Cryptomarkets Are Gentrifying the Drug Trade

https://news.vice.com/article/cryptomarkets-are-gentrifying-the-drug-trade-and-thats-probably-a-good-thing

by edward • 12 years ago

69 42 12 years ago

news.vice.com

kanja• 12 years ago

Did they seriously spoil the ending of breaking bad in the first sentence?

In five years I'm sure it will be like "spoiling" the plot-twist in Empire Strikes Back: no one will ding you for spoilers because the plot will be common knowledge.

AdmiralAsshat2• 12 years ago

Did someone seriously down-vote that I merely pointed out most sites don't consider ESB's plot-twist to be a spoiler anymore?

lotharbot• 12 years ago

Right -- in five years. Just like nobody will ding you for telling them what happens to Romeo and Juliet, or that thing about Darth Vader, because by now it's assumed that anyone who cares to experience that thing un-spoiled has already finished.

The last episodes of Breaking Bad have only been on Netflix for about 6 months. It's completely plausible that people who decided to start watching after the series reached its critically-acclaimed ending might still be a couple seasons shy of the ending. Hold your spoilers for another 3-6 months to be safe.

duffdevice• 12 years ago

Seriously. Thanks a lot, jerks. Well, I guess I can cross it off my to-watch list.

beamatronic• 12 years ago

It is still worth watching. It's about the journey, not just the destination.

titusjohnson• 12 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. Due to sunshine and summer I'm stalled out 3 episodes into the last season. I've managed to avoid spoilers so far...

tedks• 12 years ago

I've never been so happy to have skimmed an article :-)

acchow• 12 years ago

Kind of upset right now too.

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

IMO it's hardly a spoiler. The ending was a poetic inevitability.

marssaxman• 12 years ago

Who cares? The show ended over a year ago.

mikehearn• 12 years ago

The real lesson here is that, whether or not it's morally acceptable randomly drop a spoiler into an article, you probably shouldn't do it because it's an instant derail. We're not talking about the content anymore, now it's about the spoiler.

jdipierro• 12 years ago

Seriously! I'm in the middle of watching it too; What total BS!

swartkrans• 12 years ago

I feel like the title should include a warning.

WildUtah• 12 years ago

They tried to spoil Breaking Bad but hey got it wrong.

spoilers:

WW didn't die violently because of anything about the drug business. He was dying of cancer and chose to take risks that would have had him die violently no matter the outcome. The specific business he was in was immaterial.

In the end he died from his own bullet, but not until he'd asked his former partner to shoot him dead and been turned down.

Aqueous• 12 years ago

"assurances to please liberal or socially-conscious users, such as knowing that their opium is "fair-trade" and their cocaine "conflict-free"" -

As gleeful as I am that there might be a way out of - or at least around - the drug war, I find these assurances incredibly dubious with no actual regulatory or independent oversight making sure that the substances in question are actually fair trade or conflict free (and obviously there won't be any until the war on drugs ends and addiction is more sensibly treated as a health problem rather than a criminal problem.)

There is also absolutely no way - by design - to tell that the person selling you these substances is telling you the truth.

This is where a purely libertarian position tends to run into trouble. In a system where there are serious negative externalities involved (is the production of this drug causing environmental damage? is it causing innocent children to die? is it grown without pesticides? will it kill me?) you have absolutely no recourse to protect yourself or others especially if something goes wrong.

dmix• 12 years ago

Uh, the issues with marketing terms being inaccurate has hardly been solved by regulatory agencies either in mainstream business. Especially retail. I'm not even talking about dangerously mis-labeling products such as in the pharmaceutical industry which continues to happen every year [1] resulting in billion dollar law-suits, I mean terms like 'fair-trade' and 'organic' are mostly bullshit in every industry.

I guess that aspect of these markets is more symbolic than a sign of concrete progressiveness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...

roywiggins• 12 years ago

By and large, "organic" in the US is regulated and has a specific meaning. It's probably the only term that actually is, though. How heavily enforced this is, I don't know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification#United_St...

derefr• 12 years ago

I think the libertarian position is:

1. in a free market,

2. with seller reputation,

3. where the seller is the direct producer/grower/manufacturer, rather than the producer retailing through many false, reputationless identities,

4. "fair-trade" and "conflict-free" drugs will simply outcompete the other kinds.

Which is to say, if the consumer is willing to pay $X, then any money $N used to pay for guards and guns and drug mules (the "conflict" part) is $N less available for actual chemists and equipment and materials.

The guards and guns and drug mules are a sound investment for A. putting down rival operations to ensure a monopoly, or B. avoiding state action at scale, but if A is made impossible (by Tor) and B avoided by technological advances (running headless drug-manufacturing cells rather than a centralized organization), they cease to be rational investments.

Without these considerations, "conflict" drugs would have either a higher markup (decreasing marketshare), or a higher ratio of fake/cut product--a lower quality--meaning a worse reputation for the seller (decreasing marketshare). The conflict-free drugs would naturally rise to the top of an efficient marketplace.

The simplest comparison is another marketplace commodity which could, for all you know, be cut and low-quality all the time, but which very likely isn't: gasoline. Gas stations which sell at a higher markup go out of business. Gas stations which sell inferior product get a bad reputation, and go out of business. The market takes care of itself, without a regulator having to intercede at any point. (Commodities markets like this are in fact the shining example of where free markets are optimal for consumers, because they get very close to having the "complete information and distributed intelligence" that the Efficient Market Hypothesis assumes. The less commoditized the goods in a market are, the further from efficient it will be.)

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

But (3) is not the case here, presumably - I'd wager that most of the people selling, e.g., cocaine on Silk Road 2.X aren't harvesting the coca leaves themselves.

I'm also not sure that (4) will out-compete the other kinds. That's assuming that consumers place a higher value on fair-trade and conflict-free than they do on getting a cheaper product. What if fair-trade-conflict-free costs 5x what the unverified stuff does?

XorNot• 12 years ago

I'm assuming this is your interpretation of their position, and not a statement of belief. Because as always, the libertarian position is wildly at odds with reality and history, and grossly over-estimates the impacts of the factors it can control, while grossly underestimating the impact of the problematic ones (to take an example from the above: it presumes that the cost of murder-for-hire is high in the places drugs are made. It has no answer beyond falling back of ideologically not caring if it turns out to be a sound business strategy).

nerfhammer• 12 years ago

gas stations are actually

* subject to several different types of fraud against which consumers have little way of protecting themselves. Can you tell if the pump is dispensing the octane rating you actually selected or a slightly lesser-quality fuel? Or if the meter on the pump is tampered by just a small percent?

* have relatively little reputation to worry about if you're near any road with any kind out-of-town traffic, such as a highway.

* very regulated for both fraud and environmental reasons

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

The simplest comparison is another marketplace commodity which could, for all you know, be cut and low-quality all the time, but which very likely isn't: gasoline. Gas stations which sell at a higher markup go out of business. Gas stations which sell inferior product get a bad reputation, and go out of business. The market takes care of itself, without a regulator having to intercede at any point.

In most places I've been inthe US , every individual gas pump has a seal from a local government inspector certifying -- with a date -- the inspection of the individual pump. That's just one of the most visible signs of the rather extensive regulation of gasoline sellers.

To say that that market "takes care of itself, without a regulator having to intercede at any point" is simply not a factual description of the market that actually exists.

glomph2• 12 years ago

It seems pretty implausible honestly. Most people order their stuff from people in the same country as them as otherwise it risks being caught at the boarder. This means the product is probably still crossing boarders in the same way it always has. And that generally means cartel /organized crime played a role.

It seems far harder to believe that both fair trade sources and conflict free delivery systems sprung up than the idea that anonymous dealer is telling fibs.

baddox5• 12 years ago

It always comes down to trust though, right? Well, unless you can physically travel and do an audit of the production chain in person, which the average customer cannot. So then your claim becomes that the "purely libertarian position" is less trustworthy than whatever alternative you are considering, which I presume is a government regulatory agency. That's certainly a plausible claim, but I think you would need to go into more detail about why you think the one is less trustworthy than the other.

declan• 12 years ago

This is where a purely libertarian position tends to run into trouble

You're right that outlawing free markets -- such as banning Politically Unpopular Drugs -- can cause problems for free markets. :)

Similarly, if selling books becomes a crime, and you buy books on the black market, it may become more difficult to verify claims about the paper used in the printing process coming from renewable resources. The problem lies not in the claim about renewability, but in the underlying book ban.

Perhaps we can conclude from this that processes relying on free markets may not work as well if markets aren't free? Remember that libertarians != anarchists; I've never seen a libertarian marching in the streets against laws in their state or province designed to prevent fraudulent claims about fair trade coffee or renewable forests.

rwmj• 12 years ago

Couldn't law enforcement flood the market with (fake) sellers, using lots of sockpuppets, and thereby entrap buyers, who have to give their real addresses? This would be enough to severely reduce confidence in the market.

I guess that somehow reputation protects against this, but also it's possible to have a circle of buyers and sellers giving each other false reputation.

hendzen• 12 years ago

Most markets have a sizeable fee to set up a merchant account. It is doable but it would be expensive.

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

Wouldn't they be more interested in going after the distributors? I guess if they nabbed enough buyers, they could kill the market, but it's an awful big market.

glomph2• 12 years ago

This is a known potential problem. The solution is long term reputation and also a relatively high initial bond to the site to make an account.

In terms of circles of buyers and sellers they can use all the algorithms that people like ebay have been perfecting for years. Not a new problem.

Obviously not water tight, but it seems to be working well enough for these sites to function.

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

Even more effectively, law enforcement could establish or suborn real traders -- which, you know, they do anyway in drug enforcement, so no reason why they wouldn't just because cyptomarket. Fake traders, as you note, can run into problems with reputation systems.

bluedino• 12 years ago

> Had Walter White sold his blue meth on Silk Road rather than through drug kingpins and criminal gangs, there wouldn't have been much to Breaking Bad

I'm not so sure about that. There were plenty parts that would still have happened.

1. They would have still had to find a location to make meth

2. They still would have had to find the supplies to make it with

3. They still would have had to find large quantities the supplies to make the stuff

4. Distribution is still an issue. You can't just take 10lbs of methamphetamine to the UPS Store in 50 different boxes every week.

5. Walt still has to launder the money

6. Walt has to hide how he's making millions of dollar from Skyler and everyone else

7. Walt is still going to feel like rich powerful person and have to deal with that

8. Rival druglords would still be involved. They'd employ high-tech help to track down Heisenberg

Cryptomarkets Are Gentrifying the Drug Trade

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