Silk Road

[Peregrinator]

I was googling for an image for Pink's vacation thread, and this popped up in the search results. Interesting philosophical issues here.

http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable

Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.

About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark's door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. "If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn't have even noticed," Mark told us in a phone interview.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Buy while it lasts; I see this website getting shut down as soon as the authorities notice it.

 

[Peregrinator]

Buy while it lasts; I see this website getting shut down as soon as the authorities notice it.

If they can find it. Apparently the owners are pretty good at hiding stuff. It may also be hosted someplace where the authorities can't reach.

I don't buy or use drugs myself, but I think this is kinda cool. It's like the black market read something by William Gibson.

 

[Peregrinator]

Buy while it lasts; I see this website getting shut down as soon as the authorities notice it.

From the wiki article:

In reaction to a Gawker article on the marketplace, US Senators Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder and DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart insisting that the agency shut down the marketplace.[2][11][12] In a press conference Schumer described Silk Road as follows:

It's a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen. It's more brazen than anything else by lightyears.[13]

Subsequently, Silk Road's administrators posted on the Silk Road forums the following statement:

The die have been cast and now we will see how they land [sic]. We will be diverting even more effort into countering their attacks and making the site as resilient as possible, which means we may not be as responsive to messages for a while.
I'm sure this news will scare some off, but should we win the fight, a new era will be born. Even if we lose, the genie is out of the bottle and they are fighting a losing War already.[14]


After this attention, traffic to the website increased dramatically and the bitcoin saw a corresponding rise in value.[6]

The site was also used during the markup hearing for the 2011 Stop Online Piracy Act as an exemplar of the evolution of some websites to distributed networking and computer systems which by design are not blockable by domain name filtering such as proposed in SOPA.[15]

 

[John Doe]

I don't understand why anyone else still does LSD. I could understand if it was the 40s or 50s when it was new and hardly anyone knew anything about it, but why now, when everyone who has ever done it says it's a terrible high?

 

[Phelia]

I remember reading that article and then a follow-up reporting that the site had expanded from just drugs to include weapons trade, as well.

When I saw the original, I thought the concept was interesting, and the existence of the site didn't really bother me. I don't believe that bitcoins are as anonymous as they're made out to be, so I don't imagine that I'd ever have used the site, but that being said, I honestly have no concept of what the "standard" venue for buying illegal drugs is, so it could very well be safer and harder to trace - I'm not really the ideal market here. Way to square for that! Initially, it made sense that the internet had enabled an exchange point for what I perceived to be an irrepressible market anyhow, but when I saw that illegal weapons had been thrown into the mix, it made me immensely uncomfortable and I wished for some sort of supervision and recourse for the users.

Brings up some incredibly interesting and relevant questions, to be sure. Made me reflect on my own opinions toward regulation and my thoughts on the internet in general.

Also, hiiiiiii xoxoxo

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Is that where I go to purchase my ground baby?

 

[Frizzle_Fry]

I don't understand why anyone else still does LSD. I could understand if it was the 40s or 50s when it was new and hardly anyone knew anything about it, but why now, when everyone who has ever done it says it's a terrible high?

Those people got bad drugs lol