Law enforcement was designed to protect people (or their property) from the actions of other people, not themselves.
Law enforcement is fundamentally incapable of protecting people from themselves. That is why the "war on drugs" has been so ineffective.
The most effective method to stop the drug (opioid, etc.) epidemic is treatment and education, not law enforcement.
Two points:
1. I can think of many counterexamples to this: Self-harm, suicide attempts, people doing dumb stuff like playing with fireworks. We as a society have decided that if you're a danger to yourself, it's OK to have other people stop you and lock you up until you're not. Of course, people disagree on what counts as self-endangerment.
2. Self-endangerment is not the reason most anti-drug people favor strict punishments. They're concerned about the effect drug use has on society. eg: Worrying that addicts will commit crimes to get their next fix.
I lean very libertarian, so my view is that these substances should be legal and taxed commensurate to the harm they cause. That said, I feel compelled to find flaws in arguments no matter what side they're on.
All of which can be orchestrated by the police themselves. In an anonymous transaction the other party could very well be the FBI.
Pushing the monetary transactions for criminal behavior toward the public consciousness is, IMHO, beneficial to law enforcement, even if there is no clear or reasonable way to prevent or even track the monetary transactions themselves. So long as people are educated about criminal behavior, we can have a culture where law enforcement is actually effective; after all, real crime happens away from keyboard.
Not true in countries where a very large portion of the taxes I pay go to free health care and unemployment grants.
Many countries, UK and Denmark for example, also have penalty tax on sugar and fat to prevent prevent from getting fat (protecting people from themselves) as it increases health care cost.
Much like strong end-to-end crypto has already made it extremely hard to investigate potential criminal activity via wiretapping, and will make it impossible in the future once it's ubiquitous, cryptocurrencies and decentralized markets will do the same to the ability of the governments to track crimes by following the money.
It's not really a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a thing. Regulating it is not feasible (you can ban crypto, but enforcing that ban is another matter entirely), so societies will have to adapt.
The more interesting question is, what does it do to the ability to tax. "Diamond Age" comes to mind...
1.) Lack of anonymity - AFAIK it doesn't yet have integration with tor-or-similar, although this is coming soon
2.) Network effects - hardly anyone is buying or selling anything on OpenBazaar, so there's not much motivation for anyone new to move there. I hope this changes. I use eBay for almost all of my online purchases, and I would love to see the day where OpenBazaar replaces eBay for all or most of my uses.
There are no easy solutions here, but it's false to claim that these services are inherently better than what came before. They may make it safer to acquire the drugs, but they also make it much easier to do so.
I don't think we should lock people up for possessing these drugs, but an unregulated marketplace with easy access to a Willy Wonka factory of narcotics is deeply troubling.
I think it's scary that (a) these markets are here to stay, and (b) anyone with a computer and the most basic technology skills will be able to get any hard drug they can imagine delivered right to their doorstep.
Again, there's nothing to be done, really. That's just the way the world is now. But it's unfortunate.
Secondly, if Alice wants to sell crack, and Bob wants to buy it, I don't see why you or I or anybody else has the right to stand in the middle and say that's not allowed.
I accept that you think it's not good for Alice and Bob to be able to transact however they like, but you must accept that lots of people do not agree.
We're arguing that when drugs are ubiquitous -- as easy to access as pushing a button -- you'll spawn far more addicts than would have otherwise been created.
When an addict's life is destroyed by these horrific tools of pleasure we've created, are they going to take solace in the fact that they were able to use technology to enable their habit?
People become addicts for many reasons. One of the main ways is by being at a party among friends. No one expects to be addicted to this stuff, so they try a bit.
In the old days, they had one option: Get more from their friend, which may not work forever. In modern times, they can get as much as they want from the darknet markets. Bitcoin ATMs make it trivial, too. You don't even need to be vetted by Coinbase.
It's not just theoretical. People have witnessed the markets causing this.
I don't think the answer has ever been "make it so people can't buy the stuff", because that can't work. Instead, I believe that education, quality control, and help towards addicts would work much better.
The difference when dealing a human being is it's no longer a transaction between only Alice and Bob. There's now a third person involved who has every right to object to the transaction. Decentralised marketplace or not.
Am I proposing that the tools to solve human trafficking go away? I wouldn't put it that way. Lots of societal progress comes with trade-offs. There will certainly be challenges for law enforcement but I'm confident they'll solve them.
The world isn't going to descend into a chaotic state of everyone buying and selling everyone else just because free-trade becomes ubiquitous.
It's not everyone-else-in-the-world's responsibility to avoid building marketplaces where anyone can transact freely with anyone else.
[citation needed]