dispatches from libertarian paradise, i guess.

But looking back, I have been lucky. from reading the forums, it’s clear that there are scammers on Silk Road7, and shipments do get lost in the mail or seized or otherwise not delivered. (I do not expect any legal problems; law enforcement always go after the sellers, to achieve maximum impact, and Silk Road presents both technical and jurisdictional problems for law enforcement.) This is inherent to the idea of an anonymous marketplace, but the system worked for me. SR describes it well in one of his messages:

Silk road self-regulation:

Entrepreneurs have found it necessary to create and maintain communities, making rules, enforcing them, punishing rule-breakers, and turning towards violence when all else fails. They have built petty versions of the very governments they are fleeing. The modern state began as a protection racket, offering its subjects protection against outsiders and each other. The same logic is playing out today on the hidden internet, as would-be petty barons and pirate kings fight to tax and police their subjects while defending themselves against hostile incursions.

prisoners dilemma would say this isn’t likely, yet still it happened:

The experimental recipe of feedback mechanisms and emergent self-regulation may prove to be a more cost-effective alternative to modern state-driven regulation.

how is that alternative buttcoin economy going, dread pirate roberts?

It appears the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally cracked down on Silk Road, the underground marketplace where users could buy cocaine, heroin, meth, and more using the virtual currency Bitcoin. Journalist Brian Krebs has just published a purported copy of a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York against Ross Ulbricht, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind the site and the handle Dread Pirate Roberts.

There’s a new dank web marketplace. I give it a week before the owner makes a mistake and is outed.

On Wednesday morning, Silk Road 2.0 came online, promising a new and slightly improved version of the anonymous black market for drugs and other contraband that the Department of Justice shut down just over a month before. Like the old Silk Road, which until its closure served as the Web’s most popular bazaar for anonymous narcotics sales, the new site uses the anonymity tool Tor and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to protect the identity of its users. As of Wednesday morning, it already sported close to 500 drug listings, ranging from marijuana to ecstasy to cocaine.

A kind of buttcoin ad malware network. So if you get 1m concurrent users you can make 0.0008 bitcoins per hour at current conditions! oh wait, that’s like $0.28

Monetize without ads. Let your visitors help you mine Bitcoins

The latest chapter in the buttcoin saga: buttcoin murder.

Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation, The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. If someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be–any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds.

But what about liquidity?

One of the largest heists in buttcoin history is happening right now. 96k bitcoins – that’s £60m – was taken from the accounts of customers, vendors and administrators of the Sheep Marketplace over the weekend.

buttcoin action! if you want to get a sense how “liquid” this whole joke is, read this account about trying to convert even just a few 10s buttcoins into actual money:

Trying to sell the coins in person, and basically saying he either wants Cash, or a Cashiers check, has been a hilarious clusterfuck.

This is a great summary, and the magic cards are a nice dig.

What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic. While the underlying cryptocurrency is quite interesting and the wallet software is fairly good, the exchanges are based on layers upon layers of bad software, run by shady characters. The Bitcoin masses, judging by their behavior on forums, have no actual interest in science, technology or even objective reality when it interferes with their market position. They believe that holding a Bitcoin somehow makes them an active participant in a bold new future, even as they passively get fleeced in the bolder current present.

this is why buttcoiners are getting life sentences, like mr. ulbricht did today:

Since January, random.org has required the use of the more secure HTTPS protocol and has returned a 301 Moved Permanently response when accessed through HTTP. As a result, vulnerable installations of Blockchain for Android generated the private key corresponding to the address 1Bn9ReEocMG1WEW1qYjuDrdFzEFFDCq43F, regardless of the address specified by the user.

2022-02-09:

“What was amazing about this case is the laundry list of obfuscation techniques [Lichtenstein and Morgan allegedly] used”. Redman points to the couple’s alleged use of “chain-hopping”— transferring funds from 1 cryptocurrency to another to make them more difficult to follow—including exchanging bitcoins for “privacy coins” like monero and dash, both designed to foil blockchain analysis. Court documents say the couple also allegedly moved their money through the Alphabay dark web market—the biggest of its kind at the time—in an attempt to stymie detectives. Yet investigators seem to have found paths through all of those obstacles. “It just shows that law enforcement is not going to give up on these cases, and they’ll investigate funds for 5 years until they can follow them to a destination they can get information on”