[ExI] Silk Road demise

[Mirco Romanato]

Silk Road is a template for future drugs and enhancements markets when
they will be  banned.

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Apparently the fall of Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts was entirely
caused by the carelessness of DPR in concealing his identity.

Like with Chernobyl a number of mistakes were needed to cause the end
result and more were done.

By the way, alternatives exist and are already on the market.
Black Market Reloaded and Sheep Market Place are taking up the migration
of customers just now (with some problem given the numbers of new
incoming buyers). The vendors are pretty well the sames on Silk Road.

Silk Road processes 9 millions of bitcoin in sales in two years (around
1.2 billions of USD), netting around 600 K bitcoins in fees (around 80 M
USD at the current exchange). I'm sure the current competitors are
busily taking up all his users and more competitors are evaluating how
enter the market.

The Federals bought more than 100 items (drugs) on Silk Road and they
were just able to indict DPR after they tricked him to help them to sell
1 Kg of coke, caught an aide of DPR and then tricked him to pay (with a
bank account) to kill the same guy (posing to blackmail him).

In the end this is a question of survival of the fittest.
The careless, the stupid, the shortsighted are culled by the police, the
others move to occupy their place on the market. And they will be more
difficult to catch.

Anyway, the police took two years to take it down, even with so many
mistakes done. They bough 100 samples of drugs. This tell me they
invested a lot of efforts and resources to find him and locate him. How
many resources have they to devote to this? If he didn't do these
initial mistakes, how much time they would have needed to locate him?
Four years? Ten years?

They took down Napster but they didn't stopped people from sharing.
They took down innumerable drug traffickers and drug trafficking is
unaffected. The stuff is cheaper and cheaper, a sign of a efficient market.

As a commenter on Reddit put it:

"From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013, there were 1,229,465
transactions completed on the site.
These transactions involved 146,946 unique buyer accounts, and 3,877
unique vendor accounts.

this shit is huge"

Mirco