumably Silk Road, as an "economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

Before Silk Road, the Dark Net was small and scrappy, much like the regular Web in the early 90s. At the beginning, only a few hardcore criminals and privacy-obsessed geeks knew about it. Sites were hard to find and poorly maintained. That all changed when Silk Road launched in February, 2011. Where previous Dark Net users relied on obscurity as much as technology to keep them safe, Silk Road brazenly announced itself to the world. Dread Pirate Roberts advertised the new "Amazon for drugs" on forums, and gave me an interview where he boasted of the site's robust community.

Silk Road tapped into a widespread fantasy. After that first article, hordes of people who barely knew how to use an iPhone app were learning about the Tor Network and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the only money good on the Road. Bitcoin prices soared, and if I had a Bitcoin for every email I've received from some aspiring internet drug consumer inquiring about the URL of Silk Road I would be rich as a Winkelvoss. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer also learned of the site, though, and he called on the DEA to shut Silk Road down. But months went by and Silk Road grew and the myth of the Dark Net grew with it. A paper estimated Silk Road was hauling in $22 million per year. Competitors sprung up.

The Dark Net developed in tandem with Silk Road. New services like Tormail and a Tor Reddit clone came only after the influx of new users attracted by news of The Road. An outfit called Freedom Hosting became the Dark Net's first dedicated hosting service, making setting up a new Hidden Service as easy as securing an invite. By 2013, the Dark Net seemed as permanently fixed to the underbelly of the "clearnet" as a shadow. When Atlantis announced the launch of their Silk Road competitor this summer with a slick viral video and an aggressive social media campaign, it underscored how secure the Dark Net felt to its users. This, even though the Tor Network's own developers have always made it clear that it is not a silver bullet for privacy.

"Keeping an operation like Silk Road going, while staying anonymous, means you have to do an enormous number of things right, and one slip-up is all it takes," said Roger Dingledine, director of the Tor Project. But what's a warning like this compared to $22 million a year and the promise of a Libertarian cyber-utopia?

The first shock came in July. Freedom Hosting was dismantled as part of an international child porn investigation and its alleged owner arrested in Ireland. Because Freedom Hosting was so popular, huge swaths of the Dark Net went black, including Tormail, the favorite mode of communication for Silk Road dealers. With Freedom Hosting gone, the Dark Net was immediately diminished.

"Now even small sites have to do the hosting themselves," said BTCX, the proprietor of OnionNews, a regularly-updated Dark Net news blog. "I noticed a lot fewer people coming to my website."

More important than the blow to the infrastructure, the Freedom Hosting bust shook Dark Net users' confidence in Tor's Hidden Services. Earlier this year, a paper from three researchers at the University of Luxembourg outlined a new technique for de-anonymizing Hidden Services. Called "Trawling for Tor Hidden Services: Detection, Measurement, Deanonymization," the paper came to the unsettling conclusion that "attacks to deanonymize hidden services at a large scale are practically possible with only a moderate amount of resources." Although the FBI used a technique that attacked the Tor Browser rather than the Network itself, the bust gave legitimacy to the idea, already bubbling up on Dark net forums and social media, that the Dark Net wasn't as dark as widely believed.

People began fleeing the Dark Net after the Freedom Hosting bust. One person especially spooked was Chisquare, the owner of the old-school Dark Net site All You're Base, and author of an early guide to Hidden Services. Chisquare announced in August he was moving his entire operation to i2p, a less well-known anonymity network.

"Tor Hidden Services are pretty much abandoned by the Tor Project, there have been studies pointing out systemic design flaws and things are starting to heat up with the whole alleged Freedom Hosting bust," he wrote.

The Tor Project disputes Chisquare's gloomy picture. "Hidden service development hasn't been abandoned," said Tor Project Development Director Karen Reilly. "In fact, we just got started work on a simplified installation process." Reilly acknowledged weaknesses with Tor's Hidden Services, but argued that attacking "server software" and "taking advantage of user behavior" is easier than defeating the Tor Network itself.

Chisquared and Reilly represent two competing takes—pessimistic and optimistic—on the recent turmoil on the Dark Net. Each has vastly different implications for the future of the Dark Net, and anonymity on the internet in general. Much of the tech press has optimistically echoed Reilly, framing the Silk Road takedown as the result of Ross Ullbricht's sloppy security practices. Most notably, Ulbricht left a comment on a programming forum using a handle easily linkable to his real gmail account. Slate called it "the bonehead mistake that brought down an online drug-dealing empire."

The idea is that someone smarter than Ulbricht could run Silk Road safely as long as they were impeccable about protecting themselves. Ulbricht was careless and so the FBI could simply connect the dots, like any old-fashioned investigation.

Then there are the Chisquares, who see the problem as more fundamental. The imperfection of the Tor Network isn't something that can be overcome by a smarter drug lord. It's an unavoidable achilles heel that the Feds, or whoever, will always be able to strike, if the target gets big enough to be worth their time.

University of California, Berkeley computer security researcher Nicholas Weaver speculates that the takedown was the result of a rather sophisticated FBI hack attack that neutralized Tor, rather than Ulbricht's "bone-headed" mistakes. His guess, based only on a close reading of the affidavit, is that the FBI's hackers were able break into Silk Road's server directly, tricking it into transmit its locations in the clear, thus circumventing Tor's protections and de-anonymizing it. This version of Silk Road's demise suggests no amount of precaution can keep a high-profile target safe.

"Tor is still solid, but web servers and clients aren't," said Weaver. "If someone is motivated enough, they will probably find a way to compromise the server, and once they compromise the server, they can identify the server. Anyone who tries to run a Silk Road copycat will probably face the same problems."

I buy Weaver's take. The lesson of the Silk Road takedown isn't that Ulbricht was sloppy about security. It's that the idea of a world famous, anonymous illegal market is fatally contradictory. Ullbricht made some technical mistakes, but his biggest one was conceptual: buying his own hype that high-tech tricks would let him implement a radical free market fundamentalism that could never work politically. The extent to which he was enthralled with the amorality of the free market is suggested by the two hits he allegedly ordered to protect his creation.

The Dark Net as an extension of Ullbricht's libertarian dream is dead, but the Dark Net itself will persist, albeit in a quieter, more parochial form. Many reports have noted that Silk Road dealers have scattered quickly to smaller knockoffs, a sign of resilience, if not strength. BTCX of OnionNews believes that the post-Silk Road Dark Net will eventually regroup and be more robust than ever.

"Busts will just make sure it's way more decentralized in 1-2 years, with even more users because of all the press lol," he wrote.

But in the same email BTCX acknowledges the real blow delivered by Dread Pirate Roberts' downfall. "DPR was an idealist and a hero, and people knew he would never scam them or hurt them in any other way," he said. Who would want to be the next Dread Pirate Roberts, and, given DPR's fate, who would want to follow him? The Dark Net was always an idea as much as a technology, and that idea is compromised, even if the technology proves to be bulletproof.


COMMENTS:

"DPR was an idealist and a hero, and people knew he would never scam them or hurt them" - er except if he decided he wanted you murdered, in which case he'd pay someone to kill you. Initiation of force indeed.

He is a scumbag and should be in jail. Yesterday 6:42pm


ShaunKennedyUstoat77101L
I had some dumbass reply to me calling him a hero and a freedom fighter or some shit and saying he doesn't deserve to rot in jail for the rest of his life, etc., etc.

And I don't really care about/for the War on Drugs. I don't use drugs, but as long as you're not endangering anyone else, I don't care if you do.

But DPR was a common drug dealer with a talent for running a website. Nothing more. Yesterday 6:46pm


NobodyUstoat7751L
that was self defense, the man he wanted dead was threatening him and others with state violence. Yesterday 6:52pm


stoat77UNobody241L
oh for fucks sakes don't use your libertarianism to justify paid murder Yesterday 6:56pm


A. Nonie MeusUstoat7751L
Funny how someone essentially advocating for an anarchist dystopia can be thought of as an idealist. Yesterday 6:57pm


MM2Ustoat7731L
That's not even most strains of libertarianism. It's no more self-defense to murder a blackmailer than it is self defense to light the neighbor kid on fire for TPing your house. Yesterday 7:01pm


CockadoodooUstoat7751L
He's also undoubtedly coughing up all the information he has to the Feds to barter for a lighter sentence. Luckily, it sounds like he's a bit of a poser. Yesterday 7:03pm


I'm here mostly for the chicks.UShaunKennedy91L
Thank you. I literally laughed aloud when I read that someone had applied the moniker "hero" to this guy.

Skeevy drug dealer, drunk on his own hubris and convinced of the Randian righteousness of his cause, is skeevy drug dealer. Nothing more.

And if someone thinks the NSA can't break Tor, I have some beachfront property in Niger they might be interested in. Yesterday 7:04pm


statelyplumpbuckmulliganUstoat7751L
I have a feeling most people who are still calling him that don't believe the FBI's version of events, including the failed hit, and are convinced that they're just espousing the view that he doesn't belong in jail for facilitating the sale of illicit drugs on the internet. I'd be inclined to agree with that statement, except that, you know, it sure seems like he tried to pay someone to kill a guy on the internet. Yesterday 7:07pm


ShaunKennedyUI'm here mostly for the chicks.151L
A guy who runs into a burning building to save his grandma/an orphan/his dog is a hero.

A guy who makes it easy to get weed/pills/shrooms/speed/heroin/etc. delivered to your door is a guy you might really like, but he's not a fucking hero. Calling him one really just outs you as an addict. Yesterday 7:09pm


stoat77Ustatelyplumpbuckmulligan121L
TWICE. He tried to pay someone to kill a guy TWICE. Yesterday 7:09pm


BzatUstoat771L
I'm sorry, but I don't know why it's wrong to kill someone who's about to rat out a hundred people. We really need to have a much stronger ethic against snitching in our culture and our generation. Toughen up. Yesterday 7:12pm


BzatUI'm here mostly for the chicks.11L
Really? Because which one of Snowden's revelations have been wrong so far? Do you think the NSA is comprised of omniscient beings? Yesterday 7:13pm


BeastisFed1UNobody21L
I'm not a libertarian (although in the current world state, I think that some stances of the libertarians are an extremely helpful force in shifting the discourse on global politics and particularly how the US is viewed within the greater world system) and I would never advocate violence against the state or state informants, but the war on drugs has both created a massive criminal underworld rife with violence and caused millions to be locked away for non-violent offenses as well as directly resulted in the deaths of thousands (and the best part is the state itself has been/is involved in the smuggling by some parties). So when the agents of this war are killed, I find it very hard to be particularly moved and bring out the world's smallest violin. Yesterday 7:13pm


BzatUstatelyplumpbuckmulligan11L
I don't care about the hit. If there was someone out there threatening to snitch out a hundred people, he had to go. I don't know why people have a hard time understanding this. "OMG there should be no violence, like, everrrr unless it's the POLICE obvi!!"

That's what you sound like, man. Yesterday 7:14pm


BzatUShaunKennedy1L
hahaha that's fair - he was a great outlaw and a "guy I really like." I wouldn't call him "hero." I don't even like his political philosophy. Yesterday 7:15pm


ShaunKennedyUBzat21L
Good on you. For real. Yesterday 7:17pm


HorseUI'm here mostly for the chicks.11L
With the exception of some issues with hidden services, no one to date has been able to "beat" a Tor user who is using the service correctly. Not even the NSA. It's not impossible, but it's damned hard to break distributed cryptography. Yesterday 7:18pm


stoat77UBzat271L
I can't believe I have to take a stance against MURDERING PEOPLE but I guess I'll have to be that guy! Yesterday 7:19pm


SneakysUBzat221L
Most people tend to value human life. The attitude you're espousing that snitches need to die is frankly moronic, repugnant, and the sign of a mentally and emotionally stunted individual. If you feel the need to have someone killed over spilling a secret, you probably need to reevaluate your life choices. Yesterday 7:19pm


statelyplumpbuckmulliganUBzat81L
Calm down, Whitey. Yesterday 7:20pm


BzatUstatelyplumpbuckmulligan1L
Touche.

Still.

Stop snitching. Yesterday 7:21pm


BzatUstoat7711L
What's the appropriate response to someone threatening to out 100 people? Just say "Oh, okay...that's unfortunate but we'll just let it go"?

Sorry, but as I say to my two year old..."CONSEQUENCES" Yesterday 7:21pm


stoat77UBzat81L
Okay Paulie, see you at the Bada Bing later with Christopher and Tony. Yesterday 7:23pm


NobodyUBeastisFed121L
Firstly, nobody died, the man he hired and the man he wanted dead were both govt agents.

Secondly, it wasn't that he was trying to pay to have a state agent killed ( he did not know it was an FBI agent) he thought it was just some guy threatening to reveal his and others identity to the govt.

if that DID happen then he and many others would have been kidnapped and imprisoned for victimless crimes.

using violence against people who are threatening you with violence (in a serious manner) is not aggression, it is not the initiation of force, it is self defense. Yesterday 7:24pm


SneakysUstoat7791L
It's kind of amazing that there are people who would actually defend this idiot, isn't it? But yeah no, sure, murder is totally justified to keep someone from snitching. Totally. Yesterday 7:26pm


NobodyUstoat7721L
self defense is self defense, if a cop 'murders' someone who is using aggression against you, is that ALSO paid murder?

does this mean all cops who have ever killed someone and all tax payers should go to jail for murder and paid murder, or do you have a concept of self defense? Yesterday 7:26pm


NobodyUMM21L
he was threatening to have DPR and many innocent vendors kidnapped by the state.

that's a threat. Yesterday 7:27pm


GemmabetaUNobody131L
Oh is that what we are calling arrest now?

No one make all these people go online to sell drugs. Yesterday 7:29pm


NobodyUI'm here mostly for the chicks.11L
hey fucktard...

not every libertarian is randian, like this is the most over used, ignorant strawman ever when it comes to libertarians.

rand was not an anarchist, mises.org is not 'randian' or objectivist, if you're going to pick a libertarian and and ian to the end and call it an ideology to attribute to DPR it's Rothbardian.

he's a rothbardian. Why don't you pick on rothbard for once instead of rand. Yesterday 7:29pm


NobodyUstatelyplumpbuckmulligan1L
that was self defense. Yesterday 7:29pm


QwertyLadyI know right, and he will haggle down your hitman for you too...disgusting.

GemmabetaUNobody21L
Well, for one thing, cops tend to shoot second. Yesterday 7:29pm


BzatUstoat771L
I don't know why what I'm saying isn't common sense. Do you really think that people can do essentially whatever they want without fear of violent reprisals? Do you truly believe that only the police (protecting, as they do, primarily property and the propertied classes) have the monopoly on the use of force, and those who are willing to cooperate with the modern-day Pinkertons should be just allowed to do so?

Why are people who take away the freedom of others to save their own skin defensible but those who strive to stop this practice are not? Better to go to jail than open your mouth. Yesterday 7:30pm


Nobodyit's not murder it's self defense.

NobodyUGemmabeta11L
yes, when it is unjust.

If I see you smoking pot in your back yard and I walk in there and take you by force and put you in a cage.

any reasonable person calls that kidnapping.

but If I do that while wearing a magic blue suit and a shiny badge it's 'arrest'.

like wise if I go to the home of whoever runs gawker, take them by force and put them in a cage because they run a website any sane person calls that, kidnapping.

but the FBI does it to the guy running the silk road and it's 'arrest'. Yesterday 7:33pm


NobodyUGemmabeta1L
Bullshit they do, even so, if someone is THREATENING YOU with violence, you have a right to defend yourself.

The man he paid to have killed was threatening him with violence. Yesterday 7:34pm


SneakysUGemmabeta71L
Yeah, it's always a shame when people are held responsible for their actions, isn't it? Wait, isn't personal responsibility one of the core tenets of libertarian philosophy? Yesterday 7:35pm


BeastisFed1UNobody1L
I'm sorry if I came out the wrong way... I was agreeing with you (and basically saying even if it wasn't a FBI honeypot, I wouldn't give a fuck if he did). And also that anybody who either takes up the flag of the war on drugs by willingly engaging in anti-drug policing which destroys lives, and ESPECIALLY those who have not put on a uniform in its service (I consider them just as much agents of the state, probably more important to the war even than anybody who dons a uniform) and particularly those who think they can make a profit by threatening to bring its weight upon innocent people has kind of given up any claims of being an innocent victim.

I just wanted to throw in support so its not just the 'loony libertarians' (not my view, its the view of the centrists who really believe everything the media tells them and that the war on drugs is a flawed but generally good idea protecting society, like I said I'm not a libertarian, but consider them in many ways to be the only truly growing force that are friends in the west in defense against the current state/corporate menace) who are saying it. And again I don't advocate violence against any agents of the state (I hope, with the fact you see that the war on drugs and other state measures to observe/police thought, that you can see what I'm doing here ;) there are many unwelcome audiences) Yesterday 7:35pm


GemmabetaUNobody81L
Someone really slept through Civics class. Yesterday 7:38pm


NobodyUGemmabeta21L
Explain to me why it is okay for the police to kidnap you but not okay for me to kidnap you.

here, maybe we need to get fucking gradeschool level in here because you're an idiot.


Yesterday 7:40pm


stoat77UNobody81L
there is a little concept called a state monopoly on force. YES the police can use force when needed. And yes they do fuck up, in which case they should get in trouble.

there is a name for a condition where anyone who feels they need to can murder anyone for whatever reason they deem fit, and that's anarchy Yesterday 7:42pm


stoat77UNobody81L
whatever, potayto potato. It's all justifications for selfishness and in this case, murdering "snitches" like some kind of mafioso. Yesterday 7:43pm


QwertyLadyUBzat61L
Morality....., anyone? Don't argue right and wrong. I can't believe people are even arguing about this. It's just silly. Yesterday 7:45pm


NobodyUstoat7711L
firstly, you don't even understand what anarchy is that is quite clear.

secondly, explain why it is an 'arrest' and okay for a cop to take someone who smokes pot and put them in a cage.

but if I do the exact same thing for the exact same reason it's 'kidnapping'.

Thirdly, Yes, I'm aware the state has a socially granted monopoly on the initiation of force. My position is simply that nobody should be allowed to initiate force for any reason. Yesterday 7:45pm


NobodyUstoat771L
the 'snitch' was threatening DPR and other innocent people with violence.

thats like saying it's "selfishness" if you kill someone while they break into your home intending to kill you.

"nah man you should just LET them kill you, what are you, the mafia?"

and speaking of mafias, the state is more akin to the mafia than Dread Pirate Roberts.

Dread Pirate Roberts defended himself and made money through voluntary interaction

the mafia and the state are aggressors who make their money by extortion. AT least the mafia doesnt have a 12 year brain washing program and cant print money though. Yesterday 7:47pm


SneakysUstoat7781L
It's really amazing. I was under the impression that the "anarchists" who were in class with me got over their "hard core ideas about the world, man" when they turned 16. It's equal parts entertaining and deeply depressing that there are individuals who actually believe this crap. Yesterday 7:47pm


stoat77UNobody61L
because we have laws. why is this so hard for you to grasp

Please, move to Somalia where they don't have these laws to get in your way all the time. Yesterday 7:53pm


BeastisFed1UNobody1L
I'd say give it up trying to defend it here honestly, because you aren't going to make anybody see the light and might end up saying some statements that fly into the 'fire in a crowded theater' area (as an aside that phrase was originally used as some bullshit nonsequitur 'metric' to say it was ok to arrest agitators against involvement in WWI, it is itself a ridiculous tactic used by the state to control speech, assuming of course you live in the US)... You'd be better off trying to speak in esperanto since most people are set in their view of the world and cannot conceive how it could be seen any other way, that the war on drugs is pretty much an actual war against the poor/ method of violent social control instead of some fancy PR name for a legitimate (if flawed) push to protect people against themselves and evil shady drug men. Yesterday 7:54pm


NobodyUBeastisFed11L
Yeah but shouting freedom in a crowded echo chamber is my hobby.

you really want to take that away from me bro? :3 Yesterday 7:55pm


NobodyUstoat771L
anarchy =/= lawless, if you're going to talk out your ass at least use an enema first bro.

it's about non initiation of violence, it's about abolishing coercive hierarchies, it's about smashing the state. you have no idea what you're talking about. Yesterday 7:56pm


BeastisFed1UNobody1L
I'd never try to take that away from you. I just wanted to make sure that you didn't think you could legitimately hijack the narrative. Good luck, godspeed and good hunting :) Just be careful where you tread because the ice can get thin in areas Yesterday 7:57pm


statelyplumpbuckmulliganUNobody61L
You can keep repeating that as much as you want - it's still not true. Self-defense, in both the legal and moral sense, requires an equivalent measure of force. Someone threatens to kill you and you have reason to believe they can and will do so? That's self-defense on some level, even if the law disagrees. Someone threatens to expose your illegal operations and send you and many others to prison? That scenario doesn't end in death, and thus does not justify it. Hell, if we're playing the gritty crime fantasy internet bad-ass game, bribe the guy. Negotiate the terms of his silence. Or batten down the hatches and weather the storm.

Look, I'm against the War on Drugs. Completely, 100% against it. I approve of an anonymous marketplace. I don't think either users or dealers should go to prison. I even fall into one of the categories listed in that last sentence. In simplest terms, I feel you, bro. But if you're honestly of the opinion that anyone on "the other side" deserves to die regardless of equivalence and that if it happens, it makes the person responsible for that death a "fucking hero"...that doesn't make you an activist or a freedom-fighter; it just makes you a sociopath, or an asshole, or both. Yesterday 7:58pm


NobodyUstatelyplumpbuckmulligan1L
first of all, fuck illegal just because the state says something is a crime doesn't mean it is.

Where there is no victim there is no crime.

I dont think anyone who disagrees with me should die, I think if you're going to threaten hundreds of people with kidnapping and criminal detainment for YEARS in an attempt to extort $500,000 from someone and you get shot you kinda dont have grounds to stand on for claiming you're a victim.

and no the law nor morality require "equivalent force" how would you even measure that, is one bullet to the head equivalent to 100+ kidnappings and detainment for years? how is that math done because i'd like to see it.

secondly, if you break into my house to rob me and I shoot you, thats totally justified even though the 'force' is not 'equivalent'.

and the bribe he was asking for was 500,000 and there were people who were not DPR involved in the threat... so theres that...

my position is the following.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggre...the agent who DPR put the hit on was threatening many many people and using that threat in an attempt to get money from DPR, the threat was the revealing of their identities, which directly leads to them being kidnapped and put in a cage for years.

I believe that what DPR was self defense.

what DPR didnt know was that both the guy threatening him and the guy he payed for the hit were both federal agents. nobody actually got hurt.

Yesterday 8:05pm


stoat77UNobody21L
thank god you don't vote Yesterday 8:05pm


NobodyUstoat771L
Jokes on you, I vote in every single election, even the small ones. Yesterday 8:11pm


BzatUQwertyLady11L
Oh, that's right, I forgot. The Sanctity of Life, Nonviolence Over Everything, etc. Thanks for reminding me, I was busy thinking for myself for a moment. Yesterday 8:16pm


QwertyLadyUBzat71L
No. I'm more on the side of the argument that's like ... Don't Kill People?

I mean, it's really not that hard to understand. People tend to know when they're doing something wrong.

And yeah, sanctity of life and all that because you know what? Your life is no more important than your fellow man's. Worry about yourself and how you can help your society in the present. Don't waste your time on the negative, like I'm doing here. I'm out. Yesterday 8:23pm


BzatUQwertyLady1L
The reality is that neither you nor I will probably ever be in a position where we have to consider whether or not to kill anyone.

That doesn't mean that there are no circumstances under which killing is appropriate. Yesterday 8:25pm


I'm here mostly for the chicks.UNobody91L
Your simplistic philosophy is simplistic. "Fuck you. Me."
Don't try to pretend there are subtle yet distinct layers to your ethos. There aren't.

And when your philosophy is predicated on an almost childlike reverence for "the free market" that has shown, time and again, when practiced to quickly lead to that very thing (anarchy) you claim is NOT your central tenet... well, it kind of becomes a thesis, by default.

Randian. Rothbardian. You're really picking nits over what is essentially a polite way of codifying greed?

... of course you are. Yesterday 8:46pm


statelyplumpbuckmulliganUNobody21L
The thing is, I agree with you on most of those points. No one died. He was talking to federal agents. The war on drugs is intensely idiotic. Again, I'm with you. My argument, in full, is with the discussion of the death of another human being as "justified" when the equivalent force was not equal to death (and yes, that may be difficult to weigh, but fuck it, that's my stance) and the agent of that death being a "fucking hero," even in a hypothetical situation. And regardless of what you think about "the state" - if you choose to live in it, then yeah, the things they say are crimes are crimes. So I don't think someone who is knowingly participating in crimes - even if I agree they shouldn't be crimes - gets to pull the Sovereign Citizen routine and justify the death of others to that end.

Like I said, I agree with you in spirit, for the most part (although the whole "in a cage," "shiny badge" stuff treads dangerously close to self-parody). I'm just also aware that I am a willing citizen of a country with a set of laws, and that when I choose not to abide by them, I also choose to accept the consequences of that behavior and would therefore not expect (or accept) my friends, relatives, or inigos to call me a "fucking hero" for not doing so. Yesterday 8:49pm


I'm here mostly for the chicks.UHorse1L
That you know of. That we know of.

I'm not a "black NWO helicopters" kind of guy... and I realize, from a technical standpoint that it's difficult. But I also would really be shocked if government snoops hadn't discovered some exploitable cracks they're not sharing. Yesterday 8:50pm


NobodyUI'm here mostly for the chicks.11L
there is distinct differences between rand and rothbard.

like for instance, that rothbard is an anarchist, is consistent, isn't crazy or selfish actually understands economics and doesnt write shitty fiction.

and rand is well... none of the above.

also feeling entitled to my own body and the results of my labor is selfish, but you thinking my body should be regulated by you and the fruits of my labor belong to others is not?

okay.... Yesterday 8:50pm


stoat77UNobody71L
it is fucking depressing as shit that you exist. Yesterday 8:58pm


I'm here mostly for the chicks.UNobody61L
I may have been slightly mean to you.

But, yes. You are not entitled to the entirety of the "fruits of your own labor." Or the entirety "your own body." You live in a society. You have to play by the rules. Part of that includes things to make sure we don't fall into anarchy.

You get most of it, brah. But if you want to benefit from things like clean meat, medical research, passable roads, police protection, and lead-free paint... well, hate to tell ya, that means you don't get the entirety of "the fruits of your own labor." That means that, yes, for the good of society, your kid is gonna get a newborn blood screening to test for preventable, treatable illnesses that could effect society as a whole. Yeah, it's gonna happen.

You people don't seem to realize how good we have things in a post-modern, first world country. And the very reason we have things this good is because of the perpetual tug-of-war between laissez faire business scruples and "the nanny state." We have a good balance. We have a good thing going here. I don't understand why you people want to step back into the 18th century.

It's all about degrees. The level of freedom you want, however, literally spells anarchy for the modern world as we know it. The rational systems libertarian "free markets" are based on have been tried. They fail. Worse than communism, I would argue.

It's all degrees, brah. You want to share in this grand utopia the human race has built, well, you're gonna have to pay the piper.

/look at me, arguing with a libertarian on the internet
//the epitome of shouting at a brick wall Yesterday 9:02pm


BzatUSneakys11L
Neither you nor stoat77 has any idea what the political definition of "anarchy" is, but I encourage both of you to check it out sometime. Yesterday 9:06pm


ObviousProstituteIsObviousUstoat7761L
But you have to admit, this thread is entertaining as hell in a "holy fuck" kind of way. Yesterday 9:09pm


BeastisFed1UI'm here mostly for the chicks.1L
Could have fooled me, I thought we have it so well in America because our economy bustled after WWII because Europe and Asia were bombed to hell and as a result our manufacturing sector boomed (and the reorganized social contract which was created to stave off a looming revolution during the Depression, FDR's New Deal ensured that the workers got what amounted to, compared to the rest of the world, a fair shake [still exploited, but not nearly as the nations under our boot]). And our military force and aid to specific dictatorships/ use of intelligence agencies to coup or assassinate those we didn't like was applied in order to both secure vastly unfair resource trades and then after the economic rebuilding of those areas [during which, when they built new factories with new technologies, our companies which were responsible for manufacturing instead began investing into separate ventures such as banking based on interest in the short term profit instead of long-term tenability, becoming multinational, non-specialized conglomerates which led to our factories being completely non-competitive no matter what our laborers would be paid], vastly exploitative sources of cheap labor as the merging state/corporate bodies squeezed every last percentage of profit possible. When keeping this order with mostly everybody in the middle class became untenable and groups began to be cut out of this [or groups tried to point out the truth behind it all, that there was actually a man behind the curtain carrying out mass murder and the Wizard of corporate capitalism was a sham], harsher and harsher police actions began to be applied against those groups, including COINTELPRO then [some believe, I'm still on the fence] flooding the inner city with drugs and starting the drug war we are talking about right now. Yesterday 9:17pm


SneakysUObviousProstituteIsObvious81L
This thread is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. It's like being transported to a middle school social studies class and watching 14 year olds grapple with political theory. But that assessment is a bit unfair to 14 year olds. Yesterday 9:18pm


Dave GahanUBzat11L
What you say "consequences," what you're actually saying to your two year old is: "I'm going to punish you for what you did, but I'm not going to own up to it. I'm gonna pretend the universe is doing it to you and I'm just some guy who's a helpless instrument."

It's a pretty damn weaselly way to set boundaries. Yesterday 9:25pm


BzatUDave Gahan1L
It's a JOKE, dude!! WTF Yesterday 9:26pm


ObviousProstituteIsObviousUSneakys31L
I was thinking along the same lines, like that kid you knew in Jr High that was obsessed with Goodfellas somehow miraculously made it into college and just discovered objectivism. Yesterday 9:27pm


Ricky SixxUstoat771L
Not that murder is an answer but at what point were you planning on mentioning the extortion? If we didn't have laws that eliminated basic freedoms like Private Property, maybe there would have been a more logical recourse?

Two wrongs don't make a right but in this case you're being scummy for not commenting on the entire truth. Yesterday 9:28pm


stoat77URicky Sixx141L
do you know what happens if someone is trying to extort money from me? I go to the police and say "hey, this guy's trying to extort money from me." Then they handle it. I do not take out a god damned hit on someone. If my business requires me to take out hits on people to preserve its existence MAYBE ITS A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE.

Yesterday 9:38pm


I'm here mostly for the chicks.UBeastisFed11L
Consider yourself fooled, then. Yesterday 9:47pm


NobodyUI'm here mostly for the chicks.1L
you keep saying anarchy like its a bad thing.

society =/= the state.

all that stuff you listed could EASILY be done by the market, if the gov't monopolized shoes you'd be sitting here telling me that without taxes everyone would be barefoot, it's purely absurd.

as for the 18th century, I think you mean 19th and that was a great thing, prices were falling, standards of living were increasing for everyone, social issues like child labor and pollution were solving themselves through the market, all until government got involved.

and free markets have been tried? and they fail you say? Show me an example and I will show you why you're wrong.

and yes... the anarchist voluntary society i'm advocating for literally spells anarchy... it's weird it's almost like i'm an anarchist or something. crazy. Yesterday 9:48pm


BeastisFed1UI'm here mostly for the chicks.1L
Oh I guess I should have put a silly gif in to show that people thinking the other way were morons... That seems to be the trick around here to show how rational and smart you are....



Yesterday 9:50pm


SneakysUNobody61L
"as for the 18th century, I think you mean 19th and that was a great thing, prices were falling, standards of living were increasing for everyone, social issues like child labor and pollution were solving themselves through the market, all until government got involved."

The sound you just heard was every single person with the most basic understanding of 19th century history face palming. Hard. These issues were solved by a number of landmark pieces of legislation (championed largely by Theodore Roosevelt and his administration) that were incredibly controversial and widely denounced by business owners. The "market" was fine with allowing child labor, unsafe working conditions (google Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire) and unsanitary and unsafe food processing practices. Yesterday 10:18pm


Nobodychild labor was ended by capitalism not by the state, since the beginning of time children has been involved in labor, only until one or two of the parents could afford to provide for the entire family did it start to dwindle away, and it started to dwindle away before the state got involved.

as for unsafe working…

captain_spleenUBzat51L
A believer in the market like DPR should be willing to buy the blackmailer's silence. Yesterday 10:26pm


BigRageDaveMmmmmmm, mutton. You smell delicious.

captain_spleenUBzat31L
More snitching. Whole communities are hellholes because of attitudes like yours. Yesterday 10:27pm


captain_spleenUNobody31L
It's called "arrest" not "kidnapping". Yesterday 10:30pm


NobodyUcaptain_spleen1L
why is it kidnapping if I do it, and 'arrest' if If the state does it? Yesterday 10:32pm


captain_spleenUNobody41L
It's okay for the cops to arrest people for breaking the law because the law says they can, and the law is made by elected representatives of the people. You may not like that, in which case, get enough people to agree and you can change the law. Yesterday 10:34pm


captain_spleenUNobody1L
No, the person was demanding payment for the service of keeping the information confidential. Yesterday 10:34pm


captain_spleenUNobody21L
Smashing the state and abolishing coercive hierarchies... without initiating violence.

And will everyone get a pony? Yesterday 10:36pm


Nobodyand while that is legitimate, he knows, and everyone knows that if that information was leaked the state would arrest and imprison everyone.

that is a threat.

SneakysYeah, not so much. Rising incomes by themselves did not provide a magical solution to the issue of child labor. Rising incomes along with access to education and the passage of child labor laws largely ended the child labor practices. Saying the capitalism somehow magically solved this problem is at best an incredibly…

captain_spleenUNobody71L
"social issues like child labor and pollution were solving themselves through the market"

Well, if you think the solutions were "more child labor and more pollution" Yesterday 10:41pm


SneakysUcaptain_spleen61L
If this thread teaches me nothing else, it's that a basic understanding of history and political theory is frighteningly lacking in an alarming number of people. Yesterday 10:44pm


surlybastardUNobody21L
Stand your ground GZ style, right, you dumb fuck? Yesterday 11:13pm


arrrrr32So an appropriate response to a threat is murder? I really don't want to live in that society.

BzatUcaptain_spleen1L
To an anarcho-capitalist, is blackmail part of a free market? Yesterday 11:23pm


arrrrr32You clearly don't live in a neighborhood controlled by a criminal gang. I as an individual do not have the power to stand up to a large number of amoral well armed criminals who would not hesitate to burn my house with me inside it. This is why we have police, courts and laws, to allow people who cannot protect…

ValmontI'm pretty sure courts take a dim view of, "I had to kill him, he was going to turn me in to the cops!"

burnburnaaaaI'm not too bothered about the drugs. But he was a smug self-righteous git who was able to convince himself that he was a moral crusader while trying to order hits on people.

Valmont"kidnapped"? o.O

quickgetjesusatowelUBzat1L
Bzat: Neither you nor stoat77 has any idea what the political definition of "anarchy" is, but I encourage both of you to check it out sometime.

So is this a game of chicken, using anarchist-hipster rules? Today 12:06am


DintyUNobody11L
Jesus your dumb ass has been watching waaaay too much "Breaking Bad". If what DPR was doing in the first place was justifiable legally, than he wouldnt have to worry about ordering a hit on anybody. The justifications you use in the first place ("it's OK to sell whatever you want, the government should not be involved ") should be sufficient.

Ordering a hit simply exposed the fact that he knew he was in a position that was indefensible. If he really believed that his enterprise was ultimately legal, he should have gone with it and the hit would have been unnecessary.

This coming from a guy whose friend was murdered in a murder for hire scheme a few years ago. Today 1:15am


MB42It's worth pointing out that one of the two people DPR took a hit out on was an employee of his that was in no way affiliated with the feds. He was stealing bitcoins so DPR was going to have him tortured, he then decided to just have him killed because he was worried his employee might sell him out (note that the…

peacelovecrazyUBzat1L
There are a lot of different options between "letting it go" and murder. If you're not doing something illegal, then you can go to the police. If you're doing something illegal and someone is trying to blackmail you, maybe you're screwed. We don't live in a perfect world and some people are in horrible situations, sometimes innocently. Murder is still not the answer. It's never the answer. I also question the wisdom of advocating murder on Gawker, even if you're just trolling. Today 7:04am


INeverRememberMyBurnerKeyUNobody1L
BWAHAHAHAHA. 'State violence'. Or as we say in the real world, 'identification'.

Excuse me while I dry my eyes for the guy who made millions on the backs of kiddie porn victims, slave wage workers in fields cultivating drugs, and the like. Today 7:20am


INeverRememberMyBurnerKeyUBzat1L
Can't wait till your kid tells on you one day. His funeral will be so cute, I bet. Today 7:22am


INeverRememberMyBurnerKeyUBzat1L
"Do you really think that people can do essentially whatever they want without fear of violent reprisals?"

You mean like attempt to buy and sell kiddie porn, drugs, and guns on the Internet? Today 7:25am


HorseUI'm here mostly for the chicks.1L
Very true. That said, if the feds spend a lot of money coming up with a way to break it, wouldn't you expect them to use it? Instead they go after DPR mano-a-mano, old-fashioned sting type.

Realistically, they have no practical reason to even try to break it because they can just exploit stupid users. Most of the methods of gaining information on someone using the Tor network by actually beating the system involves exploiting nuanced issues in onion routing. These things usually require you to be operating a shitload of exit nodes. IIRC, the government has tried this without much success. In any case, it's easier to just wait for someone to screw up and catch them.

Not to say it can't be broken, but not only is it combinatorially hard, it's somewhat of a moot point. Today 7:40am


ShaunKennedyUDinty11L
Nobody's a fucking moron and providing a damn good case to the government for why some drugs should stay illegal. Look how dumb they made him. Today 9:38am


ShaunKennedyUBzat1L
Holy shit, stop watching mob movies and actually participate in society. Today 9:39am


HamnightUNobody1L
Oh, well as long as he didn't know it was a government agent I guess attempted murder is ok.

And it isn't "self defense" to try to kill a witness to your illegal activities chuckles. He's an everyday drug dealer who used the internet. If the weed dealer on your corner pays to have one of his junkies murdered because he things he's going to the police, would you call that "self defense"? Today 11:07am


HamnightUNobody1L
I love how this guy is a folk hero to you because he used the internet. He's a drug dealer who tried to murder a witness.

If your local crack dealer murders a junkie who talks to the police, is that self defense to you? Because that's what your advocating here. Today 11:09am

X

NobodyUstoat7751L
that was self defense, the man he wanted dead was threatening him and others with state violence. Yesterday 6:52pm


stoat77 and 105 others...
5 participants@

ShaunKennedyUAdrian Chen151L
Regardless of what you're accessing on the internet or how you're doing it, you are still a human being with a computer who physically exists in the real world.

People who forget or ignore that, despite it being proven true countless times, deserve what they get. Yesterday 6:34pm


BzatUShaunKennedy11L
ah come on, DPR got caught because of some really avoidable mistakes. Do they catch him without those?

What I'm really confused about is why he was based in the US. That just seems to be asking for it. Yesterday 7:03pm


ShaunKennedyUBzat11L
Well, yeah, of course he did. But yes, had he not made those mistakes, he still would have been caught eventually, in all likelihood. Yesterday 7:05pm


lesterhalfjr and 1 others...
17 participants@

lesterhalfjrUAdrian Chen11L
not coincidentally, the entire debate reminds me of Walter Block's "Defending the Undefendable" which Mises Institute sells. http://mises.org/document/3490

are the crimes of Silk Road "victimless"? Does it matter? (I don't mean child porn obviously) Yesterday 7:32pm


NobodyUlesterhalfjr41L
the silk road did not sell child porn to my knowledge also

fuck yeah walter block.

the following is something I wrote up today to post on muh blog.

Narcotics trafficking.
This isn’t even a crime, selling narcotics is not a crime because there is no victim. Secondly, as far as I understand it DPR just set up a website that enabled people to sell drugs, he did not do so himself. Even if he did this is not a crime just because it breaks the edicts of tyrannical busybodies.

Computer Hacking
I’m not quite clear on what they are actually charging him with, from all the sources I’ve read it’s very vague and the official report only mentions accessing a computer without permission for profit. It seems that they are charging him with this crime because of some of the things that were sold on the silk road. If that is the case, then he is innocent on this charge because he cannot be held accountable for the actions of others.

Money Laundering Conspiracy
From the official report it seems that his ‘conspiracy’ to commit money laundering was… just running Silk Road and using bitcoins and using a bitcoin ‘tumbler’ to obscure the source of the bitcoins. If this is the case than he is innocent here too, simply hiding money and how you got it is not a crime. If a mugger walks up to you on the street and demands your money and you give him your wallet, is it a crime to not tell him you have money in your sock?

These are the three charges they are charging him with, which I find interesting because he is also accused of hiring a hitman (who was a federal agent) But even though he isn’t being charged with that crime I will address it here.

Hiring a Hitman / Conspiracy to commit ‘murder’.
If it is true that Dread Pirate Roberts hired a hitman to kill someone, he is STILL innocent because the man he had wanted to be killed was threatening not only Dread Pirate Roberts, but multiple innocent uninvolved people with state violence. By threatening to release the identities of Dread Pirate Roberts and various vendors who operated on the Silk Road he implicitly is threatening them with violence to be carried out by the state for the “crimes” they committed. In this light It isn’t a stretch at all to say that paying to have him killed was self defense and in the defense of others. Yesterday 7:54pm


lesterhalfjrUNobody21L
I get it. I don't know if I fully agree and you can imagine how baffling this is to the entirely uninitiated. Yesterday 8:01pm


surlybastard and 13 others...
7 participants@

skahammerUAdrian Chen231L
This is a damned substantive article. I learned a tremendous amount from it that I didn't know.

I realize that publishing very informative articles like this really isn't the central part of Gawker's business model. But this is amazing, and in my opinion it's exceptionally worthy of praise.

Best thing Adrian's ever written for Gawker? Anyone agree? Yesterday 7:03pm


italianatorUskahammer1L
He had to up his game for his new Vice job. Yesterday 7:24pm


James ChathamUskahammer1L
I'd really have to agree with you. I only had a cursory knowledge of the Dark Net before Adrian wrote that article on the Dark Net bust over the summer and now this. Hate to sniff his ass further, but well done, Mr. Chen. Today 10:10am

13 participants@

TheOneDaveUAdrian Chen81L
I'm fairly libertarian, and absolutely no fan of the war on drugs - but ordering people murdered doesn't seem particularly idealistic or heroic to me. Yesterday 6:43pm


NobodyUTheOneDave51L
The man he ordered the hit on was threatening to get the state to use violence on others.

he was indirectly threatening other with violence. This makes his murder (which never happened) self defense, and the defense of others.

DPR Is a fucking hero. Yesterday 6:48pm


TheOneDaveUNobody51L
I'll admit that it's all allegations at this point. However, the threat was that people's info would be posted on the web unless DPR paid him.

Presumably by "use violence" you mean the arrests that most likely would have followed such an action. However, if you think DPR was justified in ordering this man's death to prevent the violence of being arrested for drug offenses, then do you also think that just killing any police officer is justified (since basically all cops have made a drug bust at some point in their life)? Yesterday 6:58pm


Gemmabeta and 9 others...
1 participant@

akm-gpointUAdrian Chen281L
i love drugs, but god damn i hate these libertarians Yesterday 6:48pm

@

Lisa_StrataUAdrian Chen1L
There is always going to be a cyber arms race between those trying to remain anonymous and those who want to identify the former. Its an evolving process - what is secure today might not be tomorrow but there also may be a better encryption technology developed the day after tomorrow.

And I think this article gave the FBI way too much credit. Did they really hack the system? Or did they just raid the guy who left his gmail address in an open forum? And did google hand over all his e-mails to the FBI? I bet after not being able to crack tor they tried to identify the operator - which turned out to be a lot easier.

Its like when they FBI caught the unabomber - they patted themselves on the back, "The FBI always gets their man". Except that they had no idea who he was until his brother basically told them exactly where he was - even had to hire a lawyer for his claims to be taken seriously. Today 4:03am

@

ManchuCandidateUAdrian Chen21L
It's that the idea of a world famous, anonymous illegal market is fatally contradictory

This proves yet again that the first rule of "Fill-in-the-blank Club is don't talk about Fill-in-the-blank Club" especially if you don't want the Feds to bust your ass. Yesterday 7:38pm

@

dvdoffUAdrian Chen1L
Well, all you have to now is got to either Sheep or BMR and it's business as usual. In fact, the listings now feature sellers listing themselves as former SR sellers. Silk Road will be back, maybe not like the old site, but when there is that much money involved, someone will figure out a way to bring it back offshore and without an American admin. Today 8:45am

@

quickgetjesusatowelUAdrian Chen11L
"DPR was an idealist and a hero, and people knew he would never scam them or hurt them in any other way..."
He heroically and ideally got an online hit man to negotiate an assassination on a person who funded (we suppose) his own business operations. Yesterday 9:54pm

11 participants@

BzatUAdrian Chen41L
Why are all internet outlaws BS anarcho-capitalists? I mean, the fact that even Snowden is a Ron Paul guy is kind of mystifying. Yesterday 7:02pm


kevin_kancerUBzat81L
It could be said that the ideology allows them to protect the fruits of their unearned privilege. Or as it is often described: "I got mine, fuck everyone else." Yesterday 7:25pm


BzatUkevin_kancer11L
well, okay. that's another fair explanation. haha actually, that's probably why most ancaps are ancaps. Yesterday 7:37pm

@

MrTrippsUAdrian Chen1L
Don't fool yourself about Tor. It has been compromised. They will catch you if you give them reason to. Today 8:55am

3 participants@

octopedeUAdrian Chen71L
I don't care about The Dark Net so much, it's never seemed much more than a windswept ghost town for people who, like me, aren't into drugs or CP or any other illegal stuff. Tor, on the other hand…that's an important project, and I hope this doesn't spell doom for them, or for anonymous browsing as a whole. I may not need to really slip into the shadows, but it's nice to know there are means by which one can escape surveillance. Yesterday 6:43pm

2 participants@

IIIlllUAdrian Chen21L
I do find it funny that we are to accept that some errant hacker cracked their server and got user info and therefore DPR ordered a hit, but are supposed to believe that the NSA and all its numerous security experts are unable to do anything similar. I assumed from the start that they did compromise it themselves and started collecting data from there linking usage habits and creating a picture of the users.

Which goes back to the problem of TOR, which is really not its problem: Human Beings. We are creatures of habit and that is the ultimate undoing of our own anonymity. Yesterday 7:04pm

1 participant@

HorseUAdrian Chen21L
Nice writeup, Adrian. Some of the best reporting I've seen on this issue so far.

I will disagree with you on one thing, though: DPR's chief failing was, in fact, his sloppiness. He was busted because he was stupid enough to wander into the clearnet. The feds might have gotten him eventually, but if he weren't so goddamned stupid as to try to have a guy killed over what was, for him, chump change, they wouldn't have had a case. Almost everything I've seen in the charges against him was a result of him communicating directly with federal agents.

The Silk Road was an incredibly large marketplace. I find it tough to believe that everyone who became so accustomed to buying and selling drugs anonymously online give that up so easily. Hidden services with Tor really do suck at present, though. I2P supposedly has a better implementation, but it hasn't been vetted nearly as thoroughly as Tor. Yesterday 7:09pm
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Re: BitCoin

Postby justdrew » Sat Oct 05, 2013 5:58 pm

I really don't think bitcoin could scale to hundreds of millions of users conducting billions of transactions a day. Not without an infrastructure rivaling the nsa.

and really, unless you do it just right, lose your computer, lose all your bitcoin money.

but hey, maybe I'm wrong.

The basic concept is on the right track though.

but somehow I still think money should be more clearly linked to Human Time, that's what money really is, a way to coerce action by others, a claim on future time.

ALSO, maybe deserves it's own thread, but Switzerland has a ballot measure in then ext election to institute a universal minimum income for all citizens. brilliant and highly due.

All monetary injection could be accomplished by simply giving people money.

People being alive is the most valuable thing on earth.
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Re: BitCoin

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Sat Oct 05, 2013 7:25 pm

I agree. Digital currency is ultimately just digitizing the form of wage slavery and choice of master (the digital world under more stringent state control). Time banking makes more sense, is just as decentralized, but it not dependent on the potential arbitrariness of value.

justdrew » Yesterday, 23:58 wrote:I really don't think bitcoin could scale to hundreds of millions of users conducting billions of transactions a day. Not without an infrastructure rivaling the nsa.

and really, unless you do it just right, lose your computer, lose all your bitcoin money.

but hey, maybe I'm wrong.

The basic concept is on the right track though.

but somehow I still think money should be more clearly linked to Human Time, that's what money really is, a way to coerce action by others, a claim on future time.

ALSO, maybe deserves it's own thread, but Switzerland has a ballot measure in then ext election to institute a universal minimum income for all citizens. brilliant and highly due.

All monetary injection could be accomplished by simply giving people money.

People being alive is the most valuable thing on earth.
Seeing the world through rose-colored latex.
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Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Oct 05, 2013 11:34 pm

.


Justdrew:

but somehow I still think money should be more clearly linked to Human Time, that's what money really is, a way to coerce action by others, a claim on future time.


Well said.
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Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Oct 15, 2013 12:20 pm

.

Plenty of speculators hedging in the event the Grand Default occurs...

[and apparently Central Banks have been drawing up their own contingency plans as well: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-1 ... nears.html

Central banks have begun making contingency plans on how they would keep financial markets working if the U.S. defaults on the world’s benchmark debt.
Policy makers discussed possible responses when they met at the International Monetary Fund’s annual meetings in Washington over the weekend, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential. The discussions continued as policy makers headed home.]

-----------------------------------

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-m ... 00102.html

Bitcoin, the virtual money that exists only in digital form, is spawning a real-world hardware boom.

The currency, used to buy and sell everything from electronics to illegal drugs on the Web, has surged to about $135, more than 10 times its value a year ago.

The rally has created a cottage industry of speculators eager to get their hands on Bitcoins, which can only be created digitally by using powerful computers to solve complex software problems. That has in turn boosted a market for high-powered machines, some costing more than $20,000 apiece, which are custom-made to unlock new Bitcoins in a process called mining, a nod to the excavation of minerals and metal ore.

"Mining can actually be quite profitable when miners are able to get their equipment in a timely manner, which is what keeps many of us looking for better, faster and cheaper hardware all the time," said Andrew Korb, who set up a fund that buys systems to mint Bitcoins and shares the proceeds with investors.

Beyond investing in the currency, the speculation has extended to equipment manufacturers targeting Bitcoin miners and automated teller-like machines for cashing in or exchanging the currency. Startups such as Butterfly Labs Inc., KnCMiner AB and Robocoin Technologies say hardware sales have soared along with the price of Bitcoins.
Shovel Makers
Korb, 24, has persuaded 65 people to invest 907 Bitcoins worth more than $100,000 in the Korb & Co. Investments Mining Fund. The group, which has a prospectus online, has bought computers from Butterfly, KnCMiner and CoinTerra to crunch data. His CoinTerra gear has yet to be delivered because the startup hasn't begun shipping yet.

"Like during the gold rush, it's the shovel companies that made money," Korb said in an interview.

Korb, based in Burlington, Vermont, is taking a risk, since the cryptographic challenges embedded in Bitcoins get increasingly complicated as more digital money is created. That in turn fuels greater demand for computing power. The virtual currency was designed that way, so that the money self-regulates supply and prevents out-of-control inflation.

Since being introduced four years ago by a programmer or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, there are now 11.8 million Bitcoins in circulation, according to Bitcoincharts, a website that tracks the digital currency's activity.
Rapid Growth
Butterfly Labs, whose mining computers can cost more than $22,000 apiece, has sold thousands of units, posting revenue that's growing by triple digits annually, according to Jeff Ownby, vice president of marketing and e-commerce.

CoinTerra, based in Austin, Texas, raised $1.5 million in funding from angel investors in August. Virtual Mining Corp. started taking orders for its equipment in July, with one recent purchase reaching $140,000, Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Slaughter said.

"We are starting to do a lot of big sales," said Slaughter, who is also mining Bitcoins.

About 1 million Bitcoins are being generated by miners every year, estimated Tuur Demeester, an investor in CoinTerra. The total number of Bitcoins is capped at 21 million, based on rules embedded within the software code, and the increasing complexity of the cryptographic problems for creating them means it will probably take years to reach that limit. In 2009, people could mine 50 coins every 10 minutes. By the end of 2012, that amount was halved to 25 coins, said Slaughter.

Double Investment?

CoinTerra received 125 orders for its mining equipment on its first day of sales, with the initial delivery scheduled in December, according to CEO Ravi Iyengar, a former chip-design researcher at Samsung Electronics Co. and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) Customers will recoup their investment in less than 60 days -- and double or triple their investments within a year, he said.

"Bitcoin is all about performance," Iyengar said. "The greater performance, the greater share of Bitcoins you can get."

Dabbling in the Bitcoin market carries risks. First, the inherent difficulty of unlocking new Bitcoins makes it costly. Virtual Mining's Slaughter said the sooner people start mining, the more likely they are to make a return on their investment in computing hardware. Yet the more Bitcoins created, the more complicated the process becomes, increasing the computing power needed to make them -- and the expense of doing so.
Tougher Mining
"A lot of the manufacturers started shipping, and it's twice as difficult to mine these coins than a month ago," Slaughter said. "The difficulty is going to shoot up so fast. People are going to say they can't make any money."

Slaughter, who runs six Avalon mining machines from BitSynCom LLC that cost him $1,500 each, said he's creating about 1.2 Bitcoins per day, or the equivalent of about $162. That's down from $300 a day in September and $1,200 a day in August.

"It's probably a wash due to the amount of energy used and the time used," said Ugo Egbunike, senior ETF specialist at IndexUniverse, an index-fund researcher. "It's probably correlated with the growth in Bitcoin's popularity. They might be a little misled in how much yield they could get out of these mining strategies."
Silk Road
The Bitcoin market is also volatile. The currency's value dropped as much as 33 percent earlier this month after the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation seized the "Silk Road Hidden Website," an online marketplace for drugs and other illegal goods where anonymous users conducted transactions with the digital currency. The closing spurred concern that demand for the currency would decline.

The value of Bitcoins has since recovered. Some people are buying Bitcoins as a refuge amid concern that the U.S. will breach its debt ceiling, hurting the U.S. dollar. Bitcoins are also being purchased as a hedge against a rising rate of inflation in Argentina.

"If there's a U.S. default, I wouldn't be surprised if the value of Bitcoins is back above $200," Michael Terpin, co-founder of BitAngels, an investor group focused on Bitcoin startups, said in an interview. The value of Bitcoin rose 11 percent to $135.40 on Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp today, according to tracker Bitcoincharts.com.

The burgeoning hardware market isn't limited to mining gear. Demand is also emerging for automated teller machines that exchange Bitcoins for dollars, euros and other legal tender. Three New Hampshire residents are working on making Bitcoin ATMs for a venture called Lamassu Inc. Designed in Portugal and costing as much as $5,000, about 40 of the machines have been ordered from customers from as far away as Australia, Denmark and Brazil, CEO Zach Harvey said.
‘Insane' Orders
Robocoin, another Bitcoin ATM maker, unveiled a machine in August priced at $18,500. The Las Vegas-based company received 15 orders in the first 36 hours, according to CEO Jordan Kelley.

"Since we've announced preorders, it's been insane, Kelley said. ‘‘My fingers are cramping from writing e-mails." Based on initial demand, he projects sales of 100 units in the first year.

Mitchell Demeter, a 27-year-old who operates a physical dollar-to-Bitcoin exchange store in Vancouver, said he's ordered five Robocoin machines.

"We are looking to scale our business, and doing so would require a lot of manpower," Demeter said. "Robocoin solved those problems for us."

He's planning to put the ATMs at coffee shops and other locations throughout Canada, and recoup his investment in three to six months by charging a fee of about 3 percent per transaction. Like Demeter, many Bitcoin buyers are young. Many have attended local Bitcoin-enthusiast gatherings and have purchased everything from beer to luxury cars using the currency.

"Everybody is trying to get in early at this point," Egbunike said. "It's people trying to get in before the rush."
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Re: BitCoin

Postby smiths » Tue Oct 15, 2013 7:54 pm

when you actually look at the way money, ideas, conversations, and wealthy people flow around the world, the tying of currencies to single nations states looks increasingly anachronistic,
whether you have objections to how value is measured, or what money is defined as, or how capitalists operate is irrelevant

decentralized currency, uncontrolled by single state entities is the the future of money

bitcoin is simplistically a protocol or a method of organization, verification and communication

but it is also the most radical form of money in about half a millennia,
it is also a political action, a move to bitcoin is a vote against the central banks and the traditional money powers
and yes, of course they are getting in on it,
Coinbase is run by a load of former Goldman guys, are they builders or wreckers? i dont know

it is vulnerable to manipulation, it is also inevitable

here are 10 interesting considerations to ponder from David Lee

1. I think Bitcoin is just a bet that the world becomes more multipolar. In this world, there will be stages of heightened instability and chaos economically and politically. In this world, something like Bitcoin (or “Gold 2.0”) backed by no sovereign makes eminent sense.
2. I think whether it is “legalized” or “outlawed” by the US is almost irrelevant. There can a flourishing Bitcoin economy because of this multipolar world described above. It may turn out to be something like online gambling in the early days.
3. I think if you study Bitcoin, you realize that the currency is an application of the protocol. Bitcoin is actually a chain of digital signatures. Each “bitcoin” is just a ledger of all transactions of that “coin.” In other words, applications that have nothing to do with currency or payments (e.g., like Bitmessage) can exist.
4. I think Bitcoin will survive and thrive because first mover protocols win so long as there are no major flaws. Examples: TCP/IP (i.e., the Internet) and SMTP (i.e., email).
5. I think Bitcoin has many of the elements of modern “black swan” startups like Google and Facebook:
highly polarizing - even and especially among early adopters and ‘experts’;
dismissive or downright hostile attitude by incumbents, usually non-technologists;
incompatible with and/or pushing against current legal regimes or regulatory systems;
de-centralized thus involving crowdsourced-based content or activity;
false conventional wisdom that the service is only used for illicit or unsavory activity (e.g., everyone thought apps like YouTube,
Snapchat,Facebook were used just for porn, hooking up, etc.)
unclear business model or applications.
6. I think that the FBI’s recent takedown of Silk Road, a black market whose primary currency was Bitcoin, was an inflection point. That the price of Bitcoin bounced back so quickly means that it’s being used for more than just illicit activity.
7. I think the best community for and most interesting activity around Bitcoin locally is the Stanford Bitcoin Group, led by SV Angel advisor and Stanford lecturer Balaji Srinivasan and Stanford prof Vijay Pande. Special thanks to BSS for reading and commenting on this post.
8. I think that people much smarter than I will be able to build applications, regimes and systems built on the Bitcoin architecture and that have nothing to do with payments. Getting back to point 3 above and Bitcoin first principles, there are a variety of applications and implications beyond payment systems.
9. I think one of the most interesting companies in the entire SV Angel portfolio is Coinbase. They started as a Start Fund investment but we eventually invested more. They have a very crisp and clear mission (“making Bitcoin easy to use”). They have Stripe-like developer focus and support. They have founders with high horsepower (i.e., IQ) and unique insights into BTC.
10. I think if I were in my early 20’s, looking for a startup idea and willing to do what the other person isn’t (e.g., move to a different part of the world), I’d spend all my time trying to understand this topic.

http://daslee.me/10-things-i-think-i-think-on-bitcoin


keep it locked

http://www.zeroblock.com/
the question is why, who, why, what, why, when, why and why again?
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Re: BitCoin

Postby DrVolin » Tue Oct 15, 2013 9:39 pm

If Tor isn't an intel op, someone is not doing his job.
all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

--Guns and Roses
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Re: BitCoin

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Oct 18, 2013 12:07 pm

Via: http://ianso.blogspot.com/2013/10/bitco ... atsec.html

Bitcoin as a law enforcement/natsec honeypot: what is the evidence?

Paranoia appears to be the order of the day, given what we know about the NSA and GCHQ thanks to Edward Snowden. Absent from the stories so far is any mention of Bitcoin. I find this odd - Bitcoin is the most cypherpunky of all crypto technologies, after all.

I want to make the case, without necessarily endorsing it, that we should be much more suspicious of Bitcoin than we are at present.

1) Bitcoin was almost certainly a team effort. The design has been peer-reviewed and is found to be remarkably secure, complete and well-rounded[1]. I argue that this suggests that a peer-review or quality control process has already been applied. If one individual cryptographer had written Bitcoin, it would contain far more idiosyncracies than it does, not just in the cryptosystem design but also in the C++ code itself. The core protocol itself, which uses a Turing-incomplete programming language, has had only one major vulnerability found in its design and execution.

For comparison, the Amazon AWS API is also a huge team effort that was also (I assume) designed with the help of competent Internet protocol and cryptography experts, and also has suffered from only one major vulnerability, which was found by a certified genius, Colin Percival. Likewise Colin's own one-person-product, the highly secure backup facility Tarsnap has also had only one serious vulnerability to date.

Bitcoin is at least one order of magnitude more complex than Tarsnap, or the crypto used in v1 of the Amazon AWS API. We should have seen far more bugs of varying severities if it was a one man band.

2) The author(s) created, maintained and then apparently retired a pseudonym (Satoshi Nakamoto) while staying completely anonymous on the Internet.

As an achievement this is almost as impressive as Bitcoin itself, albeit of a different nature.

Using the Internet anonymously is much harder than one would think. Things like Tor are vital of course, but beyond that there is the practice of operational security to a very high standard. One slip-up is enough to junk the whole identity, e.g. logging on to a pseudononymous account from an insecure location, or even sending a cookie obtained via Tor 'in the clear', is enough.

As a real-world example, the assassination of Rafic Hariri in Lebanon was pinned on Hezbollah because one of their agents made a single phone call to his girlfriend with his dedicated operational phone instead of his personal mobile.

3) Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis. Network analysis can be used to comb through large graphs looking for patterns or suspicious behaviour. Because the entire transaction graph of Bitcoin is public, anyone can perform network analysis on the whole Bitcoin network. This is not so significant by itself, but becomes vitally important when combined with the next point.

4) In the absence of good network analysis, the Bitcoin network is not legally attackable at the point where hard currency is converted. Network analysis backed up with law enforcement or hacking, however, could be extremely effective, and this fits the MO for some large three letter agencies: as we have seen with the recent disclosures of NSA attacks against SSL and Tor, the most successful attacks are multi-pronged: they combine, for example, legal strong-arming with technical know-how and hacking.

Obtaining the transaction logs of a currency exchange would give a starting points from which the rest of the transaction graph can be de-anonymised.

5) One single party controls more than 25% of all BTCs in circulation.[2] Someone, somewhere has the ability to destabilise the BTC currency exchange market at will. If you think of BTCs as a commodity instead of a currency, it is obvious that anyone holding large reserves can wreak havoc by dumping their holdings on the market. They could also bankrupt or bleed the exchanges dry of working capital by converting large sums of BTC over a period of time.

6) Whoever wrote Bitcoin must have known that it would attract criminals and wingnuts like flies to a honeypot. After all, look at the history of cyptocash and you can't help but notice Jim Bell's 'assassination politics', or realise the potential for mischief within the combination of hidden servers and cryptocash. Once Bitcoin was established and hidden servers were possible via Tor, Silk Road was inevitable. Even with the demise of Silk Road, Bitcoin is still used for money laundering, paying for skimmed credit card numbers and for 0-day exploits - in this last case, maybe even by the NSA itself.

7) 'Satoshi Nakamoto' is an anagram of 'Ma, I took NSA oath!' :-) But seriously:


To summarise, Bitcoin was apparently designed by good cryptographers and peer-reviewed before it was released. It was almost certainly written by a team of good coders.[1] The entity that did this practiced impeccable operational security. Bitcoin was designed to be difficult to attack by non-state actors, but was also designed to be inherently vulnerable to network analysis, especially so when combined with legal and covert access techniques. A single entity retains the ability to severely disrupt the BTC market through its control of large reserves, and only the most unaware or blinkered recluse could have failed to realise its potential target market mainly consisted of rogues and blackguards.

Whether or not this points to a law enforcement or national security agency as I've suggested, I think it's evident that we cannot assume that the creation of Bitcoin was motivated by altruism, or even by the strain of libertarian cypherpunk ideology that gave Bitcoin such fertile soil in which to grow.

Dan Kaminsky was quoted by Matthew Green as saying "authorship is a better predictor of quality than openness", and likewise, motive is a better predictor of the true purpose of a tool than its quality. The motive of the creators of Bitcoin remains completely unknown.

***

Corrections and footnotes

[1] As per the HN discussion, apparently the first BitCoin client was quite buggy in the beginning. Only one exploit was used on the network, but see the Bitcoin CVE list here for a more realistic list of the software bugs encountered in Bitcoin. Worth noting is that this is a separate issue to bugs in the design of the cryptosystem. Thanks to nwh on HN for the pointer.

[2] I previously stated that "...and has tried to hide that fact" but this is based on a misreading of the paper. Thanks to mcphilip on HN for pointing that out.

There's an interesting discussion over at Hacker News where some good counterpoints are made.
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Re: BitCoin

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 18, 2013 12:21 pm

Who uses the Deep Web?

Though the Deep Web does have its share of criminals and hackers (just like the surface web), it also serves some pretty important functions. For one thing, Tor software can be used by citizens in countries with governments that closely monitor their Internet activity and curtail their free speech. The Tor project, the 501c3 nonprofit that maintains the Tor network and software, states on their website that journalists, militaries, law enforcement, activists and whistleblowers use Tor.


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Re: BitCoin

Postby Ben D » Tue Nov 05, 2013 12:35 am

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/05/bitcoin_exploit/

Bitcopocalypse! Top crypto-currency can be HIJACKED, warn boffins

By Jack Clark, 5th November 2013

Selfish miners could derail Bitcoin's decentralized design, according to new study

The Bitcoin crypto-currency is vulnerable to manipulation by greedy miners, researchers have claimed, which poses a threat to the stability of the funny money.

In a paper distributed on Monday titled Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable, two researchers from Cornell University describe how Bitcoin's currency generation and authorization system – the "blockchain" – can be exploited by groups of "selfish" Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin 101
The foundation on which Bitcoin rests is a public ledger called the blockchain, which is a sequential list of all the past confirmed transactions: each block is used to securely and permanently record a small set of Bitcoin transactions and each block links to the previous block so that a record of verified exchanges between Bitcoin wallets can be publicly agreed upon.

Crucially, and simply put, Bitcoin relies on a peer-to-peer network to synchronize everyone to the longest valid blockchain.

You can't create a new block out of thin air: a cryptographic puzzle unique to each new block must be solved for it to be considered valid by the Bitcoin network and used to store transactions added to the end of the chain.

Mining is therefore the act of attempting to solve mathematically non-trivial puzzles to create cryptographically secure blocks; there's a reward in Bitcoins for solving each crypto-riddle for the network.

People can choose to pool together compute resources to cracking these blocks. These miners typically have to join other miners to unite their computation power and increase the rate at which they can tear through the increasingly difficult puzzles for each block.

The Cornell researchers now believe that if a third of all the miners in the Bitcoin ecosystem banded together into a "selfish miner" group, they could crush the competition and take an ever-larger share of proceeds.

So, how exactly could this come to pass? It relates to the fact that a selfish miner can keep newly found blocks private rather than making every single one public for the network to use. The honest, non-selfish Bitcoiners will continue to toil away on already solved problems while the pool of selfish miners start using the new blocks to store transactions.

At the right moment, when enough extra blocks have been secretly acquired, the pool of selfish miners can reveal their private blockchain, which will be longer than the public blockchain: the network will switch to the longer chain, the selfish miners earn their reward for cracking the crypto-puzzles and the honest Bitcoiners earn nothing for all the electricity they spent finding the same blocks.

'Bitcoin will never be safe against attacks by a selfish mining pool'

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Re: BitCoin

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 11, 2013 6:12 pm

.

Libertas... Aequitas... Veritas.

"In Cryptography We Trust"

http://slashdot.org/story/13/12/10/2117 ... oin-killer

"Banking giant JPMorgan Chase has filed a patent application for an electronic commerce system that sounds remarkably like Bitcoin — but never mentions the controversial, Internet-only currency. The patent application was filed in early August but made publicly available only at the end of November; it describes a 'method and system for processing Internet payments using the electronic funds transfer network.' The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds — just like Bitcoin. It would allow for micropayments without processing fees — just like bitcoin. And it could kill off wire transfers through companies like Western Union — just like Bitcoin. There are 18,126 words in the patent application. 'Bitcoin' is not one of them."


http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/12/10/ ... in-killer/

Banking giant JPMorgan Chase has filed a patent application for an electronic commerce system that sounds remarkably like Bitcoin -- but never mentions the controversial, Internet-only currency.

The patent application was filed in early August but made publicly available only at the end of November; it describes a “method and system for processing Internet payments using the electronic funds transfer network.”

The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds -- just like Bitcoin, noted the enthusiast blog LetsTalkBitcoin. It would allow for micropayments without processing fees -- just like bitcoin. And it could kill off wire transfers through companies like Western Union -- just like Bitcoin.

But while there are 18,126 words in the patent application, “Bitcoin” is not one of them.
The application instead pits the proposed electronic funds transfer system against the traditional credit card and “rival” Internet payment systems.

“While new Internet payment mechanisms have been rapidly emerging, consumers and merchants have been happily conducting a growing volume of commerce using basic credit card functionality. None of the emerging efforts to date have gotten more than a toehold in the market place and momentum continues to build in favor of credit cards,” the application reads.

Last week, Bank of America released a surprisingly upbeat report on Bitcoin, essentially proclaiming it the next big thing. Yet most Americans know little about the new electronic currency, which has experience especially volatile trading in the past month.

The e-currency soared to a new high of $1,242 on Nov. 29, according to bitcoincharts.com. With over 12 million coins in “circulation,” that meant nearly $15 billion in bitcoins were being traded on the Internet -- an amount that exceeds the value of the entire currency stock of countries like Ethiopia, Iceland, Nepal and 90 other countries, according to 2012 estimates by the CIA’s World Fact Book.

The currency is currently trading at $962, and saw swings of up to 50 percent earlier in the month.

When they first began pinging across the Internet, bitcoins could buy you almost nothing. Now, there's almost nothing that bitcoins can't buy. From hard drugs to hard currency, songs to survival gear, cars to consumer goods, retailers are rushing to welcome the virtual currency whose unofficial symbol is a dollar-like, double-barred B.

Advocates describe Bitcoin as the foundation stone of a Utopian economy: no borders, no change fees, no closing hours, and no one to tell you what you can and can't do with your money.

The mechanics of the virtual currency were first outlined in a research paper signed by Satoshi Nakamoto -- likely a pseudonym -- and the coins made their online debut in 2009. How the coins are created, how the transactions are authenticated and how the whole system manages to power forward with no central bank, no financial regulator and a user base of wily hackers all comes down to computing power and savoir faire.

Or, as Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist for the ConvergEx Group, describes it: "genius on so many levels."

The linchpin of the system is a network of "miners" -- high-end computer users who supply the Bitcoin network with the processing power needed to maintain a transparent, running tally of all transactions. The tally is one of the most important ways in which the system prevents fraud, and the miners are rewarded for supporting the system with an occasional helping of brand-new bitcoins.


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Re: BitCoin

Postby 8bitagent » Sat Dec 14, 2013 8:44 pm

1. So far I mostly see fuddy duddy "End the fed" Libertarians and overly excited tech obsessed trendoid investors hawking the Bitcoin thing

2. When Time magazine and NY Times are doing articles on the "Deep Web", you know it's not cool anymore.
I remember the deep web in the 90s and early 2000s. Yes, even a few of those alleged "al Qaeda/jihadist" websites.

It's all about 90s BBS, IRC and alt use groups:)
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