How Drugs and Paranoia Doomed Silk Road | Hacker News Reader

How Drugs and Paranoia Doomed Silk Road

vanityfair.com

44 pointspmcpinto68 comments

It'd be nice to read something about Silk Road written by someone who isn't a drug war fanboy. It gets annoying to read all the paternalistic and contemptuous banter that the author fires off at anyone who dares defy his fundamentalist prohibitionist ideology:

> college-aged line of argumentation

> precocious and edgy libertarian.

> that he had been held accountable for his decision to destroy other people’s lives in order to protect his business, rather than being able to look the other way, as so many successful tech C.E.O.’s do

> If there was one thing that stood out, it was Ulbricht’s inability to see how his creation was being used for evil, even when he was the one committing the sin

> In the Age of Trump, Silicon Valley’s job is no longer to move fast and break things. Instead, it is to consider how its technologies can be used for horrendous evil. Sadly, Ross Ulbricht didn’t learn this until he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

I mean, they were selling fentanyl. You don't have to be some sort of hard-line prohibitionist to think that making your living selling fentanyl to kids over the Internet is not in society's best interest.

The only reason fentanyl ever got made and sold illicitly is that prohibition creates an extremely strong incentive for everyone in the supply chain to avoid detection (if you get caught, you spend a few decades locked inside a cage, no fun) -- and increasing potency/volume is an excellent way to do so. This is known as the "iron law of prohibition": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

The drug war is the reason opioid use has shifted from opium smoking and laudanum-eating to injectable heroin to fentanyl and to literal carfentanil (which is so potent it's been used as a chemical weapon). Indeed, you remove prohibition altogether, fentanyl will disappear from the market, because there won't be any incentive to minimise volume of product to avoid surveillance/arrest/imprisonment.

DEA doorkicking is the only reason illicit fentanyl ever became a thing and it's absurd to suggest that more doorkicking and arrests are going to solve this problem. Don't like fentanyl being sold? Cool. Take it up with those who are to blame -- the creators and enforcers of these laws.

The mass production and overperscription of opiates by Big Pharma is not in societies best interest either. Where do you think that Fentanyl came from?

No, it's not. But being against Silk Road selling it doesn't mean we also don't want Rx sales to be more closely scrutinized.

Saying, "But what about Big Pharma, huh?" isn't an effective argument, as many of us against Silk Road are also against their practices, and we'd like to see government agents investigating them more, as well.

>being against Silk Road selling it doesn't mean we also don't want Rx sales to be more closely scrutinized.

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that, I'm just trying to find the root problem rather than attacking a branch of it that will grow right back - which seems like a waste of time to me.

Mexico due to a new and simpler clandestine process, not Big Pharma.

China, actually.

Also a problem.

that's like saying people die from car accidents and coal power so why not legalize assassinations. Just because there are drugs with potential negative effects being sold legally for medicinal purposes is not a good argument for legalizing the recreational use of hard drugs.

The only argument that matters for legalizing the recreational use of hard drugs is bodily autonomy.

There may be other arguments to criminalize the distribution of hard drugs. But the idea that you can be penalized for putting some substance into your own body by your own volition outright stinks of using law to enforce morals.

Every law is enforcing morals. Why is it illegal to murder, because society considers it immoral, why is it illegal to steal, because society considers it immoral. One of the costs of being a social creature is the willingness to circumvent our will to the will and moral standards of our society.

Comparing taking someone's life or, less importantly, their property to getting high shows a terrible lack distinction and treats what is, at its worst, a mental or physical health issue and at its best someone just getting a buzz as criminal conduct.

Looking at the world without nuance makes for a pretty cruel place, at which point it wouldn't be uncharitable for someone to say fuck your morals. Don't forget, societies have become better places by breaking unjust laws.

>Comparing taking someone's life or, less importantly, their property to getting high shows a terrible lack distinction

But that's not what I'm doing.

>Don't forget, societies have become better places by breaking unjust laws.

Sure that's true, but laws designed with the intention people from injecting potentially harmful substances into their bodies would hardly qualify as those "terribly unjust laws that must be opposed."

If they were making all people of a certain race wear symbols or forcing them into concentration camps, then you have unjust laws worthy of being opposed. That is not on the same level as laws that ban certain substances because research have shown them to have great potential to harm physical and mental health.

If you think that throwing drug addicts into prisons rather than rehabilitation centers is harmful (as your comment seems to suggest) you may have a point. However, that is an argument for prison and sentencing reform not an argument for legalization.

> laws designed with the intention people from injecting potentially harmful substances into their bodies would hardly qualify as those "terribly unjust laws that must be opposed."

They are. Once again, they violate the basic principle of bodily autonomy - you are the sole owner of your own body, and you have the right to do whatever you want with it, so long as such activities are not inevitably harmful to others. By claiming that you have the right to limit the substances that people choose to use for recreational purposes, you implicitly assert that you have the right to control their bodies without their consent.

> If you think that throwing drug addicts into prisons rather than rehabilitation centers is harmful (as your comment seems to suggest) you may have a point. However, that is an argument for prison and sentencing reform not an argument for legalization.

Throwing "drug addicts" (which is itself very fuzzily defined, and the law seems to be treating all users as addicts by default, even though with e.g. marijuana the vast majority of users are not addicted to it) into rehabilitation centers instead of prisons is less harmful - but it's still harmful, since it still limits their freedom. The only reasonable argument in favor of this is "lesser evil", i.e. if if doing so prevents a greater non-consensual harm from happening - but that is not the case.

Prohibition on drug use is fundamentally about restricting people's voluntary choices with respect to their own bodies, and is not any different from laws regulating sexual mores (from anti-miscegenation laws and sodomy laws to sex toy bans).

It also has the very unfortunate side effect of criminalizing those for whom drug use may no longer be consensual, but who cannot seek help for it because doing so would be admitting to a crime. It doesn't matter if you do a sentencing reform - so long as use remains illegal, by definition, admitting to it remains some kind of risk (if not risk of imprisonment, then financial risk of a fine, or reputational risk of getting arrested and having a record of that etc). The only way to stop further victimization of victims of drug abuse is to fully decriminalize use.

It's illegal to murder and steal, because these actions directly harm other people. Now, yes, the notion that harming others is bad is fundamentally a question of morality as well. But it's much lower level than what's traditionally called "legislating morality".

OK, so I don't know the specifics. But the major problem with fentanyl is thinking that you're buying heroin, or some other weaker opiate, or another drug entirely. If the seller is honest about what they're selling, and clearly discusses safe dosages, fentanyl arguably isn't especially dangerous.

Fentanyl is also dangerous because the lethal dose is close to the recreational dose so even knowing the purity and doses is risky.

That doesn't seem to be the case. I find that the therapeutic index is ~270, vs ~70 for morphine and ~25 for heroin. The potency, however, is dramatically greater. So I would expect that dealers would cut it enough that easily measurable dosages would be required. It is notoriously hard to uniformly cut drugs as potent as fentanyl or LSD, I admit.

Ah, thanks for this. The last bit of research I know about cutting agents is quite old now.

http://www.cph.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/cut-a-guide...

That only has a couple of mentions of fentanyl, and seems to suggest that fentanyl is found in stuff that's sold as heroin.

Yes, that's the standard problem. And there's often no disclosure about heroin boosted with fentanyl. On darknet markets, I gather that fentanyl was at least marketed as fentanyl.

But yes, I agree that it's a disturbing product. Ratings based on user feedback don't mean much when users die before they can submit a poor rating.

This sounds so made up, what drug dealer cuts his weak drugs with more powerful drugs?

Fentanyl has extensive legitimate applications; drug dealers who are stealing from medical supplies won't generally have access to heroin or similar, but will usually have access to Fentanyl.

Right, but wouldn't they sell the Fentanyl for more than heroin?

they were selling fentanyl.

"They" (assuming you mean Silk Road) were not selling fentanyl. Vendors using Silk Road were. Might sound like nitpicking, but I think there is an important distinction. If person A and person B are planning a crime using gmail, is Google responsible?

I don't think "drug war fanboy" is a reasonable inference to draw from this, and I don't perceive any of the support for prohibition that you do.

Yeah, I am pretty sure the 'evil' the article is talking about is the hiring of hitman to kill people. I am pretty sure we can all agree that is bad.

Yeah everyone who "has an issue" with coverage of Silk Road or the treatment of Ulbricht seems disturbingly eager to gloss over him trying to have people killed.

There are some people who remain open to the possibility that he never actually believed that people were being assassinated. It seemed to me that the whole assassination thing was a barely believable backstory used for a shakedown. Ulbricht conceivably paid the ransom to prevent the leak of user data, knowing full well that nobody was being killed. I came to this conclusion after reading a lot about this story; not just headlines (I did not read this article however).

I'm just explaining that many people are not just "glossing over" that. But who knows what really happened.

In the event that he thought someone really was being killed, it doesn't detract from the motivations he had in the beginning. Power corrupts, he created a monster, etc.

I know I can't write a comment that will settle this particular controversy but I feel compelled to point out that it's only on an internet message board that someone could believe that an elaborate shakedown involving the creation a record of having ordered and verified multiple assassinations, a shakedown in which your eventual vindication depends on a favorable account from the person shaking you down, is the less likely explanation of events than someone simply ordering someone's assassination --- which, if you follow the news, is something that happens all the time, and something that almost always has this exact outcome.

This particular debate reminds me of the epistemological certainty people had about Hans Reiser's serial killer friend, and the notion that the police were fixated on Reiser and not the serial killer because they were put off by nerds.

I don't gloss over it, but like I explained here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14216073, he was never formally charged nor convicted of it, there were multiple federal agents (Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force IV) whose corruptness was intimately involved with the hitmen incident, and finally, violence in the drugs trade is a product of prohibition, not one inherent to darknet drug markets or the drug trade in general.

Tbh after this nonsense happened I'm utterly sure that everyone involved in darknet markets firmly avoids doing anything involving hitmen anyway, given how literally every so-called "hitman" online is either a fed, a scammer, or a corrupt fed.

It's not true that he was never formally charged with it. It was a factual element of his conspiracy charge; it was brought into the case in such a way that not only did the defense have the opportunity to rebut it, but, because it was one of the legs of the primary charge in the case, the obligation to do so.

Ah! I stand corrected; I take back all I said about the murder-for-hire stuff.

Ah yes, always good to know that what keeps these self-described freedom crusaders from having people murdered is that they might get caught, not you know, the idea that it's wrong.

Though wasn't that because the targeted person was threatening to harm thousands of other people?

Edit: Nevermind, this is one of the other hits. I was thinking of the "Chemist" one. Certainly killing the guy over money isn't right.

Then could you please explain how you interpret the phrasing "college-aged line of argumentation" used to describe the arguments against prohibition? I don't see any reason to say "college-aged" other than to casually dismiss these arguments as being childish (without actually having the courage to argue the opposite side).

His arguments can be childish and their implications still correct. The strength of an argument is orthogonal to its consequences. It's easy to formulate a bad argument for a valid idea. I don't know how many more ways to say that I can come up with.

The author literally gloats that Ulbricht will never live outside a concrete box, as due punishment ("he had been held accountable") for the sole "sin" (his word, not mine) of creating a drug marketplace.

There is no mention that the internet hitmen saga is a predictable and avoidable negative effect of prohibition (having to resolve disputes by extrajudicial violence instead of having access to lawyers/courts/arbitration), there's no mention that none of the murders-for-hire had actually been done (every internet hitman is a fed and/or scammer) and he, AFAICT, hasn't even been convicted of the procuring murder charges.

The article makes fun of the fact that the murders didn't take place, and were instead faked using canned food. I think you're reading into this a bit.

(As I said upthread: you're incorrect about him never being confronted with the murder allegation in court).

I am often critical of Nick Bilton's opinions, but he is not a "drug war fanboy" by any stretch of the imagination; nor does he have a "fundamentalist prohibitionist ideology."

If Silk Road did not facilitate the sale of drugs at all, but still enabled the sale of guns, murder for hire, poison, weapons, child porn, would anyone defend it, at all?

The production or use of {murder-for-hire, weapons, poisons, child abuse imagery} all involve grave and inherent harm -- regardless of the laws that regulate/prohibit them.

The harm that drug use/manufacture causes is a lot more a function of the relevant policies/laws than the actual chemicals themselves. Indeed, most of the harm from illicit drug use comes from:

1. dose/concentration uncertainty or potential contamination with higher-potency drugs -- like unexpected fentanyl inside heroin

2. contamination with unwanted or dangerous chemicals (from manufacturing / distribution processes) -- such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP or cutting agents

3. Poly-drug use: combining any two of {opioids, benzos, alcohol} to exploit synergistic effects -- which can easily result in respiratory depression

4. Designer drugs / research chemicals -- the result of someone trying to make a drug that works on a given neurobiological target but without the result being similar enough to the molecules on a Controlled Substances list. The problem lies in the fact that many drugs with long histories of human use (opium, marijuana) have long histories of human use, and so they've been tested extensively and are known not to produce horrid adverse effects. It is hard to replicate the effects of a compound that has been selected and tested for efficacy and safety -- while being forced to make significant changes to the molecule. Examples of that include synthetic cannabinoids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoids), which are a lot more dangerous than actual marijuana.

All of these are either caused or significantly worsened by prohibition and can be much more readily avoided without prohibition. Those harms are not inherent to drug use; indeed, people who have adequate access to pharmaceutical-grade opioids can safely use them for decades without any major medical complications.

I'd defend the sale of anything which doesn't inherently infringe on the rights of others. A couple of the items on your list fit that category, others don't. The issue here is what reasoning we use to prohibit a thing, and when those reasons extend to attempting to prevent harms we tend to have problems.

Wired has quite a long piece on Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht [1], definitely a good read.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-untold-story/

I've read other Wired coverage that was decent, but this article is horrible.

> Silk Road was hidden in the so-called dark web, a part of the Internet that’s invisible to search engines like Google.

That's not true. I've had a few onions that Google indexed, via various tor2web proxies.

> To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software.

OK, that's technically correct. But why not just say "Tor"?

> Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, ...

It wasn't anonymous, because you had to create an account, associate it with a Bitcoin address, and provide a mailing address to sellers. And Bitcoin payments are not at all "traceless", unless you mix adequately and use Tor.

Seriously, this is one of the worst written articles I've read in a while (though I gather that it's an excerpt from a book: it's also worse than any book I've read in a while).

> But Ulbricht wasn’t simply a precocious and edgy libertarian. He was also a gifted, self-taught computer programmer.

Is it just me, or is the word "gifted" thrown around a bit too easily these days?

The only socially acceptable explanations for outsized success are incredible talent and incredible luck. And since here in the meritocracy we all know that luck plays no role, well...

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out." -- Honoré de Balzac, 1834 (http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/09/fortune-crime)

It definitely was in this case.

He made many truly stupid mistakes. But the article is generally clueless. Sure, the Silk Road server leaked the IP of that cafe. But adversaries wouldn't have known that unless his onion server had leaked its physical IP in an Apache error header. And then there were the posts on Stack Exchange and Bitcoin Forum that leaked his real name. Oh, and those fake IDs. Homeland Security found them, before the FBI had a clear bead on him, and he told them that he might have bought them on Silk Road.

It's not that, it's just that Ulbricht and his team exhibited journeyman competence at their best. What implementation feature of Silk Road gives you the impression that it was out of the reach of pretty much any salaried Bay Area developer in the market? I'm simply agreeing: there's no evidence for Ulbricht's technical "gifts".

None, right, but tptacek -- it's time to give this one up... I stopped getting annoyed a while ago about this stuff and I'm happier for it..

I mean.. Look. The difference between someone who, to us, just "threw up some crap php cms over tor then ended up having to outsource most of the technical 'tasks' involved in running said site to people who were barely better than he was, who then ended up blackmailing him while he was over his head" and ... say, the majority of us who could actually make such a site in a weekend completely anonymously (tech wise anyway, marketing/ad is a diff game I guess and today the competition has guns) is only even barely understood by most of the 'technical community' even.

What do you expect journos respewing AP, making clickbaity titles will people such as Ulbricht other than 'genius' or whatever? This guy installed a browser plugin and ran mod_php on a VPS, d00d. To the dailymail or vanityfair, the difference between that and say, what the GPU compiler opti dudes at intel do is zero and we will NEVER be able to explain to difference to those people.

All I'm saying is; give up -- it won't stop being annoying, next year another 19 year old will bruteforce "administrator/password" and get into a receptionist's email at NASA and then be jailed for 20 years as the 'hacker of the century'; desktop support will still wear 'genius' t-shirts and you'll still be expected to fix some 2000's printer for an aunt, and when you can't you will lose respect from your non-technical family even if your dayjob is programming distributed systems for 6 figures...

Now repeat this for every article about anything that requires the minutest amount of expertise, and you have the nth reason why the general public is so dangerously misinformed about... well, everything.

I've recently been enjoying https://theconversation.com/ -- all articles are written by experts in the field they are about...

> the majority of us who could actually make such a site in a weekend completely anonymously

I believe that you're underestimating the criteria for "completely anonymously". I mean, that's arguably impossible against the NSA, if they care enough to truly bother. But even well short of that, there's more to anonymity than you might think.

Well maybe. If you become a big enough target then defence is about how expensive it is to find you..

Still, look at the folks who get caught by such agencies -- usually it's some amateur mistake...

I think most of us can obtain suitably anonymous/blended bitcoins and spin up a .onion site which couldn't be directly linked to us in the way that SR was linked to DPR though, which was the point...

Completely anonymous? Maybe not, you're right. Could you or I host a .onion site that, if we abandoned it as soon as it was up, would be impossible to tie to our real identities? Yes.

Yes, I am appalled by all the amateur mistakes that I read about.

But one can't rely just on Tor. CMU's exploit of the relay early bug, and cooperation with the FBI, pwned a few onion services. That didn't depend on any misconfiguration of the onion services that got pwned. The only defense would have been using private entry guards and/or nested VPN chains between the onion server and its guards. And that's not something that's widely known outside the darknet community.

Your point about "abandoned it as soon as it was up" is a good one, though :) It's totally nontrivial to get around adversaries sniffing at those network edges ;)

I think it's pretty trivial to get around the edge sniffing..

You just need a bunch of pwned hops to go through first.. I mean.. Did you take a the infector code for mirai [0] when it was kicking about? It's beyond basic..

20 of those nodes (literally CCTV cameras with busybox netcat....) is enough. Want to go harder? Burner 3G sim before you even start proxying through them towards entering TOR is what, an afternoon's work?

Today the "Hajime" botnet [1] is reported at 300,000 infected internet connected nodes... Recon they're logging?

[0]: https://github.com/jgamblin/Mirai-Source-Code/blob/6a5941be6...

[1]: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3192925/security/next-ge...

It's very hard for servers to evade edge sniffing, because it's trivial to modulate traffic with them. For an adversary with access to lots of intercepts, anyway. Users can protect themselves by using public WiFi hotspots or burner cell modems. But that's not workable for servers, unless you host them yourself, which is too iffy for me.

But yes, DPR could have stayed anonymous, even if his onion server had been pwned.

The onion service implementation reflected far from even journeyman competence. Even when he was getting started, the dangers of Apache error leaks and Tor bypass were well known. And his OpSec was abysmal. Neither of those are part of the usual SV toolkit, however. But yes, we basically agree.

> The onion service implementation reflected far from even journeyman competence.

Oh ya, Ulbricht was not even close to journeyman competence. Falling victim to well know PHP issues, poor Apache security implementation and really poor OpSec is what doomed him.

I just mean as a software developer.

Right. How can he be both gifted and self-taught at the same time?

Wait what? Why are those at all exclusive?

Non sequitur.

Whoa, that took a weird turn at the end:

> But why would North Korea or Iran build a nuclear weapon when either can drive countless cars into one another at 100 miles per hour?

What in the world is that about?

I only ask why is it necessary to write that garbage:

... it is a recruiting device for ISIS and undeniably helped elect Donald Trump. Similarly, Tinder was originally intended to allow unattached college kids to meet one another and maybe go on a date. The service has since been used by chauvinists to prey on women. Facebook’s newsfeed, likewise, was infiltrated by Russian operatives who fabricated stories that were used to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

> [Tinder] has since been used by chauvinists to prey on women.

Um, how about all the women who use it to 'prey' on men? Who writes this drivel?

You need to call out the quote from the article, otherwise your post reads like a condemnation of the article as a 'recruiting device for ISIS' which 'undeniably helped elect Donald Trump'...

This is just a teaser for the book obviously... as all this has already been written about multiple times over elsewhere. Perhaps the only additive here is the parallels they draw to SV starups in general and how business itself has become increasing ruthless and universally corrupting; turning wideeyed entrepreneurs into ravenous cash-eating beasts. Seems to beg the question to whether Ross was any different...

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