Yeah is it username “benson” and password “hedges” this time?
It would standout but then what can you do? Find the private key for that new address somewhere? You could watch where it paid out to but the user could create a few thousand new addresses and spread it all out so you wouldn’t know which addresses were his and which addresses were payment.
For me, the most shocking aspect of this entire story is that Ulbricht was residing in the US. With all that we know about the NSA and the police state mentality of our DEA, it seems like such a person would avoid the US at all cost.
if only the owners where from a different country. Columbia or Portugal or something. i’d have moved away the second I had the cash to and re-start operations from there.
the war on drugs is complete bullshit. Have doctors prescribe psychotropics to whomever wants them and deemed healthy enough to consume them safely (IE no meth if you have heart conditions)
or have them work like methadone clinics, where you can decrease your dose or quit anytime you wish, with obligated visits to both doctors & counsillors, who will do all they can for you to stay safe.
and obviously, TAX THE SHIT AND GET OUT OF YOUR FUCKING DEBT YOU DUMB FUCKS,
What surprises me is how many people all over the net voice their support for Silk Road. Do those people react the same way when an old-fashioned brick and mortar drug dealer is arrested? Is it suddenly ok if you are tied to enough net buzzwords?
Aside from the hitman thing — online drugs definitely seems considerably safer than shady guy in the park at night drugs.
My shady guy in the park at night neighborhood drug dealer IS doing the online thing too. His website/seller profile on silk road made him look a lot cleaner than he really was, and anonymity rocks, so you never even knew.
At least with shady guy in the park, you knew not to buy things.
I don’t really get how people are dumb enough to think that all of this wouldn’t happen. “Hey, I’m going to purchase illegal drugs and create a permanent record of the purchase connected to an address under my name! Nothing could possibly go wrong!”
I know, right!
“And not only am I going to create a permanent record attached to my address, I’m going to use a method of payment that is 100% open with records of all transactions being published to EVERYONE EVERYWHERE.”
Keep in mind public/private encryption is often used in systems like this. The person selling publishes her public key and the person buying would use that key to encrypt their address.
Yes, but…
In the case of the hitman, DPR had the “blackmailer’s” street address. I suspect he had more than that.
This all reminds me of The Big Lebowsky
Walter Sobchak: You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it, believe me.
The Dude: Yeah, but Walter…
Walter Sobchak: Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o’clock this afternoon… with nail polish. These fucking amateurs…
It does seem surprisingly amateur for people rolling in so many dollars.
Well, I’m not surprised. They convinced themselves they were safe because of Tor and Bitcoin.
I know people like that. Utterly convinced that Tor, Bitcoin, PGP, etc have ZERO possible attack vectors and are completely perfect. False sense of security.
They weren’t rolling in dollars though, they were rolling in bitcoins, which are somewhat arduous to turn into dollars, especially if you’re trying to maintain a low profile. It’s a pretty safe bet that the government monitors the exchanges and takes note of anybody converting a lot of bitcoins.
The guy was a joke from the get go apparently. Why is anyone valorizing this bozo? He wasn’t even coming close to doing the thing he claimed to be doing and was caught at it right out of the gate. They had hundreds of sales on silk road of drugs to law enforcement. They set him up on two murder for hire charges just to be sure. They did everyone a favor. It was never the least bit a functional thing.
$80 million in commissions on $1.2 billion in drugs sold. And they don’t have that $80 million, you know (the money they seized was user accounts). It’s not what I would consider a joke.
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