I agree with some things he says,and some things he says are absolutely stupid. Private police force that you need to pay directly for protection? Reminds me of ancient Rome times, when if your house was on fire, the fire brigade would come and haggle with you first,trying to negotiate how much you are willing to pay to save your house. Having to pay somebody directly(rather than in your taxes) for protection is unfathomably stupid. Right now you can call the police literally anywhere you are in the world, and they will come and help, because that's what they do. With his solution, you could drive to a nearby city and nobody would help you,because you haven't paid the security agency there.
There are bigger problems with the private police force idea than them not helping you if you don't pay them. The far bigger problem is that it would be way more profitable for them to just take everything you own than it would be to protect you and your things for a few coins or bills worth a tiny fraction of your net worth.
You forget that there wouldn't be just one private police force but many service providers. So if one offers bad service (by robbing you) you just hire one of their competitors.
This kind of cuts to my biggest problem with objectivists and anarchist-capitalists, no sense of time context or history.
"Let's abolish the government and all that stuff, it is bad and not natural", ignoring the fact that without the sort of government-structured society we've already made, they'd be in no position to have the wealth they are so afraid that taxes are going to "steal" and it works forward too in the sense that without the protections we take for granted from tax-sponsored government, they'd be robbed blind very quickly by those with the means and will to do it.
I enjoyed David Friedman's discussions of the incentives present under market anarchy in "The Machinery of Freedom", now available in its entirety online[1]. Your objections are not new and have been discussed at length by market anarchists. Whether or not you find the responses satisfactory is up to you.
David writes for a mainstream audience which is assumed to have some familiarity with concepts of economics and property, but does not need to already be a libertarian. I feel he is the best representative of market anarchist thought.
One thing I don't get with libertarianism is why this, second paragraph of the book, doesn't apply both ways:
"People who wish to live in a 'virtuous' society, surrounded by others who share their ideas of virtue, would be free to set up their own communities and to contract with each other so as to prevent the 'sinful' from buying or renting within them. Those who wished to live communally could set up their own communes. But nobody would have a right to force his way of life upon his neighbor."
I guess the police force would be worried about having a negative reputation, so robbing a small time person might not be worth the risk if it meant you wouldn't get the contract for the bigger fish. But at some point you could always just cash out by robbing your client.
I would also guess that the people you hire to protect your stuff would probably also accept payment to take other people's stuff so you would have a similar set of problems to medieval kings and their armies.
> This kind of cuts to my biggest problem with objectivists and anarchist-capitalists, no sense of time context or history.
No one attacked your person so I don't really understand why you get personal here. As it's my policy to avoid such poisoned discussions I'm going to leave this sub thread.
Right, but it works the other way round, too: if your police thinks YOUR competitors (and this may mean, well, gangs) pay better, nothing would prevent it from turning over to protect their interests rather than yours.
Regarding your Roman Fire Brigade example, we can now produce a much more effective system with modern bookkeeping technology. Instead of paying for fire protection as your house burns, you pay for the fire protection in advance. In fact, that's already the way it works in some parts of the world. You pay the fire department in advance (so they can pay for the upkeep of their machines), and if you don't, they have no obligation to put out your flaming house.
> You pay the fire department in advance (so they can pay for the upkeep of their machines), and if you don't, they have no obligation to put out your flaming house.
Two problems:
1. If not enough people pay for a fire brigade, the fire brigade is complete shit even if I do pay for it, because I can't fund a brigade all on my own. (If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.)
2. If my neighbor's house is on fire, I really, really want the fire to be put out even if my neighbor hasn't paid for the brigade. I do not want the brigade to wait until my house is burning. (If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.)
3. If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.
I don't think it's the responsibility of the police to protect you anywhere. By responsibility I mean, if you are not protected you can hold the police legally responsible.
Can you imagine how many police we'd need if there were an obligation to protect everyone at all times? There isn't a country on Earth with police forces that large.
There isn't a country with enough police to protect everyone from physical harm caused by others at nearly all times (statistically speaking)? I doubt it.
And I doubt OP was speaking about those times when the country is entirely on fire or the police department has been nuked. Rather, I think the point is that the police will do anything they reasonably can do to help.
For all the invisible handers, let's not forget the London olympics where certain security roles were contracted out. The company involved failed to recruit sufficient numbers of personnel by a significant margin, failed to train adequately those that they did and failed to communicate the scale of the failure that was developing. In the end, the government had to bring in the army to perform the role.
While there are undoubtedly areas where the public sector can learn from private sector efficiency, I'd venture that there are some societal functions where the point of profit maximisation results in an inferior and inadequate service. Or - to look at it a different way - the public sector is the only provider incentivised to realise the positive externalities of that service. This might be the public benefit of putting out fires regardless of a person's payment status (stopping them spreading), the cumulative benefit of going about business safe from crime, the benefits of a healthy workforce, etc etc.
An invisible hander would probably say that the government should not have organised the olympics to begin with (effectively a monopoly).
Using tax money to put on an event of that scale where there was effectively only one organisation with the resources to provide security services is bound to make that one organisation optimize for cost saving.
If you had only private sporting events then security companies and event organizers would eventually optimize to a state of security that best served the expectations of their customers.
sounds very much like security at the vancouver 2010 olympics and the G8/G10 summit. i worked as security doing airport screening of people (x-ray & mag) and oh boy i have plenty of stories. There was so much waste, gaming the contract/system so the government would pay for far more man hours of under qualified under trained workers. Like keeping 40 people on the clock when 5 would have been sufficient. Granted the police were not much better.
I had never worked security before, nor have I science.
I'm I missing what stands in the way of anyone currently setting up their own security agency? Especially in states with open carry. Unless it's not about freedom and more about channeling their feelings on the government.
In the very same paragraph he talks about the government stealing money from you in form of taxes, so I guess he would rather not pay any taxes at all and just choose who protects him himself, getting rid of the state-run police force. I can't even begin to describe how many things are wrong with that approach.
By "security agency", most ancaps mean something that fills the role of government. Capturing accused criminals and holding them in jail is perfectly legal if you're the government, otherwise it's considered kidnapping.
> Personally, I don’t think they [Bitcoin, Tor] can be effectively banned at this point. Iran and China, for example, are actively trying and failing.
That is, unfortunately, not quite true in regards to Tor. Iran has on multiple occasions done/tried out doing (turned it on, then off) traffic censorship that directly or indirectly very much affected Tor. [1] [2] True, Tor managed to roll out obfsfroxy et al., which they'd been already actively developing prior to that, but if e.g. Iran (again) attempted country-wise generic SSL censorship, that would hurt things. Tor's pluggable transports would perhaps be a response to that still, but Iran's gov't could move on to other things.
With China it's even worse, as it seems there is custom software being used from within China to actively discover and censor out new Tor bridges (as in, a new one is used by someone, some minutes later another connection from China comes in to it, speaks Tor protocol, disconnects, and then the bridge is blocked.) [3]
This is just to make sure the information about these matters is out there. If anybody is interested in helping out Tor, the mailing lists [4] and research papers and code is out there. :) [5]
I was so excited to discover that something like this exist - a community that gets on with its business without any stupid organization or agency putting sticks in its wheels. I just wish this spirit of freedom would come over to countries of the former USSR where it is badly needed.
It's beyond obnoxious sometimes when some sites (not Forbes specifically) put just 1-3 paragraphs per page with one image so that each one is effectively a slide surrounded by ads. When I reach my limit of the "paged experience", I search for the printer friendly page.
Edit: Er... Looks like Forbes is redirecting to the full "paged experience" upon clicking. Oh well. Just scroll to the bottom and click "print".
Please elaborate on this? Good work in what sense?
Ignoring the dubious ethics of running a black market, SilkRoad is ultimately a rent-seeking enterprise making money from transactional frictions. It creates no value - hardly the sort of shining beacon of enterprise the founder(s) make it out to be.
Well, through SR, DPR helps all parties involved be safer. For buyers, all products have ratings and reviews, and sellers have overall satisfaction statistics, and there is a forum. For sellers, there are buyer statistics.
He's a pioneer. When SR has strange technical problems, he can't just jump on IRC or Stack Overflow and ask. He has to deal with attacks against Tor no one else has experienced. I don't know of anyone else betting more heavily on the security of Tor (at least the hidden service aspect).
He's also just plain inspiring. He had a bold idea, coded it up, kept it working, by himself or with a small group, despite opposition by the worst possible adversaries. He puts his life on the line for his principles. If the world had more brave and highly capable people like him, we might not still be in the drug war.
Sorry, but you you've got the concept of "rent seeking" completely wrong.
"In public choice theory, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. One example is spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created."
A black market - almost by definition - is one in which the players are cut off from the channels of official lobbying or patronage that make rent-seeking a viable economic strategy.
That's not to say that a dark symbiosis can't develop between black marketeers and legitimate authorities. For instance, the police, by enforcing laws against drug trafficking, increase the risks of trafficking. This increases prices and profits alike. High profits attract a constant supply of traffickers, who also tend to be far more ruthless than the average businessman, which brings additional layers of criminality to the trade, thereby ensuring continued employment for the police - to say nothing of an unsettling expansion of their powers.
But at no point do the traffickers and the police feel a mutual need to formalize this relationship, since public opinion remains, on balance, opposed to the narcotics trade. That is to say, the police can rely on the ballot box to stay employed, stripping them of any incentive to do business (at least on an open, institutional level) with traffickers. Meanwhile, the traffickers can count on public opinion to keep police on the beat, and need not go to any further expense to keep their racket going.
Contrast all this with the retroactive extension of copyright terms which has got to be the canonical example of true rent seeking, illuminating the practice in its most naked and unproductive form.
EDIT: An more germane example is the lobbying done by pharmaceutical companies with an interest in keeping the law and public opinion in opposition to illegal substances that may have pharmacological properties. Because these substances are too well known to be patented, their legalization could lead to patent-free formulations that reduce demand for patentable substitutes that pharmaceutical companies have created, or ones they could develop in future. Blocking the legal use of one widely and cheaply available substance to create a market for a more expensive but conceivably inferior alternate is a text-book case of rent seeking.
I'm not sure we disagree here - rent seeking indirectly by the mechanism you describe between police and drug trafficking is still rent seeking behaviour!
You don't need a formal agreement or specific legislation to establish a rent-seeking economy, nor is economic patronage necessary. A black market is not somehow separate to rent-seeking business.
I don't really understand your point. In my understanding, for silk road to be rent-seeking it would have be actively working to keep drugs illegal, thus maintaining their profits. I have seen no evidence this is the case.
I'm also unsure why you think SR "creates no value"? It creates value in the same way eBay does.
Morals of being a drug market aside, in what way is SilkRoad a "rent-seeking enterprise" any more than any other transaction facilitating entity? Every transaction has friction and facilitators provide the service of matching buyers and sellers. Maybe not the highest ideal of productivity but hardly deserves to be described as rent-seeking.
Well, I guess we just disagree on the definition of rent-seeking. Matching willing buyers and sellers creates value by increasing the satisfaction of both the buyer and the seller since both should be better off after the transaction. The facilitator who creates more mutually beneficial trades is increasing the wellbeing of society as a whole. From wikipedia "Rent-seeking behavior is distinguished in theory from profit-seeking behavior, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." SilkRoad is not rent seeking because they are not looking to change or increase the transaction friction and regulatory control of the drug trade for their own benefit. That is why rent-seeking is usually used to describe entities trying to create a government policy which benefits them but hinders mutual exchange of others. To define rent-seeking is such a loose way as to cover all facilitators who don't produce anything directly is to distort it's original meaning and make the word useless to describe true rent-seeking.
Consider that it's very much in Silk Road's interest that the regulations that currently create the transactional frictions on which it makes a profit remain as they are, or perhaps become even more restrictive. It's rent seeking in the same way that smuggling illegal immigrants is rent seeking. This does not require a broadened definition of rent seeking at all.
>It's rent seeking in the same way that smuggling illegal immigrants is rent seeking.
Smuggling illegal immigrants is not rent seeking. If an illegal-immigrant-smuggling company lobbied the government to tighten immigration controls, that would be rent seeking.
It's in the interests of the smugglers that tight immigration controls remain in place, just as it's in the interests of Silk Road that regulations on restricted substances remain in place.
They need not lobby directly for these restrictions, they have other organisations that will do that for them.
Who is creating the majority of friction in the drug trade? Nation states and their war on drugs.
Silk Road is using technological advancement to remove as much friction from the process as possible, but it's obviously still non-zero, just like any market in the world.
Do you have any points to offer other than useless snark? You have multiple comments challenging your initial claim that Silk Road is rent-seeking and you have yet to offer any sort of defense of your position.
Unless a business in that position attempts to enforce its position, what's the problem? If he is making something easier for others he should be rewarded or he'll stop.
It's like saying a road has no value because stuff isn't created on the road, just moved.
As for ethics, you could sleep better after buying a kilo of coke on silk road than paying your taxes.
Roads are a public good, not a business (despite what libertarian rhetoric would have you believe). All business seek to enforce their position, by the way.
There were lots of private highways and roads in early US history[1]. I'm not saying it's always and everywhere a good idea, but the historical reality or private roads suggests we shouldn't dismiss them out of hand.
I think you're arguing with the mirror. I said it's like [the fallacy of] thinking a road has no value ...
And I see a lot of businesses selling stuff like 3d printers who use open designs and contribute changes back to the community. Lock-in is a choice people make.
Given the ultimate traceability of bitcoins, would anyone care to speculate how tDPR converts SR's transaction fees into fiat currency without being tracked down by law enforcement?
I don't think running Silk Road would be very useful for that purpose, any more than running Kickstarter would be useful for mapping the traditional investing world, or running reddit would be useful for mapping print distribution networks.
It would be useful for busting buyers, but no more so than traditional cop-on-the-street sting operations.
"How can you plug yourself into the tax eating, life sucking, violent, sadistic, war mongering, oppressive machine ever again? How can you kneel when you’ve felt the power of your own legs? Felt them stretch and flex as you learn to walk and think as a free person? I would rather live my life in rags now than in golden chains. And now we can have both! Now it is profitable to throw off one’s chains, with amazing crypto technology reducing the risk of doing so dramatically. How many niches have yet to be filled in the world of anonymous online markets? The opportunity to prosper and take part in a revolution of epic proportions is at our fingertips!
I have no one to share my thoughts with in physical space. Security does not permit it, so thanks for listening. I hope my words can be an inspiration just as I am given so much by everyone here."
He's definitely not a cop in the sense of a Hollywood movie (eg Miami Vice).
He and his team are specialists. They are to cops what the Navy Seals or Rangers are to an Army E1.
The primary goal is information. They could care less about busting any given small time vendor. They want a mapping of the network of trade, origination, distribution, communication, transactions and financing. Particularly to draw currently unknown or difficult to track network nodes out into the open.
It's the same thing that has been done with paedophilia online. It's a honey trap. There isn't much value in busting single nodes. They want to see how much of the network they can map out, and the leads it provides to larger players. If this concept didn't exist, they'd desperately want to create it. Given their history of creative honey pots and how long they've been leveraging technology heavily, I think it tilts Silk Road toward being a likely sponsored program.
> Given their history of creative honey pots and how long they've been leveraging technology heavily, I think it tilts Silk Road toward being a likely sponsored program.
Any other examples? Sounds like fascinating reading.
according to the article, the trade volume on silk road is around 22 million $ per year. I would hazard a guess that this is a teeny-tiny fraction of the global drug trade... and at least at this point, I wouldn't imagine it attracts any of the big players...
I would also speculate that any of the big drug traders are very clever business people. They are used to switching their modes of operation, diversifying and building different routes and layers into their operation.
Why would it not be able to go through the chain of command? The military and intelligence services for example engage in all kinds of covert and clandestine operations whilst still being government employees.
There are also techniques which may allow tor users to be deanonymized to vary degrees. Browser/OS fingerprinting , flash cookies etc. These will be easier if you control one of the end points.
I've never used silk road, but presumably if you want people to ship stuff to you , then you have to enter an address at some point?
Many Tor users use the Tor Browser Bundle, which blocks flash by default, includes noscript (I forget if it by default activates noscript...), and doesn't retain any information between sessions other than what is manually stored like bookmarks or saved passwords. On SR, buyers communicate their address via PGP. Sellers only communicate an address (which may be fake) on the package they send a buyer. SR is thus blinded to physical addresses.
I guess law enforcement would simply gather as much data as they can. Only need a few guys screwing up their browser settings one day, or maybe you get more sophisticated and start looking at response times, timing jitter etc.
If you control the mechanism for key exchange would this not make MITM possible? Display different keys to different people for the same person.
I'd be interested to see if any more sophisticated techniques have ever been successfully used to uncover a Tor user.
From the webpage I linked, "Security-wise, Silk Road seems to be receiving passing grades from law enforcement agencies internally; a leaked FBI report mentioned no attacks against SR, anonymous anecdotes claim the DEA is stymied4, while a May 2012 Australian document reportedly praised the security of vendor packaging and general site security."
Right now a buyer's address is vulnerable if they don't use PGP when giving it to a seller, or if SR is indeed trying to do a MitM attack by replacing a seller's published public key with their own. But the latter case is easy for a seller to check against simply by creating a second buyer account and verifying the buyer sees the correct key. The buyer and seller can also arrange to exchange keys off of SR. A better plan (also mentioned on Gwern's page) would be to have law enforcement create their own buyer and seller accounts and act like normal users until it was time to start a crackdown -- the problem seems to be that law enforcement, or at least the FBI, either doesn't have permission to engage in mass entrapment and fraud, or it's just not interested in buyers.
Just like in the real world, it wouldn't be hard to pretend to be a seller to catch a few buyers - not hard, but also not worth doing - whereas by pretending to be a buyer you aren't going to find out the address of a seller.
>There are also techniques which may allow tor users to be deanonymized to vary degrees. Browser/OS fingerprinting , flash cookies etc. These will be easier if you control one of the end points.
In addition to TBB foiling all of those tactics, the only one that can done without being traced is fingerprinting. So if any of the others were being used, someone would probably have noticed.
Outside of Ayn Rand novels, collective action is necessary for the livelihood of free peoples. Old-fashioned civic virtue used to fill the roles that the state usurped (see Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, The State").
I have a soft spot in my heart for Ayn Rand, but her moral system would be a poor foundation for a free people (which I am here using as a euphemism for market anarchy).
Brits, Irish and Aussies too I believe. When I read that comment, I thought that Dread Pirate Roberts could be using Libertarian musings (which I've never heard outside of US political discussions) and references to US law enforcement agencies as a smokescreen for his identity.
Interestingly, and coincidentally, there's been speculation that the Bitcoin creator (Satoshi Nakamoto) could be an Irish computer science student called Michael Clear, due to British spelling in his (if it is his) written work: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto
‘British’ English is the standard English taught in Europe and the Middle East, likely in India as well, so I doubt that this is a remotely helpful clue.
Non-natives English speaker pick their English where they hear it. If you're watching British television or speaking with English people a lot, you'll surely pick some English colloquialisms.
Correct, I was mostly responding to ‘due to British spelling’ in connection with Nakamoto. The claim that some American spelling crops up in his writing (on the linked-to Wiki site) actually supports the idea that he is neither a native Briton nor American, but learnt British spelling in school and American spelling on the net.
>Would anybody other than a Brit say that sentence?
If I were running Silk Road, I'd be paying attention to research and memes surrounding anonymity, and writing style has been a popular point of interest lately. Adopting another culture's colloquialisms and idioms is one potential way of masking your own identifying idiosyncrasies in writing.
I'm curious how long it will be until this person is turned into an FBI informant (think Lulzsec and Sabu). The website has done some obscenely stupid things in the past, like leaving their real (non-Tor) IP address on error pages. Presumably the website is a large target, even just for it's common mention in media.
The beauty of Silk Road design is that the site being a FBI honeypot has been built into the threat model from the start. All identifying info sent between buyers/sellers is encrypted using PGP, Silk Road doesn't see anything.
That's not accurate. People are encouraged to use PGP for addresses and other sensitive communication there, but it is not enforced or directly supported by the system. There are still vendors who can't be bothered to figure PGP out (often relying upon dubious alternatives like privnote), and there will always be customers who don't care one way or the other.
Silk Road itself doesn't even have a discrete place for users to enter their public key; it is only by convention that most vendors put it at the end of their profile text.
Growth in wages and better working conditions broadly followed the growth in labor productivity. I see labor protection laws as a lagging indicator of worker well-being that are only passed when a society is rich enough to afford them.
I get so tired of libertarian self-serving mumbo jumbo. He's a drug trafficker, makes large amount of money of it and I have a hard time seeing that any decrease in government oppression isn't offset by the realities of the drug trade. Regardless if I agree with it or not, someone like Cody Wilson has a far better case in my book.
> any decrease in government oppression isn't offset by the realities of the drug trade.
What "realities of the drug trade"? Any drug sales happening on TSR are by small-time manufacturers and dealers. There are no shootings or stabbings on TSR. The cartels don't have any reason to use TSR. I think the nature of TSR prevents most of the "realities" you're citing.
Indeed. Pretty much all of the ugly 'realities' of the drug trade are those which exist and thrive precisely because drugs are outlawed. SR happens to protect its users from having to deal with most of those realities - and that's a great benefit. DPR rightly deserves praise for helping people to get the drugs of their choice without having to hit the often dangerous streets for them.
Perhaps one day western societies will be able to have an adult conversation about drugs, but for the time being shrill reactionaries still set the tone. Meanwhile for every one dramatic walking-cliche of a drug casualty out there killing themselves and making the world shittier, there are at least a handful of responsible drug users conducting perfectly normal and successful lives. For any drug you can name.
If there's anyone being dramatic here it's the people who think anything that furthers their cause is good. In term of transparency SR is the opposite of legalization and will sooner or later be ruled by the ones who can produce the best product for the cheapest price at a high enough volume. And responsible drug use isn't a contradiction to "irresponsible drug manufacturing", so I don't get your point there.
Your point is pretty much impossible to discern as well. All I see in your post is slagging off DPR as a glorified drug trafficker, and some rather vague handwaving about the "realities of the drug trade".
"Irresponsible drug manufacturing"? If you're imagining that SR is a cesspool of tainted products, you could not be further from the reality of it. On SR, buying communities for specific drugs or drug subtypes tend to band together to discuss and assess vendors and their products quite publicly. In some cases, you see users subjecting vendors' products to lab tests (in countries where it's actually easy and legal to, god forbid, quantify the exact composition of illegal drugs). It's nowhere near as easy to get away with selling tainted garbage in this venue as it is on the street. There are typically far fewer unscrupulous operators standing between buyer and the actual supplier on SR, and consequently product quality is higher than most buyers likely have access to IRL.
> sooner or later be ruled by the ones who can produce the best product for the cheapest price at a high enough volume
..and? If the guy who can produce untainted, good-quality product at the cheapest price wins (which he won't, as there are any number of other factors that people involve in their buying decisions), then why would that be a problem?
I think it's fairly safe to assume that the drug trade didn't significantly change over night and that the sources of drugs are largely the same. Which means that a lot, especially of the harder drugs, come from south america. I'm obviously not going to go through the problems the drug trade causes in south america, as I assume this is public knowledge. Of course there is similar problems with manufacturing in the US.
Also I don't think its hand-waving when I base my opinions on the available information. I'm all ears if you can show that drug production has significantly changed (or at least what's is available on SR), that there's a significant overlap, and shift, between buying on SR and buying from street gangs and that this new distribution channel won't have largely the same victors, and therefor problems, as the rest of the drug trade.
Like I said, if someone comes up with a way to locally manufacture smaller amounts of drugs and give the control to the users, than you might have a theoretical case.
