Silk Road hit the news wires again but this time it's because the authorities caught
up with the Dread Pirate. I was talking with a friend of mine today and mentioned
this to him and he was completely lost as to what I was talking about.
He didn't know the "Silk Road" was a place where you could order illicit drugs and all manner of illicit other stuff and have it delivered to your door. He hadn't heard of the "Dread Pirate Roberts" and didn't get the movie reference. For those who prefer the convenience of mail order Cocaine this is going to be a problem. For those who used the service it's going to be a huge problem.
What is interesting is the DEA, FBI etc have been trying to crack this case for years now and suddenly they got lucky because apparently the Dread Pirate was foolish enough to order nine fake ID's on his own website. Somehow these ID's were intercepted (it could be the fake ID's were part of larger sting ).
They interviewed him and decided to watch him. They also obtained his Comcast account ISP records.
Using Underwear Gnome sleuthing techniques they gum shoed their way to the Silk Road server and commandeered it.
Hmmm, there appears to be large holes in the narrative but the narrative isn't complete yet.
Keep in mind though one of the things Snowden revealed in his leaks is the documents show that the NSA goes to considerable effort to reveal data gathered through its advanced capabilities only when it is possible to come up with a more innocent possible source (a “parallel construction”).
What I am saying is there is no way in hell a guy running a Billion dollar illegal business, who understands crypto currencies, encryption and encryption gotchas (if you don't know what you are doing) is going to use his home computer and his own internet connection to administer a website like Silk Road. He was smart enough to be able to hide the Millions of Dollars he made on the site in the form of bitcoins offline presumably. He was able to convert some of those coins to dollars to pay his rent. He obviously wasn't smart enough to get out of the USA though.
To get an idea of just how big the operation was:
The criminal complaint revealed that the site had collected revenues of some 9.5 million bitcoin since 2011, the equivalent today of $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions for Ross Ulbricht, who allegedly ran the site under the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts.”
There are only about 11.75 million bitcoin in circulation. There were even fewer when Silk Road first began—the supply of bitcoin will steadily increase until there are 21 million in existence.
If you want to know more about the Silk Road then load up TOR or downlod something like TAILS and start searching around or just go here for this brilliant analysis http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road
this to him and he was completely lost as to what I was talking about.
He didn't know the "Silk Road" was a place where you could order illicit drugs and all manner of illicit other stuff and have it delivered to your door. He hadn't heard of the "Dread Pirate Roberts" and didn't get the movie reference. For those who prefer the convenience of mail order Cocaine this is going to be a problem. For those who used the service it's going to be a huge problem.
What is interesting is the DEA, FBI etc have been trying to crack this case for years now and suddenly they got lucky because apparently the Dread Pirate was foolish enough to order nine fake ID's on his own website. Somehow these ID's were intercepted (it could be the fake ID's were part of larger sting ).
They interviewed him and decided to watch him. They also obtained his Comcast account ISP records.
Using Underwear Gnome sleuthing techniques they gum shoed their way to the Silk Road server and commandeered it.
Hmmm, there appears to be large holes in the narrative but the narrative isn't complete yet.
Keep in mind though one of the things Snowden revealed in his leaks is the documents show that the NSA goes to considerable effort to reveal data gathered through its advanced capabilities only when it is possible to come up with a more innocent possible source (a “parallel construction”).
What I am saying is there is no way in hell a guy running a Billion dollar illegal business, who understands crypto currencies, encryption and encryption gotchas (if you don't know what you are doing) is going to use his home computer and his own internet connection to administer a website like Silk Road. He was smart enough to be able to hide the Millions of Dollars he made on the site in the form of bitcoins offline presumably. He was able to convert some of those coins to dollars to pay his rent. He obviously wasn't smart enough to get out of the USA though.
To get an idea of just how big the operation was:
The criminal complaint revealed that the site had collected revenues of some 9.5 million bitcoin since 2011, the equivalent today of $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions for Ross Ulbricht, who allegedly ran the site under the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts.”
There are only about 11.75 million bitcoin in circulation. There were even fewer when Silk Road first began—the supply of bitcoin will steadily increase until there are 21 million in existence.
If you want to know more about the Silk Road then load up TOR or downlod something like TAILS and start searching around or just go here for this brilliant analysis http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road
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