He made a metric fuckton of money from the endeavour. The authorities feel they have to throw the book at him to dissuade any other like minded individuals from starting similar websites.
Hey, I never said it was an effective strategy. I was just trying to empathize with our authoritarian overlords to better understand the dystopian world we live in.
>>7434 There are, though in the long-term they'll probably be irrelevant. In the same way that Napster was a single point of failure for file sharing, sites like Silk Road are a single point of failure for facilitating drug purchases. A new technology will come along that requires no middle man, and puts the buyer directly in touch with the seller without need for any intermediary - it may be OpenBazaar, or it may be some other project, but I suspect its existence is a matter of "when" rather than "if".
>>7473 Probably wise.
>On day six of Ulbricht’s trial, the prosecutors called in a gaunt and bespectacled 31-year-old programmer named Richard Bates. Bates had known Ulbricht since the two were in college at the University of Texas at Dallas, and they reconnected when Bates returned to Austin in 2010.
>"Did the defendant share a secret with you?" prosecutor Timothy Howard asked Bates shortly after he took the stand.
>"Yes, he did," Bates answered, his voice quaking. "He revealed that he created and ran the Silk Road website."
>Bates had majored in computer science, and in 2010 got a job at eBay as a software engineer, where he still works. As 2010 drew to a close, Ulbricht, a physics major, began to ask Bates frequent questions about programming, telling Bates only that he was working on a "top secret" project.
>Bates kept pressing, though, and one night Ulbricht finally did tell him. The pair logged onto Silk Road using a neighbor's open Wi-Fi network. "I was shocked, but also intrigued," Bates said, and he continued to help Ulbricht with programming.
>"What did he offer you in exchange for his help on Silk Road?" Howard asked.
>"Nothing but his friendship," Bates said.
>Bates got off the stand in the late afternoon. As we walked out of court, he looked about to cry. The government had offered not to charge Bates in exchange for his testimony in the case against Ulbricht. But for the deal, he could have been charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics just for the programming help he gave to Ulbricht. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/sunk-how-ross-ulbricht-ended-up-in-prison-for-life/
>>7478 He did indeed. Here's a few choice excerpts:
>In 2011, I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator. Good Wagon Books will find its place and get to the point that it basically runs itself. Julia and I will be happy and living together. I have many friends I can count on who are powerful and connected.
Wanker.
>I then went out with Jessica. Our conversation was somewhat deep. I felt compelled to reveal myself to her. It was terrible. I told her I have secrets. She already knows I work with bitcoin which is also terrible. I’m so stupid. Everyone knows I am working on a bitcoin exchange. I always thought honesty was the best policy and now I didn’t know what to do. I should have just told everyone I am a freelance programmer or something, but I had to tell half truths. It felt wrong to lie completely so I tried to tell the truth without revealing the bad part, but now I am in a jam. Everyone knows too much. Dammit.
Secretly the head of a global criminal conspiracy to distribute hard drugs? Tell that girl you're shagging about it!
>Well, I’m choosing to write a journal for 2012. I imagine that some day I may have a story written about my life, and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.
What could possibly go wrong?
By 2013 his journal entries are basically just notes on the day-to-day of running SR, but they're rather spooky. All the idealistic personal and political stuff is gone, replaced by entries like these:
>03/25/2013
>server was ddosed, meaning someone knew the real IP. I assumed they obtained it by becoming a guard node. So, I migrated to a new server and set up private guard nodes. There was significant downtime and someone has mentioned that they discovered the IP via a leak from lighttpd.
>03/28/2013
>being blackmailed with user info. talking with large distributor (hell's angels).
>03/29/2013
>commissioned hit on blackmailer with angels
>04/01/2013
>got word that blackmailer was excuted
>04/05/2013
>a distributor of googleyed is publishing buyer info
>mapped out the ordering process on the wiki.
>gave angels access to chat server
>04/06/2013
>made sure backup crons are working
>gave angels go ahead to find tony76
>cleaned up unused libraries on server
>added to forbidden username list to cover I <-> l scam
It's fascinating to me, and sort of a cautionary tale, to see how rapidly he descended from the idealistic, "people should be free to consume what they want, governments have a monopoly on violence" etc etc, the classic libertarian shtick, to murder for hire being just a little note on the day's happenings - alongside trivial shit about his server backups.
I'm watching this documentary "Deep Web" (2015). It's not telling me much I didn't already know about the trial, technology or the timeline of events but it does have interviews with vendors and people who knew Ulbricht, gives a bit of insight into him as a person.
AlphaBay is the current big one. A couple of sellers I recognise from the Silk Road days on there. I wonder how long it'll last.
Don't leave your money in the site for long periods of time, and do your PGP encryption of your address on your own computer rather than using the 'encrypt for me!' checkbox on the site, and you should be alright.
> Don't leave your money in the site for long periods of time, and do your PGP encryption of your address on your own computer rather than using the 'encrypt for me!' checkbox on the site, and you should be alright.
Good advice. Think about having your gpg keyring stored encrypted on a USB drive or something - nothing like having the pubkeys of a bunch of known vendors on your keyring to serve as evidence .
> AlphaBay
AB will exit scam at some point, just be aware of that and try to use vendors that you "know" and "trust" as much as possible. A general good DNM rule is to avoid the so-called one stop shops.
Also don't do any multi-sig transactions; they can be easily and instantly tracked from you all the way to the BTC exchange when the vendor cashes out. They were designed to make legit transactions foolproof, not illegal ones.
FWIW, Nucleus is where my favourite vendors are right now and I think there's less chance of an exit scam in the near future (although who knows). I miss Agora.
>>7767 >Also don't do any multi-sig transactions; they can be easily and instantly tracked from you all the way to the BTC exchange when the vendor cashes out. They were designed to make legit transactions foolproof, not illegal ones.
Can you explain this? All bitcoin transactions are viewable on the blockchain so if the vendor's address is known to law enforcement then you're just as linked as if you had done a multi-sig transaction, surely? I would have thought that using a tumbler service would be the only "safe" way to do a transaction, either way (to the extent that you trust that your tumbler of choice isn't a honeypot).
>>7769 > And buy them off a human.
I'll jump in here before you smart alecs make a crack about buying drugs off Venusians or something. I meant to say face to face.
>>7770 >Most people don't have worthwhile connections.
If you're in any large city, just go to the city centre and look for a gang of youths hanging about who look "gangsta". Walk past them slightly slower than you would and give them a look *make sure it isn't threatening just slightly curious*. 100% of the time I do this I get offered weed. Mind you I have long hair and look pretty much like the stereotypical stoner.
Other than that, go see some young local band, or go hang out at a musician's jam night. Ask someone there.
> I would have thought that using a tumbler service would be the only "safe" way to do a transaction
Exactly. Most (all?) markets do built-in "tumbling" for you because the escrow wallet is basically shared between everyone and vendor wallets are virtual - individual vendors will have virtual balances but they don't sit in actual wallets. This set up makes it almost impossible to trace individual transactions simply because of the built-in confusion; the only time BTC transactions occur is when you send money to the site and when a vendor cashes out - the actual individual purchases only happen virtually and are therefore untraceable.
With multi-sig escrow there is no shared escrow wallet, all purchases happen as individual transactions on the block chain. Both you and the vendor are directly exposed to law enforcement and they can prove exactly what you purchased and when. Big doom, basically.
-Boomers: UK dealer. Excellent, if pricey, LSD and MDMA. Usually 48hr delivery.
-Feelgood: Cheap, high quality cannabis from Spain. 4-8 days delivery.
-Vendeep: UK reseller of commercial Portuguese grown cannabis if I need something quickish. 24-48hr delivery.
-Snowcap: Reliable but expensive UK cannabis dealer. 24-48hr delivery.
-Mendosa: Super cheap, clean, but average quality cannabis from spain. 5-10 days delivery.
-Fungee: Ships from Hungry. When he has stock, real nice magic mushrooms and CBD-rich cannabis. 4-8days delivery.
-Dutchmagic: Usually has a couple of decent but pricey hash offerings; I'd avoid the cheaper stuff and his weed is commercial grade at best and expensive compared to Spanish vendors. 3-9days delivery (ships from Belgium and Netherlands).
-Safe4u: Medical cannabis oil from Belgium. 3-7 days delivery.
Boomers is pretty much the only vendor I'd buy chemicals from. He has been around since the early days of darknet markets and has never let me down. I've had some really life affirming experiences with his LSD and some awesome adult fun-time with the wife and his MDMA. Top lad. As for weed, I mainly buy off Feelgood and Mendosa. Feelgood's Dancehall and Critical47 have been lovely. And £35 for 5g's. Mendosa's Kali Mist is excellent for the money. And I do like Dutchmagic's Orange hash. The above list is just a fraction of the vendors I've used. I've only had 2 out of hundreds of parcels not arrive and maybe 3 or 4 purchases that were shit. Compared to buying shitty overpriced drugs off street dealers / m8 dealers, I'd much rather use the internet and memecoins.
For educational purposes only - nucleuspf3izq7o6.onion
>>7778 Well yeah, I usually just stick to weed these days.
As for wanting to get hold of molly or lucy, well that's just rave crowds, so hang around them. They probably don't even call them raves any more. Have they brought back the word shindig yet?
>>7781 I don't think suggesting people change their lifestyles in order start trying to hang out with "rave crowds" is a viable way to get reliable drugs.
Indeed I'm part of the raving crowd and I have no idea how to get anything interesting. That might be though because I assume anyone openly advertising they have these things in public is a nark.
>>7782 >>7783 >>7784 Fair enough lads. I'm actually well north of thirty years old and fairly out of touch when it comes to harder drugs. Back in the day I took them all, and sold almost all of them as well. But the last ten years has seen me calm down and stick to just the beer and weed because I had hammered it for so long that I just can't keep it up any more.
I'm not naive, just hopelessly out of touch when it comes to class A these days.
>>7786 > So what's to stop you tumbling before sending to the multisig?
The market itself. You can still tumble your coins before they go to the market, but once they're in your wallet every purchase can be tracked on the blockchain.
Obviously this is much worse for vendors than for consumers; all a LEO has to do to identify a specific vendor's commission wallet is to make a single purchase and follow the money trail on the blockchain.
Yeah, you and the vendor can both tumble your bitcoins on the way in/out of the market but that doesn't cover up individual purchases made (it's mainly metadata but hopefully I don't have to spell out to you how damaging that can be) and it places a lot of trust in tumblers like bitcoinfog (which has already been demonstrated to be insecure). Agora was essentially the most secure tumbler on the darknet - all you had to was put your coins on there, wait a few weeks, and cash them out - they'd be totally different coins and there'd be no way to prove that it was even *you* cashing them out.
tl;dr - single points of failure = a really bad idea for someone doing anything illegal.
I've been buying off darknet markets for 3+ years. All my purchases have been small amounts (<=50g weed <=5g MDMA <=10g Magic mushrooms <=12 squares of LSD). I have never tumbled my coins. Ever. Localbitcoins -> DNM.
What the fuck is the big deal with tumbling coins? You do realise the (UK) po-po don't give a single fuck about small-time personal customers of darknet markets? They only care about dealers and the operators of DNM sites. They don't have the budget to target us.
If you work for the NHS or GSHQ, or use TOR for noncing, I can understand why you would be paranoid. However, I'd be more worried that it's pretty simple to identify you as a TOR user and whatever that suggests. Again, something I have never tried to hide; mainly because the UK legal system is not going to prosecute me over 4 tabs of LSD they found in my post.
If you are a vendor, that's a whole different story; and tumbling coins is barely the first step of OPSEC. As a personal-use buyer however, no fucks are given. Have a spliff and chill the fuck out. Internet drugs are awesome and fuck local hoodlum dealers. The po-po don't give a fuck.
I'm on drugs as I type this, so take my advice with a healthy pinch of scepticism because, well, drugs are bad, m'kay?
> What the fuck is the big deal with tumbling coins? You do realise the (UK) po-po don't give a single fuck about small-time personal customers of darknet markets?
> mainly because the UK legal system is not going to prosecute me over 4 tabs of LSD they found in my post.
That's probably true for "real life" buyers, but a bit of a leap for people buying online. All you need is for May's new JTRIG bunch to want to score up a few "cyber" busts to put the willies up everyone and that's you being made an example of.
> 10 darknet users were busted for buying 10000% pure LSD from darknet markets. Each have received a 6 month sentence, suspended. If you buy drugs online YOU WILL BE ARRESTED AND RAPED.
And yet the Daily Mail forget to mention that accounts for less than <0.01 of known customers of DNM's.
Itz the same bullshit about helicopters with heat-seeking cameras randomly looking for cannabis farms. Complete and utter bullocks from the UK governments nudge department. Nowt but fear mongering aimed at the feeble minded and the paranoid.
It might be a lottery but it's still a big risk. I have security clearance, if I get a criminal record that's me and my company fucked; I'd rather not risk it, thanks. I realise that I may be an edge case.
Actually I think you and I might be talking at cross-purposes. I'm specifically talking about the risk of multi-sig transactions on EIM and AB; I regularly sent coin directly to Agora with no worry at all exactly because I knew that my safety was being taken care of in terms of specific plausible deniability. I wasn't buying nuffin but etizolam of dat market, honest guv.
>Following today’s breaking news about U.S. and international authorities taking down the competing Dark Web drug bazaars AlphaBay and Hansa Market, KrebsOnSecurity caught up with the Dutch investigators who took over Hansa on June 20, 2017. When U.S. authorities shuttered AlphaBay on July 5, police in The Netherlands saw a massive influx of AlphaBay refugees who were unwittingly fleeing directly into the arms of investigators. What follows are snippets from an exclusive interview with Petra Haandrikman, team leader of the Dutch police unit that infiltrated Hansa.
Sorry for the necrobump but didn't think it was worth a new thread.
Basically if someone theoretically wanted to start perusing dnms (for research) what's the easiest, idiot proof way of doing it? I've got a mac I use for day to day browsing but from what I've read I might be better off just buying a cheap laptop specifically for the purpose, then basically use TOR and TAILS?
If you know of any decent idiots guides for this sort of thing would appreciate a point in the right direction.
The easiest option is to run TAILS on a burner laptop. It's designed to be relatively foolproof and is used by a lot of people to do proper naughty things, largely without incident. The TAILS documentation is pretty good and you shouldn't find it too challenging to get running if you're reasonably tech savvy. If you know what an ISO is, it'll be piss-easy.
TAILS is designed by some very smart people to be extremely secure, but it isn't 100% guaranteed to protect your identity; there is a very small chance that your machine could be hacked, causing your true IP address to leak. This is highly unlikely unless you're doing Extremely Naughty Things that make you a high priority target for a major intelligence agency, but it can be mitigated if you think that's a realistic threat model. If you do think that's a realistic threat model, then you need to teach yourself infosec to a high level or get treatment for your paranoia.
TAILS provides a very high level of anonymity, but it can't guarantee privacy - any information you send over the network can potentially be intercepted or seized. That's not a big worry if you're just buying a few dingers from a reputable seller, but it's certainly something to be aware of.