Quote:
Originally Posted by fluffheadsr
interesting... people actually buy from silk road? What's to keep the DEA or whatever from posting sales and then beating your door down when you put in your shipping address?
I believe the DEA to be actively participating on both ends of the Silk Road equation. The beauty of that system is such that you buy drugs today from a DEA agent posing as a regular drug dealer on SR, then the DEA agent would know who is buying 1 gram of cocaine. I highly doubt the DEA is trying to bust every 17 year old in the nation buying 1/8th of weed discretely with bitcoins. There have been sales of drugs totaling over 5,000 EUR that have taken place, and in this situation I would wonder if either side is DEA or similar organization. The rating system can be helpful, but the DEA has a warchest of high quality drugs they could sell in very small quantities to quickly make a large positive rating.
Selling drugs on SR seems safer than buying them in small quantities. The DEA is certainly buying lots of SR drugs. They are getting the packages of drugs delivered to them. They can try and fingerprint, they can try and look for postage to see where it came from. But a very careful seller can ship from many locations in a 100 mile radius and be all over California in heavily populated areas. You could try and time-stamp a postage purchase from a camera and pull the tapes from that post office, but all the packages look the same, and standard sized priority mail boxes are always used. If you bought pre-paid priority mail stamps you could just drop the packages in one of those drive-though drop boxes all over my city and yours.
The way the USA government exerts it's control over us is via the money. No longer do they mount an army to shut down MegaUpload and Online poker - they just seized the money. When the money can no longer be seized, it seems the individual humans become empowered to do as they wish.