> SR1 was shut down due to a forum post that was linked to an anonymous PHP question on Stack Overflow.
That's their public version of the story.
Thanks to Snowden, we know today that they use "parallel construction", so we may have no clue at all to what lengths they went and how many illegal tactics they used:
This should be modded much higher than it is. What are the odds that someone thought to check Stack Overflow independently of any particular reason to do so?
1. it's just an idea of how to make a decentralized SR.
2. I doubt I'll be able to implement it entirely myself regardless.
3. even if I or someone else does, what is bad about it, exactly? It'll be just software. A set of Ruby/JS files. Everyone would be able to run a node so clearly punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option.
Isamu Kaneko who wrote Winny [1], a popular Japanese P2P program, while working as a research assistant at University of Tokyo was persecuted and harassed until he died of heart attack this year. He did not profit at all from Winny.
GP is trying to make decisions, or help others make them. Granted, they should have specified the US or something, but don't act like an incident in Iran should be relevant to their own risk assessment, or to anyone else not living in Iran.
Purposely remained anonymous because he knew they would target him. Bitcoin foundation claims that as creator of Bitcoin, he is liable for every transaction under new FinCen laws being considered. https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=163
It would help if the author of this software doesn't call it 'Silk Rd 2.0' or reference online narcotics trade in any way. It should be called 'P2P open marketplace' which makes a huge difference during your trial when they claim you purposely set it up to violate US law instead of being able to argue you are an innocent software developer. Just look at weev's trial how they manipulated everything he said on IRC to make him look as criminal as possible.
Stephen Watt (the_uT) also merely wrote a piece of software he didn't use himself, nor did he profit from and he went to prison after Albert Gonzales used it to steal a ton of money with. It was sort of released to the public, dumped in an IRC room
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And in these cases, when risk is unbounded, it is better to be cautious. Simple antifragility heuristic. [1]
I've heard that there are magic pan-dimensional pixies that will destroy the universe and potentially other universes if you post another link to a book on amazon today.
It might not be true, but remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this is a case where risk really is unbounded, so you better be cautious.
Near-complete absence is strong Bayesian evidence against an assertion whose grammar implies universality: «This is exactly what "they" do». You would expect it to be common if the assertion were true.
Man, I really wish people would stop saying this. It's just completely false. It's a basic result of probability theory that if A is evidence of B, ¬A is evidence of ¬B.
Only naively. If there is a clear reason why there is no evidence of absence (e.g. no one has ever looked for evidence), I don't see how this "basic result" is true in any meaningful way.
The trick is that the strength of the evidence is not equivalent. It is not correct to say "Evidence of strong evidence is strong evidence of absence". More generally, A is strong evidence of B does not imply that ¬A is strong evidence of ¬B.
Indeed. The alternative would be "we have no evidence that B is happening, therefore we can conclude that it is more likely to be happening than if we had evidence that it was happening."
It is important to consider the chance of us having evidence of B, assuming that B was actually happening.
We have an absence of evidence for æther, but we are pretty certain that if it exists, we would have evidence of it. Our confidence of that is strong enough to state with some confidence that æther does not exist. For practical intents and purposes, we can say that the absence of evidence of æther is evidence that it does not exist.
Not all absences of evidence are made equal, some are more significant than others.
Absense of evidence of " … if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it." is a damning enough takedown of at least that part of the argument…
I think you're on the right track: there's a large gap between releasing a tool and running a service.
The difference between offering BackTrack isos for download and running live, free Backtrack VMs.
A traditional, non-distributed service is often backed by centralized entity (corporation, nonprofit or private person), so many of the consequences are directed at them. Whereas with a diffused individuals running their own, it would be harder to as easily control.
The rules that tomorrow's government abides by will surely be much worse (for "us") than those of today. Imagine the future being much, much shittier than it is today.
I agree with you 100%. I just also think that to claim "oh, I just wrote this software, I can't get in trouble for anything" doesn't take into account either the technological illiteracy of most of the justice system, nor the current environment of what can qualify on the evening news as being a win for the War on Terror.
There is nothing wrong with this, I guess government propaganda is really scaring some people. If it were like this arms manufacturing should be a crime and the billionaires behind those factories should be in jail, you still live under democracy so government should fear you and not the other way round.
One could, however, argue that Thomas Jefferson had some valid points on democracies and the running therof. And it's him that V for Vendetta was riffing off:
“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”
On the other hand, a point could be made that it's totalitarian regimes where governments are afraid of their citizens (those in fear of losing their powers, especially illegitimately obtained, start suppressing freedoms and surveilling everyone).
So the Tor, Bitcoin, libOTR, pidgin/adium, encfs, luks, openssl, openssh, openvpn, truecrypt & recent PGP devs (not counting the crypto-as-muntions early days) fear this too?
The ones that have been harassed in my memory is the Cryptocat dev and Winny. Don't mark your software as having a political purpose and more of a general tool and I think you'll have less harassment in your future.
You seem to be assuming in point 3) that the government is rational about this kind of crap. History proves they're out of their minds when it comes to drugs and prosecution of any and everything related to them. They'd throw you in prison for as long as they possibly could just to "make a point".
I would discourage even titling the submission "Silk Road 2.0". I can't speak to the criminal side of things, but civil court judges have come up with theories that if another piece of software has been deemed 'illegal' and you try to attract users of that software to your software, then your software could be considered illegal.
Again, it's apples to oranges, but you can see how the court's line of reasoning could go the same direction.
Is implementing a distributed marketplace any more illegal than, say, implementing a distributed digital currency (Bitcoin) or anonymity network (Tor)?
No. But it should be noted that even Satoshi retained his anonymity in creating Bitcoin; that, with no indication Bitcoin would have any real use or value in the future. That should stand as fair warning for anyone considering creating such systems.
"Of course not" is probably technically the correct answer right now. But, speaking as an American, we increasingly cannot assume the legal system to be logical. There is no "of course," there is only "ask a lawyer to find out what current practice probably is."
As a side note, of course, this is the very definition of the breakdown of law. But that is what the people want: a nation, not of laws, but of men.
What if the creator somehow profits from the system?
One could imagine a Bitcoin-esque system where the creator includes rules in the client that require every transaction to send a small cut to a Bitcoin address he owns. [1]
If that system then "happens" to be used for illegal purposes like drug trafficking, is the developer of the system committing a crime? It's distributed so he can't shut it down and he's no longer actively participating. What if he destroys the private key of the Bitcoin address?
It's an interesting thought experiment...
[1] Of course you'd need a critical mass of users and the right incentives to prevent people from starting their own "alt-markets" much like Bitcoin has spawned dozens of "alt-coins".
There's a real world example here, Liberty Reserve. Granted, it was centralized, but same law concepts apply. The problem with Liberty Reserve was not that they had a system used by criminals, but that they knew this fact and actively encouraged this activity to continue, including sending around lots of incriminating internal e-mails.
It's a lot easier to evade the Fed's if you live in Africa or middle east. Just saying but you could easily setup those operation outside of US in a much "harder" to get caught. And if you bounce around every now and then to different countries you're pretty much guaranteed not to get caught at least for a good number of years.
I imagine that prisons are largely filled with people who felt they we're "pretty much guaranteed not to get caught at least for a good number of years."
(Even if they remember to destroy their inscribed copies of 'Leaves of Grass')
Right up until the Feds drop a tip to said African or Middle Eastern country, after all, those countries are known for their drug tolerance and their human rights.
This has problems and isn't going anywhere for long:
- it makes GitHub a target
- it makes contributors into targets
First, Git (although DVCS) needs to be located in a non-extradition country where a SEAL team cannot just break in and steal dev servers. This sounds like it would require tor also.
Second, all contributors need perfect anonymity hygiene. Anyone that commits publicly is a liability. Use a new pseudonym just for this project, keep issues and discussion to information and technical matters strictly.
This is absurd. We have to stop trying to run from our own government, we've run out of places to go. I've been hearing arguments for years that we need to place anything that's even a theory of committing an illegal act on some micronation of Sealand or, like PirateBay, float drones in the sky.
It's going to get to the point where theres no where we're going to end up hosting Reddit, et al., on the Moon.
If you're intent is to create a facility, whose express purpose is to break the law, albeit laws you may not agree with, I think you're going to be on the run for a long time.
Obviously that's correct. But, my point being is that the law is wrong and we should attempt to challenge government instead of simply trying to evade it over and over.
If you have a plan that seems workable, there are hundreds of thousands of people willing to join you. If you don't, then jurisdictional arbitrage will continue to be the order of the day.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately and I can't come up with a clear and fully appropriate medium to actually challenge government overreach in a significant way.
It seems to me, viewing history as an example, it used to be possible to legitimately petition the government by means of demonstrations, protests, contacting legislators, etc. Now that's been completely replaced with lawsuits. Only by one party with significant means and resourcing sueing the other and waiting a long time to reach the Supreme Court do things get accomplished.
As this has to do with the drug war, however, I think things are slowly changing. If the Prohibition of alcohol can be any guide it will take a large enough public outcry along with voting people into office that share your point of view. All that takes time, money, and at least some way to sway the public (generally meaning control in some kind of large media company that the public believes/trusts).
The only way to get started is for people to get together and say they want to do it and start doing it. Apathy and complaining about it goes nowhere.
Don't confuse disagreement with apathy. Remember that post-Snowden Congress had the ability to put a stop to the NSA program and didn't, and the public outcry (outside of HN) was fairly muted. So it seems that you've got to win some hearts and minds first.
And winning the hearts and minds is not going to be easy. Consider the Tea Party (and importantly consider your own feelings toward the Tea Party) A bona-fide grass roots movement that the establishment has marginalized, ridiculed and baselessly accused of violence and racism and now stands charged with holding the nation hostage, by exercising legal and constitutional rights. I suspect you're movement would not fair any better.
>Remember that post-Snowden Congress had the ability to put a stop to the NSA program and didn't, and the public outcry (outside of HN) was fairly muted.
I don't see the public outcry as muted at all, but I suppose it depends on where you look. Remember, we're in a transition of traditional/oldschool media to new media.
I also don't expect the body politic to simply throw out their beloved spy apparatus after some public outcry. This isn't just a decision of Congress, but of a state funded military industrial complex that exists out of bounds of any kind of oversight with their own secret budgets -- something almost unheard of any prior state and without historical precedent. Trying to tear down the walls of that is going to be an extremely complicated and time consuming process, and I think its going to be a piecemeal affair.
> I suspect you're movement would not fair any better.
Obviously its very hard to establish a movement in the 21st century that can effectively alter the status quo. I look at Occupy as a better example -- and without getting into arguments regards one vs the other the Tea Party has continued where Occupy faltered and disintegrated. You may not be able to control what people say about you and its hard to keep a movement from splintering, but if you go by the basic tenants of creating a popular mass movement with leadership, specific political objectives, and enough funds, I think it's very possible to get things accomplished.
First, Git (although DVCS) needs to be located in a non-extradition country
non-extradition country to where? Non-extradiction country to the USA? That's very America-centric. Any place you can host it, will have local courts, local police and local judges. You can't find a country that, effectively, has no laws you have to obey.
Are you really so poorly mannered as to chime in and start throwing nasty names around? That genius you replied to takes one point to make a political statement, not contribute anything to the conversation and then slips into to the gutter. If it's not popular to stand up for yourself being assaulted, then I don't really care.
If you aren't, you're still completely wrong. Russia, America or any nationstate that is made aware of something can seize whatever it wants whenever it wants and wherever it wants. That's why any controversial app must be distributed, fault resilient for both development AND production. Centralized will never work, even with perfect security hygiene. It's a good thing that Git has a full copy, because a single dev server seizure would be annoying but not fatal.
Do you have any other flaws to point out that pertain to my original comment?
That genius you replied to takes one point to make a political statement, not contribute anything to the conversation and then slips into to the gutter.
I wonder if you could pool money to have spacex or some other company launch a satellite/set of servers into orbit as opposed to some country somewhere. That'd be pretty expensive for them to take (physically) out of service then!
Maybe, but probably not as expensive as you launching it in the first place as a percentage of money involved. I'd bet there are a few old birds up there that are still under control, but not serving any particular purpose. Steer it into a collision course, and bam, your server just became a cloud of garbage orbiting the Earth.
On the other hand, that would seriously piss off the rest of the international community, especially if the two satellites were high enough to clutter up existing satellite traffic.
I think it takes a lot more effort than that to thoroughly wipe a drive. Though my only expertise in this regard is having to use a degausser on magnetic tapes.
The story then went full-on Breaking Bad nuts, with
Redandwhite demanding $150,000 for a "non-clean" kill and
$300,000 for a "clean" version. Roberts said that he knew
the value of such things; he claimed to have paid $80,000
for a previous "clean" hit, and he wanted a discount.
Did I say earlier that the story had already gone off the
rails into Crazytown? Reader—I was wrong. Because a
federal indictment unsealed separately today in a Maryland
court says that Roberts had in fact arranged such an
$80,000 hit just a few weeks earlier. Not crazy enough?
Turns out that the "hitman" in this first attempt was
actually a federal agent.
Roberts was upset that one of his employees—records show
these employees were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week
—had stolen from Roberts and eventually managed to get
himself arrested by dealing with an undercover agent.
Roberts wanted the employee tortured so that he would
return the missing Bitcoins. Not knowing much about
hitmen, Roberts ended up talking to the very undercover
agent who had helped bust his employee.
Federated networks/decentralized hosting seems to be the future for anonymous storage and communication. I'm curious to see what will be the first real world implementation.
The black market drug industry always seems to create pioneers of new forms of subversive technology (see narco-subs).
I should also give a shout out to Tahoe-LAFS, which the Cryptosphere is inspired by. They've also discussed supporting distributed webapps and adding a JavaScript API:
> I'm curious to see what will be the first real world implementation
Cryptosphere, Tahoe-LAFS, and similar systems have all sorts of potential use cases. I'd love to see distributed Facebooks, distributed Wikipedias, and even a distributed DNS registry.
One of the reasons I'm using Git as the "object manager" in Cryptosphere is to better facilitate things like forking, so if there's a distributed web site you like, and you don't like the way it's being managed, you could fork your own copy and try to get people to use that instead (licenses permitting, of course!)
Off topic, but I'm curious what you mean by this. The only thing I can imagine you mean is to have Wikipedia's databases sharded everywhere and... that doesn't really make sense to me.
Silk Road be damned! A distributed anonymous marketplace has many real and tangible benefits. By having a robust community escrow mechanism, and by having people deal directly with each other with reputational support, a marketplace like this could unleash a new age of internet commerce. Add to this several arbitrage mechanism to determine valuation, and I believe we can build a marketplace solutions light years from what we have now.
As I've been working on a marketplace platform plan for products and services of uncertain value, if there are other people who are interested in partnering on the build of such a platform. Please contact me as marketplace efficiency is my passion and I believe that there's an amazing solution out there waiting to solve this problem.
Sorry, I thought my contact was visible in my profile (it is to me). You can contact me directly at brer.frank at gmail. I'm also in the Bay Area if anyone wants to meet up to talk in person.
Yes. Optimized for both local and international buying and selling with the purpose of eliminating arbitrage in objects of uncertain value. Added to that, bitcoin, distributed, and built in community escrow -- the first truly 'internet' market.
This strikes me as extremely inappropriate. Don't publicly advertise tools for subverting the state.
> there are the bad guys with guns ("the state") that can interrupt the operation any moment and try to seize the money
This is just childish. There are much worse guys with guns that lack legal and political processes. They generally don't bother us because the state protects citizens.
Handle grievances with regulations or criminal code by organizing popular support for policy changes, not by building systems to break the law. Otherwise, expect to be treated as a criminal.
Well, what else is the state if not a group of criminals who, through use of violence, coerce people into accepting their authority and following their rules (which in most cases don't protect the interest of the people, only the interest of the state)? It's a pretty libertarian/voluntarist view. There is nothing childish about it.
I listed the state as an example because the state is seemingly the only entity which tries to outlaw voluntary peaceful exchanges. There is a term for practice of peaceful human action that for some weird reason is disallowed by the state [1]
I don't understand the willful ignorance of libertarians who make the claim that the state doesn't do anything outside of extorting people and ruling with guns. Yes, there are problems with every single government ever made, and there will be for the foreseeable future, but there a lot of obviously good things that come as a result of having a state. Listing them seems silly, but apparently it's not considering how many libertarians share your view.
Things like protecting weaker parties through a court system, providing national infrastructure for the economic prosperity of everyone (as opposed to private infrastructure for the prosperity of few), national defense, food and water regulation, base level research and development, protection from criminals, corporate regulation, are only a few that immediately come to mind.
Libertarians have no problem admitting that the state may do some good in some regards. In fact, it could potentially be an immensely positive force. I think where libertarian attitude diverge away from the mainstream view is that the state is nevertheless evil. Perhaps a necessary evil to run the world so to speak, but still evil because it must violate rights of people to exist by definition.
It's a fair point that most libertarians aren't for the complete removal of the state. However, in my experience they seem to try to vastly simplify many issues by waving their hands and talking about the non-aggression principle as if that automatically solves everything. The truth is, while there may be laws which are unjust, unfair, or plain silly, most of them were created to meet a need or solve a problem. Sometimes it's very easy to forget that.
A good friend of mine is an anarcho-capitalist and while he is overall a very technical, very logical, and generally smart person, neither of us have managed to convince the other that their view-point is flawed. It's rather frustrating.
> The truth is, while there may be laws which are unjust, unfair, or plain silly, most of them were created to meet a need or solve a problem.
The intention of the law to "meet a need or solve a problem" doesn't necessarily reflect the actual behavior of the law. Adopting this mindset can also bring the attitude of "we need a law to protect children" while packing the "Protect Children Act" full of special interest material.
I would personally disagree with the assertion that the majority of laws solve a problem or result in a net meeting of needs.
> However, in my experience they seem to try to vastly simplify many issues by waving their hands and talking about the non-aggression principle as if that automatically solves everything. The truth is, while there may be laws which are unjust, unfair, or plain silly, most of them were created to meet a need or solve a problem.
This is very true, but it doesn't represent the views of all libertarians or even all anarcho-capitalists. For a much better approach to anarcho-capitalism—one that focuses primarily on economics and not on morality—check out David Friedman's writings and talks. Here's a basic introduction to his proposal of a polycentric legal system where the market produces all goods and services including law, law enforcement, arbitration (courts), and even national defense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o. Along with Murray Rothbard's primarily moral/ethical/legal arguments (which seem slightly more prominent, and seem to be the ones you've encountered), Friedman's economic arguments make up the main "branches of anarcho-capitalism."
Not to argue with your friend through you, but I just don't understand how anarcho-capitalists even exist. The theory behind any anarchistic system, by nature, is the abolishment of any hierarchy. Capitalism, by nature is completely hierarchical, and without some sort of third-party governing it, even more so. I know the ideal form of capitalism is small companies exchanging freely without government intrusion, but the reality is that capitalism, mixed with human nature, eventually leads to one corporation that rules everything. This has been shown to happen even with government intervention, which is where anti-trust laws and worker's rights came from.
So if you piss off "the corporation", you have their private militia come after you. Then their courts sentence you to death, or slave labor. How is this anarchistic? Seems pretty top-down to me. Just because a company is running things doesn't mean it's not a government.
I just don't really understand libertarianism, I guess. It makes sense if you're filthy rich, but otherwise you'd just go from being middle class to a peasant with no rights almost instantly. Are all libertarians filthy rich and just very vocal (there seem to be a lot of them), delusional, misinformed, or am I missing some large part of the theory behind it?
The only way I could ever see the phasing of government out working successfully is in a shared economy (anarcho-communism). Not that I think human nature would ever permit a system like this until tens of thousands of years of psychological/spiritual evolution take place, but I think at the time humans are able to self-organize in every sense there will no longer be the need for personal possessions. Oddly enough, we would be a lot like ants.
This semantic argument has been beaten to death. What's relevant is the actual beliefs of a given group, not their name. If you insisted, you could simply replace "anarcho-capitalism" with "belief-system-x" and carry on with meaningful discussion.
However, in my experience they seem to try to vastly simplify many issues by waving their hands and talking about the non-aggression principle as if that automatically solves everything.
I don't know any libertarians or ancaps who insist that the non-aggression principle solves anything, much less everything. What we say is that it's simply the ethically Right Thing To Do, and that if "solving" a problem requires violating the NAF, then it's better left unsolved, even if there are negative consequences.
The idea that libertarians believe in some kind of "libertopia" is one of the most persistent, while completely unfounded and mistaken, myths that exists about libertarians. It's the libertarians who, more than any other group, take reality into account by acknowledging that we can't engineer a "perfect" society by using force against one another.
Libertarianism has pathologies at the edges? Big deal, so does every system that has ever been proposed as an alternative.
It's the libertarians who, more than any other group, take reality into account by acknowledging that we can't engineer a "perfect" society by using force against one another.
I doubt anyone reasonable even claims that a perfect society is possible - someone will always feel wronged regardless of their circumstance. I don't think it's unfair to say that the main function of a society is to reduce the likelihood that a person of said society gets wronged. Which brings the question of how does a society do that without enforcement of laws? If we accept the NAP is a law, who reprimands those who break it? Who actually defines what it is in the first place? Undoubtedly there are many different interpretations of it and it's not possible to achieve a feeling of fairness in a society if not everyone agrees on its basic structure and laws. If you feel like these are too basic of questions, feel free to link me to what you would consider a definitive explanation.
It's complicated, and - as you say - there are aspects that can be interpreted differently. This is why even among professed libertarians, views differ on things like abortion.
For me, it all basically reduces to the idea that Bastiat articulated, that "government is just the collective extension to our individual right to self defense". So even as a radical individualist anarchist / anarcho-capitalist, I can still see a role for something like "government", but only if it's use of force is restricted to defensive use, and it respects the idea that "if an individual doesn't have permission to do something, then multiple individuals don't have permission to either".
IOW, voluntarily organized collectives, assembled for mutual defense, OR individuals acting in self-defense, are how the NAP would be "enforced".
But again, there's no "perfect" political system, IMO. Conflicts could still arise, but I don't think institutionalizing the use of force is a good approach.
>This is a system for facilitating voluntary transactions between individuals.
Should we still not be frightened (or at least concerned) if what's being transacted is child slaves, or kidnapping/murder for hire, or guns for the mafia? There are a number of very unhealthy things which can fall under "voluntary transactions between individuals"
I'm not making an argument against anonymous marketplaces by any means, just against the idea that black markets are necessarily benign by definition, because they exist outside the reach of the state.
Will this system hinder our enforcement of slave trafficking and murder for hire laws? What are people going to do, stick a person in a box with a bunch of laundry detergent to mask the smell, then drop the box in the mail? Is an assassin's bullet going to travel over this network instead of through the air?
Those transactions are still going to have "meatspace" components which are, and will remain, the weak point that law enforcement will target.
Tor and bitcoin already exist, if mobs want to use those systems, they already can. The utility in systems like SR is reputation management and connection discovery. In other words, this system would really be nothing more than a craigslist that doesn't claim to take down ads for hookers. It shouldn't frighten you.
> Should we still not be frightened (or at least concerned) if what's being transacted is child slaves, or kidnapping/murder for hire, or guns for the mafia?
No, you should be frightened by the fact that governments, being monopolies, tend to create less economically efficient products (including laws) than competitive markets, so if you assume that societies are better off if they have legal systems which prevent slavery/kidnapping/etc., competitive markets will be more likely to produce those legal systems than governments.
Where those markets act with those interests, sure, i can see that.
Unfortunately, if the new generation of Silk Road type platform proves effective and resilient, I think that any large scale crime syndicate or trafficker with the wherewithal to pay is going to start running their own.
And granted, it may just be an arbitrary level of abstraction to say the state is necessarily any more just in generating or enforcing laws than a third-party entity, but I do believe that in the case of decentralized black markets, something other than the markets themselves are going to need to act in that stead, because there would otherwise be a conflict of interest in trying to rein in illegal activity in communities whose entire purpose is profiting from illegal activity.
Though I suppose there might be precedent, for the sake of the self-preservation of the whole, for an Anonymous-like group to step in and keep the real scum at bay.
Which might bring everything back full circle, either the Feds get called or vigilantes.
>There is a number of unhealthy uses of guns, like murder. Should we ban guns?
No, but I believe the state has a legitimate interest in regulating their sale and use.
But i'm not talking about guns in the abstract. I'm talking about the purposes that organizations involved in a black market gun trade would likely be putting them to. Collectors of firearms are not going to be using Silk Road 2. People who just want something to protect their home aren't likely going to be using it, either. The issue is the degree to which a black market, by virtue of it's purpose to evade law enforcement, would be used to facilitate criminal activity.
Or to extend your example further, no, we shouldn't ban cars, but we have every right to shut down chop shops.
I don't understand the willful ignorance of libertarians who make the claim that the state doesn't do anything outside of extorting people and ruling with guns.
Luckily, very few - if any - libertarians ever make such a claim. If anything, you're probably either misunderstanding what they're saying, or simply engaging in hyperbole to the point of, essentially, setting up a strawman.
Libertarians acknowledge that the govt sometimes does things that are, in some sense, "good". We just happen to consider that irrelevant, since "good" which requires violating the NIF principle is not justified in our worldview. And/or, some Libertarians will also argue that for almost every value of X, where X = "something the State does", that X either isn't actually needed at all, or would be provided more efficiently by a non-State mechanism.
I see this as more of a discussion of the politics of _why_ a black market should exist, more than recognizing that it does and people want it. There is never going to be a completely deregulated marketplace for everyone. A SilkRoad 2.0 is an idea for an elitist market where only the technically skilled can use it properly and correctly, and thus becomes self limiting on its own.
I see it like this: a few like minded people want to trade things that many high minded people would rather not exist or don't want to be openly sold (whichever you prefer) without having boot clodding storm troopers kick down your door and take away your ability to pursue life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This is just a simple progression/evolution of the black market.
Just wondering. Why do you think forcing companies into complying with some regulation is necessarily a good thing?
If the customers care about this kind of safety, the producers will voluntarily comply with some private standards and will pass some private certification to attract customers.
So that is definitely not a valid reason of where government is needed. It can be done without the govt and without coercion.
(I could expand on every point you consider to be a good reason for existence of the state if you wish.)
If you don't force companies to comply with regulations for the benefit of society, they will simply cut corners to increase the profit margins to the themselves and their shareholders. This is essentially true for any industry where there is potential for damage to the environment, or even their end consumers. I don't have any exotic links to theories or viewpoints on this, but it is my firm believe.
Consumers cannot necessary demand something if they're not aware of it (ie: EPA testing water supply for contaminants, USDA testing meat supply for salmonella). It's taken decades of pushing for the populace to get basic things like the Clean Food & Water Act(s) passed and be able to eat/drink/consume products being able to know what the ingredients are and not (for the most part) getting sick from doing so.
Regulation needs to and should exist for basic human services of life.
You're right that the state holds a monopoly on violence. You're wrong that the interests of the state are significantly misaligned from the interests of the people, or that black markets are wholly benign in nature. Failing to recognize how much you benefit from your government is, yes, I'm sorry to say it, childish - as is publicly condoning breaking the law in reaction. It's an overly-extreme position.
I do think that automated systems that don't require bureaucratic governance are a good idea, so I'm particularly annoyed by projects like this because it can create a negative public image. You can apply the concepts much more proactively.
In there, they don't allow you to practice peaceful protest to the current regime by simply walking into the streets and clapping. No signs, no speeches, no anything. Just a crowd clapping is outlawed. Among other things, they fined a one-handed (!) man for clapping (!).
Do you think it is proper to still practice obedience to the rulers in this case?
What is different in the case of anonymous voluntary exchange? Sure, they can outlaw clapping. Or breathing. Or being over 1m tall. Or anything. But just the fact that these people might tell you "breathing is bad" or "being 1m+ is terrible" does not make it actually this way.
Belarus has the Web, and will be aware of a project like this. DPR was just arrested by the Feds, and one of their primary sources was his forum posts. Do you see what I'm saying here? This is in poor judgement.
> You're wrong that the interests of the state are significantly misaligned from the interests of the people
You should read the news more often: Government shutdown for no valid reason, Wall Street corruption going unpunished and ongoing (those weren't the last financial scandals), the approval rate of Congress nearing the bottom, one could write a book about how the government has stopped representing the People...
I'm pretty much in total agreement with you, but to nitpick on one thing you said:
> as is publicly condoning breaking the law in reaction
_Peaceful_ civil disobedience campaigns played a large role in the Civil Rights movement and helped raise awareness leading to (in the US, at least) the Civil Rights Act - thereby reinforcing equal protections and voting rights.
The intent is important; and the NONVIOLENT aspect is especially important. But civil disobedience isn't always necessarily a bad thing. Nor is it always a childish suggestion.
> Failing to recognize how much you benefit from your government is, yes, I'm sorry to say it, childish
Did I ask the state to provide me with all these "benefits" in exchange for being enslaved and having guns and threats at me? If the government thinks I need its X, Y, and Z services, or whatever and uses it as a basis for theft, is it any good?
Is it different from, say, me saying that apples are good for you, therefore I can point a gun at you, violently take your money and buy you a fucking apple? You know, because it's good for you! No? Surely I am benefiting you in this case so you have to shut up and blindly obey.
Every single thing that the government does can be not only just provided, but provided more efficiently (and also more morally) on a free market.
The misalignment of state and public interests is not mutually exclusive with the people benefiting from the government. To use a deliberately childish (though still valid) analogy, livestock benefits a lot from farming, but I would argue that (personified) livestock's interests are not aligned with the interests of the farmers.
> Failing to recognize how much you benefit from your government is, yes, I'm sorry to say it, childish - as is publicly condoning breaking the law in reaction.
African Americans during the civil rights movement benefited from government (roads, etc.) and also used very public law-breaking as a fundamental tactic.
I think your referring to civil disobedience, which was a PR tactic for highlighting racial abuse under Jim Crow, not a system for selling contraband. I think a more accurate comparison would be to the speak-easys and moonshine of the 20s. Handing out flyers with your name and plans for a speak-easy market would've been just as misguided.
If that is the case of the author, thats probably true. I viewed this more as a discussion in the theoretical of what could be accomplished. Post a paper about how it could be done, and perhaps some more inclined (and anonymous) individual might do the work.
I am not terribly taken by the book as a whole, but you would probably profit from reading the first chapters of "23 things they don't tell you about capitalism" [0].
[0] you can find an epub with a simple google search, or listen to this talk by the author, who unfortunately has a thick korean accent: http://youtu.be/whVf5tuVbus?#t=4m
Just because it appears at first glance to be a tool to subvert the state doesn't mean you should dismiss the possibility of legitimate uses. Bitcoin, tor, bittorrent, etc.? Come on.
We might just have a semantic disagreement, but Wikipedia supports the definition that I'm using [1]:
> A black market or underground economy is the market in which goods or services are traded illegally. The key distinction of a black market trade is that the transaction itself is illegal.
It's presumptuous to claim that "not every law is oppressive." What might be unnoticeable to many people could become oppressive to you. Ultimately, the subjective ethics and conscience of an individual is more valid than any arbitrary system into which that person is thrown, on an individual basis. In other terms, that which is "worth fighting for" -- worth resistance to oppression -- is, as always, relative and subjective. Fortunately, quite a lot of people feel that it's extremely oppressive to inflict restrictions, caging, and great violence upon nonviolent, consenting people. Oppression comes in many forms. Given this thread, I'll use drugs as the context. A single lone person who wants to grow and use drugs is still oppressed (according to my ethical framework) even if the entirety of all other people on Earth, all 7+ billion, summarily and vehemently want to violently restrict that person from doing so.
>Fortunately, quite a lot of people feel that it's extremely oppressive to inflict restrictions, caging, and great violence upon nonviolent, consenting people.
I would agree with you here. However, I wouldn't necessarily agree that all laws are necessarily oppressive or, if they must be oppressive by your terms, need to be resisted. After all, there are cases of theft, vandalism, murder, rape, fraud, conspiracy, etc - all of which would require 'oppression' through the force of law for the good of the community.
I have no problem with your lone person who wants to use drugs and is harming no one - but laws in general presume consequences for violating norms within a society. If on the other hand, that lone user has to commit violent acts or their use poses a danger to others, then in my opinion their right to personal liberty has to be limited.
Indeed. My issue of great concern is that many people are unable to admit nor even understand the nature and negatives of their own actions and beliefs when their morality is forcefully imposed on others. This is not to say there aren't subjective positives in a person or group's views. This is only to say that there are also negatives.
The more one selectively filters and dismisses the negatives of forcefully imposing [what one wants] on others, the more that person becomes conditioned to accept violence. The continued path of this mindset is easily one where imprisonment and economic suppression, and the overall appeasement of violent systems, increasingly becomes a rational response to even trite conduct. Disobedience by those who are different becomes itself vilified. Ends begin to justify means. Force imposed upon nonviolent people that would otherwise be heinous becomes common.
In contrast, I find that the more someone begins to examine, to self-assess, the negative nature of his or her own actions, the less willing he or she is to use force to impose those subjective views. It leads to admission and mindfulness. Recognizing the violence [of self] can take one on a path of peace and tolerance [of others], where one begins to seek more progress through culture alone rather than through law.
Laws by their nature are oppressive. We'd agree that there are many variations of systems and laws that we might mutually favor in principle. Though, in fewer words, the more a system lends itself to arbitrary law, the more a system lends itself to tyranny. That's because oppression and violence -- in law or in other forms -- in and of itself is no justification. Systems protecting people from violent actions certainly become a resounding cause when they use forms of oppression to protect people from great oppression (e.g. rape, murder, etc.). Though the way systems of justice do it is largely unjustified (to me), in light of the astonishing increase of a prison-military-police industry and the society that brought it into existence. It's one of many systems with systemic problems, in dire need of critical change, humanity, compassion, and transparency.
This strikes me as extremely inappropriate. Don't publicly advertise tools for subverting the state.
OTOH, I can't imagine how anything could possibly be more appropriate. I think everyone should publicly advertise, and work on, tools for subverting the State.
No, because Tor is a tool for anonymizing Web traffic, and it's not against the law to use the Web anonymously. It is against the law, by definition, to participate in a black market.
Are you saying the right to share information without surveillance is on the same footing as the right to sell drugs? And even then, is it wise to address your disagreement with a law by creating a GitHub repo that details your plan to break it?
I'm not advocating compliance here. I'm just challenging this idea that we can beat the state through technical prowess, or that we should do it without being pressed into extraordinary circumstances. It's not just unwise, it's (regarding the "technical prowess") flat incorrect.
Drugs are a canary in the coal mine. If you lack the ability to share drugs over a medium without surveillance, then you know that you lack the ability to share information over a medium without surveillance. If you can't say "mail me three marijuanas please" without somebody listening in, then you can't say anything without somebody listening in.
There is no such thing as a system that provides privacy only for legal activities. Therefore if you want to fight for the freedom and ability to share information without surveillance, then you must design systems that can, incidentally or otherwise, be used to share drugs (and you must fight attempts to surveil existing systems.)
Why should the right to share information be on a different level than selling drugs? You can sell (share) powerful information. You can share information that would cause far, far more damage than any drugs will.
The readme advertises the project as a black market, as does the name.
EDIT: jlgreco, I can't reply to you, so I'll respond here.
> So the purpose isn't the problem, just the name? If Tor were instead named "Thing-to-subvert-the-state-omatic", would you then oppose efforts to popularize it?
The Silk Road was a black market, so 2.0 would need to be pretty explicit that it's NOT a black market to overcome that-- but it's not. It seems pretty intent on carrying that legacy.
I wouldn't call Tor the "Thing-to-subvert-the-state-omatic"; I'd call it the "Thing-to-avoid-surveillance-omatic." This, in keeping with the history of the Silk Road, I'd call the "Thing-to-sell-drugs-omatic."
So to be clear, do you oppose this because of what it facilitates, or do you oppose it because of what the author indents it to facilitate?
If the author gave it all of the same properties and abilities, claimed that he intended it to share knitting patterns, named it "Yarn Road", and never mentioned a single thing about drugs, would it bother you?
To a degree, yes. I'm in favor of virtual markets and currencies, but because they can increase the opportunities for lawful commerce and reduce the role of rent-seekers-- not mask illegal activity. His messaging is certainly what I find most bothersome, but I still wouldn't throw my weight behind a system that offered no means of regulation. Likewise, I wouldn't agree with a system that includes total passive surveillability either. There needs to be a considered balance.
I certainly would not play out my policy disagreements through system design, which is how this strikes me. It's far too risky, and certain to get your software (and life) shut down in the long run.
So the purpose isn't the problem, just the name? If Tor were instead named "Thing-to-subvert-the-state-omatic", would you then oppose efforts to popularize it?
Ageism is never good. However, it perhaps helps to explain his or her mentality. Conflating law with ethics is probably more likely in younger people given the dynamics of authority, or so it seems to me.
There's obviously no shortage of people of all ages who are prone to equating [an authority that commands obedience] with [an authority of subjective moral validity]. As any struggle for freedom and liberation movement throughout history will attest, the dynamics of law vs. ethics are often in deep conflict. Time after time, subservient people who "just follow orders" obey cruelty. Heroes resist and are sacrificed. I digress.
In the context of the drug war and voluntary interactions among consenting people, [illegal] markets are the logical way to maintain liberation and resistance to [legal] tyranny.
> Conflating law with ethics is probably more likely in younger people given the dynamics of authority, or so it seems to me.
Assuming that somebody progresses through Lawrence Kohlberg's 'stages of moral development' in order as they develop, that seems reasonable.
However, the development of this system seems to be evidence that the author does not conflate ethics and the law. Trading drugs is presumably illegal in the authors jurisdiction, yet the author presumably believes themself to be acting ethically in the development of a system that facilitates the trade of drugs. If the author were conflating the law and morality, then he likely would not develop this system because it would facilitate illegal(therefore immoral) behavior. This does not seem to be the case; the author seems to be capable of separating morality and legality.
I'm not sure if you're mistaken about who I'm referring to. My reply was in continued reference to the poster who called the mere act of posting about SR 2.0 "inappropriate."
> pfraze: "This strikes me as extremely inappropriate. Don't publicly advertise tools for subverting the state. ... Handle grievances with regulations or criminal code by organizing popular support for policy changes, not by building systems to break the law. Otherwise, expect to be treated as a criminal."https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510947
Equating resistance of tyranny, and even the discussion surrounding it, as being "inappropriate" alone exemplifies, at least partially, the conflation of authority with a moral imperative. Then he or she makes this clear by blatantly suggesting that the only [appropriate] method of resistance is limited to the context of authority. That's patently absurd, of course. In any real-world application of people attempting to liberate themselves conscientiously, wherever law is oppressing them, usually they cannot attempt to do so without serious action, resistance, and cultural pressure: not remaining shackled. Free action breaks barriers. It creates a social impetus for the increase of people to follow and change to occur (culturally or legally).
I think it's very unwise to do this given it's how DPR just got busted. You can disagree or not, but this is a question of consequence, not political theory. If you don't think publishing a project called Silk Road 2.0 will get you on a watch list, then ok. If you think this is the way to organize against the state, then good luck. But if you think this is just the comments section, and nothing's really going to come of it, then here's what I have to say:
DPR doesn't have millions of people rallying for him-- because he was a drug dealer. He put a hit out on an employee, and he made $80million by taking a cut. There is no more clear way to flaunt the law than to do it for a large profit, and that's what he did. Whether he used Tor and Bitcoin or kept a notebook ledger and walked between houses, his message would be the same: that'll be 5%, please.
Free action does indeed break barriers, and new technologies change the world, but if there were ever an industry that got better treatment by a government, US Tech would be it. I don't have a problem with fighting oppression. I have a problem with squandering privilege while tying yourself to the oppressed. If you are in this conversation and you're not afraid of ramifications, yes, you have a privilege.
People of "privilege" are often in the class doing the destroying.
Our opinions may be diametrically opposite. The only people "squandering" anything are the ones who enjoy parts of liberation, and agree with it, yet aren't even willing to at least stand in vocal solidarity with those who actually fight for it. The only ones who "squander" anything squeeze as much opportunity as they can out of freedoms and stand silent, from complacency or from fear, while civil liberties are destroyed. People rejecting oppression and acting upon what they know is right are doing the opposite of squandering.
One of the great lessons to nurture a skeptical mind is to learn to question everything. Question everything. Question everything especially when it's in the face of those who stake a claim to authority. Often the people who seize authority are people most eager to dominate and objectify others, and to blindly follow abusive orders. The DoJ and state entities, as it happens, are motivated by political victory, increased funding, and indirect monetary backing from corporate entities with ulterior motives. Impartiality doesn't exist, and is near nonexistent without a lot of money. "Truth" is rarely a motivating factor unless it's convenient. The US justice system is rotten in countless aspects. This especially includes the FBI. We can agree that it's good to not become a useless pawn or useless martyr to them when wise options exist. However, a voluntary market is a peaceful, wise option for many people. Yes, the system is still primed to threaten, cage, and destroy people who engage in it. It is that system and appeasers who should be vilified, not peaceful people. They are not "squandering." They are merely trying to live their lives.
You assume that DPR "put a hit on someone." Very little of what was chatted about makes sense whether or not the transcripts are accurate and attributable to him (and not someone else). To my distant vantage, the transcript suggests the person thought he was talking to a fake and was essentially toying with the fake; on the internet, we're all super heroes and can say anything extreme, facetiously. Who knows...
Wise is the one who continually perceives and questions. Ignorant and careless is the one who swiftly reaches judgment.
Given that PGP keys were extensively used by vendors on Silk Road, wouldn't it be possible to use Silk Road profile and transaction data (I'm sure there exist some site dumps out there) to bootstrap a web of trust?
Then a distributed hash table or similar structure can be used to publish product listings, signed transaction data, and feedback to keep everyone updated on who's to be trusted or not. There would be no explicit escrow but lots of people trusted the feedback history and "Finalized Early" on Silk Road without getting scammed.
One of the features of SR was that the money was laundered on entrance and exit to silk road. So you could not tell whose money went to who (despite the bitcoin ledger being public). This proposal is missing that critical feature.
Upthread there's a link to an Ars Technica article [1], which has this line:
> He even ran a program called a "tumbler" to route incoming Bitcoin payments through a complicated series of dummy transactions, so as to make them infeasible to trace through the public Bitcoin blockchain.
I think what he's saying that because all money went into one account and out of one account, from the outside you couldn't tell who was sending money to who. It means I can pose as both the buyer and the seller, let silk road take a cut, and turn a big block of known bitcoins into small chunks of unknown bitcoins
Distributed services are the future, it seems. I predict (rather boldly, so I may be wrong) that the next wave in computer technology will be the move from centralized servers to a distributed framework. I foresee the next Microsoft/Google/Facebook being a company that brings this idea to reality. (Not specifically the Silk Road bit, but the general paradigm of distributed services.)
That may be a very accurate prediction. With the rest of the world afraid of using the US's cloud services for fear of NSA monitoring, something is going to crop up to take its place. First it will be some kind of personal usage, like p2p for trading pirated MP3s and eventually someone will start using it for a business, editing spreadsheets and the like.
Decentralized and crypto Office being used by Joe Q Public!
In SR1 wasn't an additional feature of having the money go through a centralized party that neither party had access to the others BC wallet id? Would doing it this way negatively impact anonymity?
Maybe bitcoins could be moved around in an onion-routing scheme similar to Tor. You might be able to see that a particular wallet ended up with the money but it wouldn't necessarily be possible to see where they came from originally.
1. Transaction scripts in place of 100% human arbitrage. Reasonable feature.
2. hand-wavy name coin reputation thingy. This idea makes no sense.
3. Being federated would be 'neat', despite the example project being abandoned and largely non-functional. Or you could just use Freenet instead of Tor?
> 2. hand-wavy name coin reputation thingy. This idea makes no sense.
Using namecoin to keep track of identities makes perfect sense. That's precisely what it was created to do. See http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases
Obviously the reputations would need to be stored somewhere, but using Namecoin to say "this arbitrator is definitely the arbitrator you are trying to use for arbitration" would work perfectly well.
Namecoin can keep track of the initial date that the particular identity was registered. It can allow for the owner of the identity to quickly update information for everyone to see in the blockchain. It helps a great deal when it comes to keeping track of identities. You can store up to 1kb of data inside a namecoin registration.
The above cannot be said of Bitcoin addresses or GPG.
I see the problem with Silk Road not essentially being with the currency or the network mode itself, those both seem effective and appear to have been functioning properly at the time of its shut down (in so far as we know). I think the main issue is the trying to get physical items from point A to point B without getting intercepted/apprehended. It's all well and good to move digital items without getting noticed, but once you start shipping things you have to used pre-existing structures (ie: USPS, Fedex, et al.) which, if not run by the government, has no issue with giving any and all information to them. How to solve this is more complicated than the other parts, IMO.
Secondly, the arbitration through a third party I could see as being corruptible, if that third party is known and has no legal ramification/justification for just acting on their own good recognizance. It's like there needs to be a black market escrow that can't be bribed and won't steal the money.
Also, I'd just like to add that there are other potentials for connectivity outside of Tor & I2P. Older networks such as Freenet allow this kind of node hosting without having to "invent the wheel" and use some kind of new way to host a forum -- it probably just needs some oil added to the wheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
Basically, when you want to buy something, instead of sending bitcoin manually, the marketplace generates a payment request for you, with two outputs — merchant (the good price) & marketplace (the fee) + some unique ID in the comment field so that the service can link your payment to the order. It can be a QR code or bitcoin:// link or something.
Would a distributed marketplace even charge a fee? I would assume all users would be happily compensated by the existence of the marketplace. The lack of fees also increase margins/decreases price
Quite right. Still, I think this whole libertarian concept is probably based on the idea of _someone_ making some money somewhere along the lines. :)
I assume the mediators would need to be paid, at the bare minimum, probably moderators to filter out junk and spam and whatever other unforeseen circumstances pop up.
Horribly underspecified. Reputation based third party arbitration is not even close to a solved problem. The bitcoin block chain does provide a new potential tool in making reputation systems more reliable (a distributed repository of public/private key pairs enables you to reliably tie reputation to a persistent transaction history), but there are lots of free parameters in such a scheme that need to be done right.
Additionally, with the node idea, the issue is that most people, including drug dealers, don't want to be mirroring lots of illegal content on their boxes. The set of people who can follow simple rules related to posting on forums and mailing items is much much larger than the set of people who can roll a secure node in a network.
The nodes will not "mirror" content of other nodes, no. The nodes will be just storing their own data + provide a UI for browsing content of that node as well as the content of other nodes. So technically you're not hosting anything illegal even if some other node does.
Freenet gets around this by having the local data store encrypted and invisible to the local user. You may or may not be hosting illegal/terrible things, but you (and more importantly, the bad guys with guns) don't know either.
Yep. I fully expect forums like that to become a dominant mode of communication in the near and medium-term future. All it really needs is for someone to make for it a slick and easy to use interface. If I was in a position at the moment to found a startup, this would absolutely be the field I would found it in.
I don't see any feasible financial model, how will you induce cash flows since you'll need nodes to run the service and these nodes will also be clients? - If I understand correctly that is.
That is a good question. I will first repeat the advice often given to startup founders: Get it working first, find a was to monetize it second.
Beyond that, I have had a few thoughts. Yes, I actually agree that this would be a harder endeavour to monetize than most startups, but if it really came to it, you could make a profit. I did not really go deep into these considerations, as (like I said) I don't actually have the resources at the moment to make it a reality, but my main idea was to integrate it somehow with the bitchain. AFter that, there are several ways you can profit. Say, have each post cost a fraction of a bitcoin to propagate it along. It would encourage others to catch the posts and pass them around in the same way bitcoin miners getting bitcoins for mining encourages bitcoin mining. And then I could charge a commision on that.
That is one example, of course I would have to way up all the pros and cons of each approach, and of course there is the drawback of any monetization system necessarily introducing some point of centralization, even in a otherwise entirely decentralised system.
I want to see this implemented for buying/selling designs for 3D printable things, and other supplies for Makers. I'm talking really basic things like the OSE's tractor designs.
Also: is there any way to use these scripts as a form of DRM? The biggest weakness to current DRM schemes is that the validity of a license depends on a trusted party -- the seller, or something like Steam. While such a scheme won't keep people from outright pirating digital goods, I think I would rather trust a p2p DRM scheme than depending on say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to stay in business.
> is there any way to use these scripts as a form of DRM?
If you aim for consumer friendliness, you shouldn't do DRM in the first place.
> I would rather trust a p2p DRM scheme than depending on say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble to stay in business
Since DRM is by definition "defective on purpose" (or "defective by design", as some NGOs say), there is no reason to trust any DRM scheme - p2p or centralized.
Thanks for sharing, this was an interesting read. However, I failed to understand in how far this establishes a good use-case for DRM.
This story is about a US citizen who started a company in the EU (he chose UK), which was easy, but failed to open a local bank account there, no matter how hard he tried. He finally solved this problem via Bitcoin.
He wanted to operate in the EU because his new business concept was based on the very strict consumer protection law in Germany (in particular, the UsedSoft v Oracle ruling).
So from this story I learned:
1) that Bitcoin is very handy, and
2) that strict consumer protection laws are not only good for customers, but can also be good for business.
But I don't see how this story makes a good case for DRM. I merely see how DRM could be used to prevent his business model and to circumvent the German consumer protection laws (at least partly). Is it this what you meant?
Ahh, you missed the essential point. :-) The point is that that you can use the p2p ledger to publicly track rights, like a notary public without the notary. Normally, this is centralized in a few hands, vested in a trusted source (the government, or a third party). Property rights, titles, deeds, all are recorded by various government offices like the county clerks.
What makes the DRM issue really about power (and NOT about "freedom" or "consumer friendliness") is that current DRM schemes puts all the power into seller. The most vocal dissent against DRM, however, when examined, really about retaining the power that comes with cheap computing.
This is no way for society to function. We're not the Wild Wild West and I certainly do not want a tyrannical social order either. The solution is a decentralization of power. Being able to use an untrusted mediator is a big deal, of which a DRM method is one small application of this.
In this guy's case, he is selling used software in the EU. By being able to tie the DRM to the bitcoin transactions, it better allows for used software to be passed from one person to another in a fair and equitable way. It can be done in a way where the software owners have little to complain, that if you're going to resell the software and treat it like a tangible good, then at least that gets tracked.
Now, I've heard arguments that, software and other digital "goods" are not inherently tangible, and should have no scarcity restrictions on it. That any form of DRM is therefore arbitrary. However, that fails to consider two points. First, is that authorship and creative endeavor is itself not as easily replicable as the digital good. When you pay for a digital right, you're actually paying for the effort put into the creative endeavor -- although in practice, the owner and controller of a right often is not the creator. The second, is that all types of property are inherently arbitrary. There is nothing sacred about property, though a lot of people have deep, unexamined, emotional attachments to property.
I actually find it hilarious that people get angry about how arbitrary digital rights are ... and yet fail to consider that all property rights are inherently arbitrary. Who owns the water, the land? Who owns the air? Who owns the animals and other living beings on earth? We humans like to think we are the owns, but we not really. We draw arbitrary lines around land and other resources and trade pieces of paper designating ownership. Why not get angry about that?
> If you aim for consumer friendliness, you shouldn't do DRM in the first place.
> Since DRM is by definition "defective on purpose" (or "defective by design", as some NGOs say), there is no reason to trust any DRM scheme - p2p or centralized.
Those are unexamined assumptions that are driven more by emotion than anything.
What's up with using github for what amounts to a text post? It makes the link misleading (implying that you actually have some code), and it's not a great use of github anyway.
Sounds interesting, but I'd have to see it work in a live practice. There's a lot of neat and interesting protocols out there that look good on paper, but in a real world setting completely fail. That's why we've seen a disintegration of services that run outside of port 80 (www).
A title like Silk Road 2.0 makes me think you want attention more than you want a distributed anonymous marketplace. Why not focus on having a distributed marketplace that also happens to be anonymous instead of focusing on the anonymous aspect so much?
The problem really boils down to reputation and trust. If you can create a "portable" reputation that can move among decentralized marketplaces the rest is relatively easy.
This is way way off topic but it has been really bothering me lately: Why do so many people misspell "losing"? In the wrap up of the OP:
>The federated distributed marketplace will be much more difficult to shut down. And even in the case of shut down, no one is loosing their money.
I have been seeing this everywhere lately and someone even tried to argue with me that I was misspelling it. Why is this such a common screw up? Lose only has one o as does lost. I see no plausible explanation.
It's one of only a few words that I keep misspelling over and over again. But why post a comment dedicated solely to proper spelling of "lose" and wondering why so many people misspell it? What's the point?
If anything, you could submit a PR or just say "hey, there is a typo".
There's nothing illegal in this repo, sure -- but definitely don't even think of implementing it yourself. Or even use it.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took...