Using Silk Road

http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road

by HockeyPlayer • 13 years ago

368 164 13 years ago

gwern.net

damian2000• 13 years ago

Interesting video and article here from the point of view of Australian customs

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-05/dark-internet-linked-t...

jacques_chester4• 13 years ago

Slightly OT:

"Computer expert" Chris McDonald is actually Professor Chris McDonald. He holds appointments at the University of Western Australia and at Dartmouth. I was lucky to have him as a lecturer for several course and as my honours supervisor.

http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~chris/

He's nominated for teaching awards with comical regularity. If you ever get a chance to take one of his courses at UWA or Dartmouth, take it.

gwern9• 13 years ago

I greatly appreciate Australia and NZ's police agencies being public and specific about interception & arrest rates; I wish America could be as informative - as things stand, I have no references on either.

veb• 13 years ago

That was an awesome read. Always fun to read about drugs, but this seems like it was written quite a while ago... wonder if anything has changed since.

drakeandrews• 13 years ago

I was written May 2011 from the top of the article, but some of the footnotes have been updated recently.

xaver• 13 years ago

A lot of the stuff on the cypherpunks was added fairly recently I believe. At least, I don't remember those sections being there the last time I read it.

Gwern has an interesting approach to writing articles where he continually updates and adds to them so that they improve over time. See: http://www.gwern.net/About#long-content

cnp3• 13 years ago

Everyone needs to read the rest of the site. It's one of the most interesting domains I've ever come across. Fascinating guy through and through, and his short stories are excellent.

vitno• 13 years ago

One of my favorite sites. If you aren't familiar with it already, it will probably lead you to lesswrong.com. Also worth a good amount of time input.

tekromancr• 13 years ago

Lesswrong is a weird place. I can read an awesome, insightful article one moment, then something completely bat-shit insane the next.

jacques_chester4• 13 years ago

I had occasion to correspond with Gwern recently. It is always enlightening to talk to somebody who is smarter than I am.

throw_away2012• 13 years ago

Arrogant much?

benwoody• 13 years ago

His article on bitcoin is a great read as well. http://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better

revelation3• 13 years ago

He is also on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern

mrmagooey• 13 years ago

I wonder if the current little spike in the bitcoin price (from https://mtgox.com/) could be attributed to this article being posted on HN

cnp3• 13 years ago

The Bitcoin price has been dramatically spiking for the past two weeks. Very curious as to why.

SlipperySlope2• 13 years ago

Look at the transaction volume as charted by blockchain.info. You will see a good correlation between that and the price of bitcoins.

A good part of the recent bitcoin transaction volume is due to online gaming startups that use bitcoins, especially to work around US online gambling restrictions.

The bitcoin economy is very rapidly growing from a miniscule base, first in illegal and gray-market trade, and then in international trade where low transaction costs and lack of credit card fraud appeal to global merchants.

pudquick• 13 years ago

Both Mega and reddit have recetly announced acceptance of bitcoins for payment. Not saying that's the reason, but I'm sure it contributes.

csmattryder• 13 years ago

Whatever it is, it's made a few people (myself included) rather rich.

Bought a fair few BTC at ~1/6th of the current price, just trying to figure out when to cash it in.

gwern9• 13 years ago

No. The price has been increasing gradually and abruptly for the last 2 or 3 months. As well, over the past 2 days GA says there's been 26,107 unique visitors to my Silk Road page; if 1% actually buys bitcoins (in line with the famous 1% rule of the Internet), that's just 260 people buying bitcoins.

http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u... suggests that daily bitcoin blockchain transactions make up something like $8m; much of this is just people shuffling bitcoins around of course, but even so, 260 people aren't going to push the exchange rate to $29!

drivebyacct2• 13 years ago

Man, SR is one of those things I look at in awe. I'm not sure I'd ever have the cojones to have something shipped to me...

The comments on the blog post are sad in a "Good god people are effing stupid" sort of way.

Also, if you're getting on Tor, I recommend Tails [1]. Most people aren't aware of all of the things they need to be wary of when getting on Tor and not leaking their identity.

[1] Tails: http://tails.boum.org

barbs• 13 years ago

A similar linux distribution: Liberté. This one's based off of Gentoo (Tails is based off of Debian)

http://dee.su/liberte

SlipperySlope2• 13 years ago

What is most interesting about this article is how to set up the Tor browser.

Privacy is very, very, important - especially for those who are oppressed, and even for those living in democracies.

sruser8• 13 years ago

(throwaway account)

I've spent over $50,000 USD on SR in the past year, and I'm happy to answer any questions people have about the site or community.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Presumably you are either a dealer, or you have a gigantic drug habit?

sruser8• 13 years ago

I'd prefer to answer questions about SR, not about myself.

rdl3• 13 years ago

What types of items have you purchased, and what's the loss rate? Does it vary with types of products?

I have an HSA insurance plan where I effectively pay out of pocket, so I'm starting to get more and more tempted to buy non-US drugs for which I have or could get a valid US prescription. Not particularly drugs of abuse, but something like ciprodex (ciproflaxin antibiotic + dexemethasone (steroid) otic (ear drops); $140 in the US and $55 in Canada). Stockpiling some other drugs (tamiflu, etc.) might also be tempting.

The only drugs I see on SR seem to be psychoactive, either research chemicals or boring prescription psychiatric drugs like xanax or adderall.

sruser8• 13 years ago

I purchase mostly opiates, though I have occasionally purchased other classes of drugs as well.

I have been scammed a couple of times, but I have never lost a package that was actually sent by the vendor. I have a 100% delivery rate.

Every time I was scammed was the result of finalizing early. This is bypassing the escrow system and giving the vendor the money immediately. Usually new users are asked to do this, and some vendors require it. I've learned my lesson and never FE (finalize early) now.

You can find non psychoactive/psychiatric drugs, it just varies a lot and you need to keep your eyes open. Certainly the market for what you are looking for is smaller, but it is there if you are persistant about it.

trotsky2• 13 years ago

Things like antibiotics, ssris, antivirals and other mainstream drugs that aren't abused are often available relatively inexpensively from online pharmacies based out of India due to their price controls and flexible intellectual property laws.

mindcrime• 13 years ago

Well, these aren't exactly about the site, but if you'll humor me, a couple of questions jump to mind:

Do you have purchases sent directly to your home/business, or do you attempt to obfuscate the delivery somehow? If so, can you share anything about the tactics you use?

What percentage of your purchases arrive as expected? Do you have any reason to believe that anything is being intercepted by Customs / Border Police / Whatever, or do you only buy from in-country sellers?

Also, have you happened to notice if SR sellers sell things like Clenbuterol, and others that could fall into the "Performance Enhancing Drug" category?

sruser8• 13 years ago

I have purchases sent to my home, most of the time.

I have never lost a package that was actually mailed, though I have been scammed a couple of times by vendors who never send anything.

I try to stick to domestic vendors to avoid customs, but sometimes it is impossible due to supply issues. When I am ordering internationally I stick to Canada if possible. I once had a package from India get stuck in customs for over a month. When it finally arrived it had been opened and retaped shut. However, they did not find the actual contents of the package, it was very well hidden.

I am not familiar with Clenbuterol but I did manage to buy some Provigil after reading this article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/my-experiment-with...).

scarecrowbob• 13 years ago

I've heard about the site and am casually curious, but how does the obvious security hole of eventually having a product sent to a specific real world address work out in practice? What is the genearl method for anonymizing this.... I'm sure it's a pretty basic question, but since you're here and all...

sruser8• 13 years ago

As I just mentioned in other comments, I have the packages shipped to my home, using my real name. I have never had a package intercepted.

I think I benefit from the fact that the items I am ordering are very small and fit into normal sized envelopes. From what I've read, packages are much more suspect than envelopes.

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

I've never ordered anything from Silk Road, but one thing I'm surprised isn't done is using cheap/knockoff consumer products as a "carrier."

For instance, if it were well known that ordering a $295 DVD player from FrobozzCo.cn would result in delivery of a $29 DVD player stuffed full of Adderall or whatever people order, I imagine people would feel pretty safe ordering that way.

The other thing is, I'm not sure that the act of merely receiving illicit goods in the mail is adequate grounds for prosecution in the US. You can always claim that you have no idea where it came from or why it was sent to you, can't you? Otherwise it would be a popular revenge tactic to order something nasty for delivery to someone else.

booticon• 13 years ago

I have not used the site either, but from what I've read, the best idea is to use the name of a previous tenant, and to stick with domestic. If the parcel is sent via USPS First-Class or Priority, it cannot be searched without a warrant.

revelation3• 13 years ago

It seems that SR doesn't solve the major problem for buyers: you have to name a postal address and that address will be printed on a package containing illicit goods.

Any bad experiences with customs or have you been using in-country sellers exclusively? Any tricks to obscure your real address?

(Since these have mostly been answered below already: do you stick to a fixed group of sellers or go by price?)

sruser8• 13 years ago

I touched on this in some other replies, but basically, I use my real name/address, try to use domestic sellers as much as possible, and have never lost a package to USPS/customs.

olalonde• 13 years ago

I assume some people rent a postal box under a fake ID.

jacques_chester4• 13 years ago

In countries where the incrimination standard is reasonable doubt, that you received a package addressed to you is not really a slam dunk proof that you ordered the contents.

Furthermore, in countries where you enjoy a right to refuse to say anything that may incriminate you, you may simply refuse to explain how or why the package was sent to you. The prosecution will need to positively prove that you ordered it, which is a much harder task if the seller doesn't cooperate.

(IANAL, TINLA).

te_chris• 13 years ago

What's the experience like? I enjoy taking recreational substances occasionally but don't really do it because drug dealers are generally shitty people who one doesn't want to deal (ahem) with. Is the experience with acquiring better on silk road?

sruser8• 13 years ago

There are still scammers on SR, but the forums and reputation system go a good job at reducing that risk substantially (edit: if you're smart about doing your research and only dealing with the top vendors).

I do have to meet with RL dealers from time to time, and I vastly prefer SR.

iblaine• 13 years ago

What personal drug habit requires $50k? If it is blow, that's at least an 8-ball every single day for a year. I can only guess you're buying that volume of drugs to resell it. Which is essentially why the guy in NZ was caught.

powertower2• 13 years ago

That's $135 per day. So to put it in percpective, at SR prices, thats 1.5 OC80 (OxyContin 80mg - oxycodone) pills per day. That's a far cry from people who do 10-20 of those.

powertower2• 13 years ago

What opiates are you mostly buying?

Unless you are ordering Heroin, which is very expensive on SR, at that spending rate you are probably buying Oxys or Opanas.

This might surprise some, but there are much simpler and better-priced places to get those online than SR / with 24h turn-around, overnight UPS - that won't involve an eventual FBI/DEA reverse sting - which is were SR is heading with all this attention.

joshschreuder• 13 years ago

Unless you're dealing to others maybe?

jemka• 13 years ago

>there are much simpler and better-priced places to get those online than SR

for example?

thornofmight• 13 years ago

Yes?

Nursie2• 13 years ago

If you've spent 50 grand on SR in the last year you're either dealing (I make no moral judgement on this) or you have a growing problem.

IF you're not dealing I would advise you to think very hard about the road you're taking, because that is one heck of a habit.

lhnn• 13 years ago

How do you know the goods you purchase are safe for consumption? Is it based on reputation of the vendor? Do you have home testing kits?

HockeyPlayer• 13 years ago

How do you get your bitcoins?

handsomeransoms• 13 years ago

Silk Road is very interesting from a design perspective, particularly the way it leverages different open source cryptographic tools to satisfy its complex security/privacy/anonymity requirements.

I gave a talk about this at the Oakland Cryptoparty back in October. The slides are a little patchy and based entirely on perusing the site (read: speculation), but it inspired a lively discussion from amongst all the participants. It seems there's nothing like illegal drugs and the black market to get people interested in learning more about crypto!

I'm planning on giving an updated version of this talk at "SF Cryptoparty II" on March 23rd (attend or sign up to talk! https://cryptopartysf.org/). I will definitely incorporate ideas from (and link back to) this article. Feedback appreciated!

Slides: http://garrett.im/static/pdf/silkroad_oakland_cryptoparty_sl...

gwern9• 13 years ago

I've read your slides.

I think your Farmer's Market summary is outdated: it used Tor hidden service, for a short period only and after the investigation started (reading the indictment), and it's pretty clear now that Hushmail rolled over and then the garnered information was used to extract the Paypal & Western Union financial transactions. See my discussion of Farmer's Market in OP.

Slide 14 should mention the SQL injection attack on SR back in November or December 2012; I also disagree that DDoSes would be ineffective.

Slide 23: IIRC, someone has a verifiable anonymous mixer. I forget its name because it charges more than others.

Slide 27: Mtgox has been hacked and lost bitcoins, but haven't they always made up their users' losses? That's pretty important.

cnp3• 13 years ago

Here's an academic analysis of Silk Road. After crawling the site for a few months they came up with this:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-...

"Abstract

We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods being sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics, and that most items sold are available for less than three weeks. The majority of sellers disappears within roughly three months of their arrival, but a core of 112 sellers has been present throughout our measurement interval. We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month; this corresponds to about USD 92,000 per month in commissions for the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over our measurement interval. We discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results, including ethical considerations for future research in this area."

waterlesscloud3• 13 years ago

$1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic.

Still, it seems like the risk far outweighs the gain here.

OGinparadise2• 13 years ago

$1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic.

apples and oranges. This is illegal and their take is maybe enough to pay one criminal lawyer for a month.

rorrr4• 13 years ago

It's only small because bitcoins are a pain in the ass to get, and haven't spread yet. Once they become mainstream, there's no reason SilkRoad can't be the next huge thing. Think about - there's nothing that stops them from selling pirated books, movies, clothing at a huge discount compared to, let's say, Amazon.

Many things only cost a lot because the manufacturer's profit margin is huge. That's true about anything clothing-related.

dobbsbob• 13 years ago

That study didnt cover all the hidden transactions, also DPR sells on his own site too when it started his g/f was the first vendor selling shrooms. So theres one person in this world who knows who DPR is, which is exactly enough for her to rat him out should anything go south in their relationship. Im sure she's told all her friends too like Max Visions' gf did.

Another problem is all the writing hes done on the site about agorism. Surprised feds havnt broken out the writing analyst software and then trolled agorist forums and the bitcoin forum to match it up, unless hes been extremely careful with his Opsec

codygman2• 13 years ago

It's very annoying that the back button doesn't work on your site.

gwern9• 13 years ago

I didn't do anything to break it, and it seems to work fine in my Debian Iceweasel.

codygman2• 13 years ago

Fair enough, I'm using:

Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l

Google Chrome Version 24.0.1312.57

Not sure why the back button doesn't work. Great site/content though! Just a minor annoyance that I thought was on purpose.

A1kmm• 13 years ago

I think the easiest attack on SR would not be one of the attacks mentioned in the article (although similar to their second attack, but focused on legal implications instead of fraud), but rather:

a. Law enforcement creates a large number of vendor and customer accounts. Due to the pseudonymity, they can create as many as they like and they can't be linked (they may need to create them over time to avoid making the pattern too obvious).

b. The fake customer accounts buy from the fake vendor accounts and leave positive comments, building up a reputation for the fake vendors. This would give money to the operators of SR for fees, but aside from fees there would be no loss for the operators.

c. Eventually, the number of fake vendors could be sufficient that it makes up most of the volume of SR.

d. The fake customers buy from some real vendors and claim that the goods never arrived or that they got arrested and it looks like the vendor tipped the police off.

e. Any real customer who buys from a fake vendor gets their details sent to their local police.

f. Most vendors, real and fake, accumulate comments saying that they tipped people off to the police, with no way to tell which vendors are real vendors with mostly genuine good feedback and a few forged complaints of being police run, and which have a few real complaints of being police run and mostly forged good feedback.

g. Police forces issue press releases announcing how many people they have caught buying things on SR, and buying becomes a highly risky proposition.

Cushman• 13 years ago

That's a pretty nice playbook, but it fails for the reason every attack against SR fails: It doesn't get you the vendors, and they're the only big fish there to catch. At best, you can spend time and money just treading water to keep them in check, but it will never shut them down.

tomjen3• 13 years ago

No it removes the incentives to buy there -- the idea that SR is safe -- kills the customer base and so the sellers will leave.

jopola• 13 years ago

A. Why does it matter that the police have your address? Addresses are public information. Anyone could have your address and send illegal material to it. B. Just stick with the reputable vendors before the whole police thing happened.

dllthomas2• 13 years ago

Regarding B, it's a practical defense, but it also means it was something of an effective attack: undermine the efficiency of the marketplace by adding a barrier to entry.

maxwellhansen• 13 years ago

It currently costs $505.90 to register an account as a vendor on Silk Road, so I do not think this is a financially feasible strategy.

1337biz• 13 years ago

I don't want to know how much money the government is already blasting every day on the "war on drugs". If there is something where the government is willing to waste money on, then it is for things like these.

You can already write the press release "undercover mission", "highly sophisticated system of professional drug dealers", "illegal money laundering", oh and how could I forget "financing terrorism".

tirant• 13 years ago

And you won't accomplish anything by shutting down Silk Road. Most of drugs that get in a country don't do it by packages sent by Silk Road. LE (Law enforcement) is already low on resources, so they better use them for bigger 'operators'.

gordaco• 13 years ago

Even more: if they happened to be able to close Silk Road, or make it impractical or unusable, another similar site would rise within weeks. If they don't understand this, they simply don't understand internet.

This is another example of how useless does the so-called "war on drugs" get.

saym• 13 years ago

Not to be finicky , but why did you abbreviate law enforcement if you only used it once?

adamnemecek2• 13 years ago

SR would have to be brain dead not to realize that this is an issue. As maxwellhansen, one has to purchase a token to become a seller which are quite expensive. Furthermore, there is a limited number of tokens and the only way to get a token is to buy it from someone (who will then lose said token). Therefore it is pretty hard to become a seller.

celticninja4• 13 years ago

this is incorrect, the site does require you purchase a vendor account but this is from the site admin and not from another user. to become a seller/vendor on the site you just need money, about $500 USD I believe.

Jabbles• 13 years ago

I think some pretty basic clustering algorithms would reveal this self-serving subset of participants in SR. The fake vendors and fake buyers would have to interact with the real ones (and positively, with real drugs) in order to go unnoticed.

malandrew3• 13 years ago

Is the data available to perform this clustering? Like with BitCoin, are all SR transactions recorded for posterity and accessible to every market participant?

derefr• 13 years ago

Basically, a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack aimed at networks of people, rather than networks of machines.

DanBlake3• 13 years ago

Option #1 : I am aware many exchanges/markets do 'bitcoin mixing' to get around this, but the local authority could just as easily subpoena/force someone like mtgox into giving up the info of where the coins are going. As always, the folks who cant hide behind tor and want to appear legit are going to be weakest. (mtgox/bitpay/coinbase/etc..) - Those are the companies that will be 'compelled' to comply if it gets to that point.

Option #2: Inspect the packages you receive for fingerprints. You will likely find a postal workers prints and be able to continually track it back to the sourced post office. Then you just correlate the time the package was likely sent and watch security footage, looking for something that matches the shape/look of your package.

Also- Please dont take the above post too seriously. I have mostly no idea what I am talking about when it comes to bitcoin.

jerguismi4• 13 years ago

> I am aware many exchanges/markets do 'bitcoin mixing' to get around this, but the local authority could just as easily subpoena/force someone like mtgox into giving up the info of where the coins are going.

The coins are mixed _before_ they arrive to mtgox or some exchange, I would guess.

> Even if you mix the coins a few times through a few sites, its still going to be the best way to find them.

Any arguments here? The authorities would need information from every web site that has been involved with the transfer. The mixers can reside in the tor network, so it is impossible to get the connecting information.

toomim• 13 years ago

No, you can't. The coins are mixed before they get to mtgox. Mtgox doesn't know where they came from.

In fact, you don't even need to use mtgox. Mtgox is just where you swap bitcoins for cash. If I sold drugs, it would be smart to just keep the money in bitcoins.

And you can also exchange money for bitcoins with an anonymous physical person in your city. Just go to localbitcoins.com, find someone near you with one or the other, and swap with them.

DanBlake3• 13 years ago

How are the coins mixed before exactly?

Also, I think its extremely impractical to think that a volume drug dealer is going to do physical exchanges. Even if they did opt for that route- Track the guy he did the exchanges with, then beat him with a wrench to find out who he bought from.

juanramon• 13 years ago

Talking about Tor; you can built your own Silk Road with http://osclass.org/ (it's a software for creating your own classified site) and using the Tor plugin http://blog.osclass.org/2013/01/21/anonymous-with-tor-plugin....

Disclosure: I participate in Osclass.

arcadeparade• 13 years ago

thanks for the link. Any links on creating a .onion link and the rest of whats needed?

acebarry• 13 years ago

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

I set up a hidden service once to bypass a university firewall. It's surprisingly easy.

LatvjuAvs• 13 years ago

There is no other place where I can safely buy military grade sniper rifle with delivery to my door, than tor network!

gwern9• 13 years ago

Didn't the Armory shut down because it was hard to compete with all the offline sources of military-grade guns...?

sc0rb• 13 years ago

This makes me wonder what other 'interesting' business ideas people can come up with to operate as a hidden service?

Throwing anonymity into your business plans could turn up some interesting ideas....

etherael• 13 years ago

This article was very well written and easy to digest and has some of the most succinct descriptions of the political underpinnings and implications of the cypherpunk movement I've ever seen without the sweeping oratory that tends to go with such things.

That said, this single section;

Fortunately, I don’t think LE is authorized to engage in cyberwar (#1) or mass entrapment & fraud (#2). And who knows, maybe SR could survive both.

Where he discusses the degree to which the state will restrain itself from "bad behaviour" strikes me as a little naive in light of history. I'd be more concerned about attacks along the lines of the liquor poisoning that the state engaged in during alcohol prohibition.

I imagine if someone wanted to cause serious bodily harm to the potential buyers in this marketplace it wouldn't be too difficult to do, and they've proven historically they're prepared to go to this extent. I also imagine it would have quite a high impact on the risk assessment of silk road buyers if people started ending up dead from their purchases.

espadagroup• 13 years ago

The first rule of Silk Road is you don't talk about the packaging...or post pictures of it...

Using Silk Road

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