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ROSS ULBRICHT has been sentenced to life in jail for his role in the Silk Road. This article shows what a waste of resources this trail was. Online markets for

ROSS ULBRICHT has been sentenced to life in jail for his role in the Silk Road. This article shows what a waste of resources this trail was. Online markets for illegal substances are going to follow the path of file sharing, both are nearly impossible to stop. "Closing down the web’s biggest drug shop has simply cleared the way for competitors."

benguild 11y ago
Truth. It’s like how ridiculous shutting down Napster was. However, it does set a precedent for future things of this nature. For example, shutting down Megaupload caused a lot of other file-sharing websites to shutdown or clean up their act for fear of a larger crackdown. If anyone thinks they can just run a website like Silk Road and get away with it longterm for the sake of just being a middleman (like the file-sharing networks were), it’s now been demonstrated what kind of attention that will raise.
- hackercurious 11y ago
  Good point... this trial will not stop anything, just the nature of how things move forward from here... Perhaps in the future, these markets will be even more decentralized, like torrents have changed sharing sites. There is now a huge incentive to run these markets from places like Russia or Mexico.
  - draugadrotten 11y ago
    "This trial will not stop anything" may or may not be true, but the trial is also about bringing justice for what was done, and punish for the crime that was committed. If a murder was committed, a trial may not stop future murders, but surely you agree that we must bring the murderer to trial. By selling drugs and conspiring to murder, Ulbricht must stand trial, even if there will be another drug dealer tomorrow.
    - higherpurpose 11y ago
      This is an interesting perspective on just "how much of a crime" that was: http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/06/some-notes-about-ulbricht-verdict.html http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/06/some-notes-about-ulbricht-... I haven't followed this too closely, and maybe he is guilty of attempting to murder people and such, but it does look like the government/judge wanted to punish him with a life sentence mostly for the the fact that he created a "drug market outside the reach of the law" (or whatever).
      - tzs 11y ago
        Ars covered this much better than did Wired [1]. That's what you want to read to get a decent picture of the factors that went into his sentence (assuming you don't get a copy of the court transcript and read that). [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ulbricht-at-sentencing-i-respect-the-law-and-its-authority/#p3 http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ulbricht-at-sente...
    - hackercurious 11y ago
      If we follow that logic there are a few large players that are missing from your line of thought- Ulbrich is a small fish in huge pond when compared to the large unnamed players who get of with small reprimands and fines. How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-...
- realusername 11y ago
  Shutting down Megaupload also caused a lot of people to move back to torrents. At that time, direct download websites were quite trendy and most of the trafic was redirected to torrents after.
- higherpurpose 11y ago
  Those charts on the Economist showing how new markets fill the empty space left by Silk Road are very similar to some charts from a recent EU study on piracy: https://torrentfreak.com/shutting-down-pirate-sites-is-ineffective-european-commission-finds-150514/ https://torrentfreak.com/shutting-down-pirate-sites-is-ineff... Short of somehow controlling the creation of these "services" in the first place (rather than trying to block them after the fact), it doesn't look like they can be stopped as long as the demand is there.
- yc1010 11y ago
  Uhm no what caused problems was Visa/Mastercard/Paypal stopping payment processing for filehosting site (even ones that were "clean" )
pjc50 11y ago
Yes and no. Closing it down has made it clear you can't have a long-running drug store. This has greatly increased the incentive to exit scam your customers. In file sharing, no money changes hands. In Silk Road, bitcoin changes hands, leaving a permanent public record. You can safely assume that, just as there is a department working out who is today's "Al Quaeda #1" so they can drone strike him, there will be a department devoted to tracking the most popular online drug vendor of the day.
- chisleu 11y ago
  No, it proved that you can't have poorly-run drug stores. The exit scams are because demand is greater than supply. The centralization is what makes them possible. The same thing would be possible if every coke dealer did the same thing in an area. A distributed system would be better.
  - BinaryResult 11y ago
    You mean like this? https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar
    - chisleu 11y ago
      Nope, but I like my idea so much that I'm going to keep it to myself. :)
tzs 11y ago
> Online markets for illegal substances are going to follow the path of file sharing, both are nearly impossible to stop. The former are actually massively easier to stop than the latter. They have too many moving parts, too much involvement with moving physical goods around, and involve too many unreliable people with conflicting interests to prevent infiltration and to prevent betrayal from within.
- wongarsu 11y ago
  But the marketplace doesn't need to be involved in most of that. Apart from dispute resolution the marketplace doesn't need to be concerned with the specifics of drug selling; just like ebay isn't very involved in watch selling despite offering a marketplace for it. Sure, it's relatively easy to bust individual vendors, but that's similar to busting a street dealer: most of the time not a big deal.

benguild 11y ago

Truth. It’s like how ridiculous shutting down Napster was. However, it does set a precedent for future things of this nature. For example, shutting down Megaupload caused a lot of other file-sharing websites to shutdown or clean up their act for fear of a larger crackdown. If anyone thinks they can just run a website like Silk Road and get away with it longterm for the sake of just being a middleman (like the file-sharing networks were), it’s now been demonstrated what kind of attention that will raise.

hackercurious 11y ago
Good point... this trial will not stop anything, just the nature of how things move forward from here... Perhaps in the future, these markets will be even more decentralized, like torrents have changed sharing sites. There is now a huge incentive to run these markets from places like Russia or Mexico.
- draugadrotten 11y ago
  "This trial will not stop anything" may or may not be true, but the trial is also about bringing justice for what was done, and punish for the crime that was committed. If a murder was committed, a trial may not stop future murders, but surely you agree that we must bring the murderer to trial. By selling drugs and conspiring to murder, Ulbricht must stand trial, even if there will be another drug dealer tomorrow.
  - higherpurpose 11y ago
    This is an interesting perspective on just "how much of a crime" that was: http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/06/some-notes-about-ulbricht-verdict.html http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/06/some-notes-about-ulbricht-... I haven't followed this too closely, and maybe he is guilty of attempting to murder people and such, but it does look like the government/judge wanted to punish him with a life sentence mostly for the the fact that he created a "drug market outside the reach of the law" (or whatever).
    - tzs 11y ago
      Ars covered this much better than did Wired [1]. That's what you want to read to get a decent picture of the factors that went into his sentence (assuming you don't get a copy of the court transcript and read that). [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ulbricht-at-sentencing-i-respect-the-law-and-its-authority/#p3 http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ulbricht-at-sente...
  - hackercurious 11y ago
    If we follow that logic there are a few large players that are missing from your line of thought- Ulbrich is a small fish in huge pond when compared to the large unnamed players who get of with small reprimands and fines. How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-...
realusername 11y ago
Shutting down Megaupload also caused a lot of people to move back to torrents. At that time, direct download websites were quite trendy and most of the trafic was redirected to torrents after.
higherpurpose 11y ago
Those charts on the Economist showing how new markets fill the empty space left by Silk Road are very similar to some charts from a recent EU study on piracy: https://torrentfreak.com/shutting-down-pirate-sites-is-ineffective-european-commission-finds-150514/ https://torrentfreak.com/shutting-down-pirate-sites-is-ineff... Short of somehow controlling the creation of these "services" in the first place (rather than trying to block them after the fact), it doesn't look like they can be stopped as long as the demand is there.
yc1010 11y ago
Uhm no what caused problems was Visa/Mastercard/Paypal stopping payment processing for filehosting site (even ones that were "clean" )

pjc50 11y ago

Yes and no. Closing it down has made it clear you can't have a long-running drug store. This has greatly increased the incentive to exit scam your customers. In file sharing, no money changes hands. In Silk Road, bitcoin changes hands, leaving a permanent public record. You can safely assume that, just as there is a department working out who is today's "Al Quaeda #1" so they can drone strike him, there will be a department devoted to tracking the most popular online drug vendor of the day.

chisleu 11y ago
No, it proved that you can't have poorly-run drug stores. The exit scams are because demand is greater than supply. The centralization is what makes them possible. The same thing would be possible if every coke dealer did the same thing in an area. A distributed system would be better.
- BinaryResult 11y ago
  You mean like this? https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar
  - chisleu 11y ago
    Nope, but I like my idea so much that I'm going to keep it to myself. :)

tzs 11y ago

> Online markets for illegal substances are going to follow the path of file sharing, both are nearly impossible to stop. The former are actually massively easier to stop than the latter. They have too many moving parts, too much involvement with moving physical goods around, and involve too many unreliable people with conflicting interests to prevent infiltration and to prevent betrayal from within.

wongarsu 11y ago
But the marketplace doesn't need to be involved in most of that. Apart from dispute resolution the marketplace doesn't need to be concerned with the specifics of drug selling; just like ebay isn't very involved in watch selling despite offering a marketplace for it. Sure, it's relatively easy to bust individual vendors, but that's similar to busting a street dealer: most of the time not a big deal.