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Comment by notliketherest | Hacker News Reader

Dear Vint Cerf, since you have created TCP-IP, and another contemporary of yours - HTTP, you seem to be tacitly encouraging a decentralized worldwide exchange of information used by billions around the globe to facilitate exchange of ideas, pleasure, and commerce, free from government censor...

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I thinks it totally different. At the end of the day, the law could reach the original Internet. It really wasn't much different than telephone lines. Encryption is where everything changes. I think everyone should be at least a little bit nervous about where these crypto technologies are taking us. Once criminals learn how to use this technology, there's probably no going back.

Drug purchasing sites have actually helped reduce violence and crime associated with prohibited items/activities. I'm more nervous about where authoritarian government is taking us.

* citation needed.

Well, there are some that I know. The original is here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2436643

Then there is Neil Franklin a Maryland police officer and director of the organization "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc29nw4Si3Y

And his interview in the Deep Web documentary at minute 60 (it is in Netflix).

This paper doesn't directly support what you said. In the abstract it says: "With Silk Road functioning to considerable degree at the wholesale/broker market level, its virtual location should reduce violence, intimidation and territorialism."

There are 3 mentions of the word "violence", one says that the typical internet drug dealer is typically less violent than their offline counterparts but this doesn't meant that gangs will just let others take away their income because the new dealer is dealing out of a living room instead of on the street. Silk Road was B2B, as the paper mentions. But those businesses still need to get their drugs to the end user which seemingly happens on the street.

So it's an assumption, not a proven fact.

Harm reduction (IRL, safe injection sites) reduces violence.

That way, a registered nurse/healthcare official who has a job/career to lose if someone overdoses. Nothing is stopping a random dealer using a DNM from cutting a batch with fentanyl, and anonymity means they can fake reviews and hide it

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