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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

> It feels like Open Bazaar is poised to become the next Silk Road.

It might be a decentralized replacement for Silk Road. But there won't be central servers to take down, or owners of such to arrest. I mean, Tor devs don't get busted, do they? So rather, I'd say that it could replace centralized dark markets.

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Interestingly, a comment below pointed out that the team has roots in the American intelligence community, and the founders live in Virginia (http://samuelrpatterson.com/about-me and https://twitter.com/brianchoffman) within a 20min drive of Langley.

I'm not sure what to make of that, but it seemed worth mentioning.

It sure is worth mentioning! But then, Snowden has similar roots. So ???

But yes, I'm sure that the code will be reviewed carefully.

So it's a legitimate concern that this software will be some sort of honeypot to hack and monitor those who have the technical skills to evade typical monitoring, who have a moral code that doesn't align with the federal government, and who probably have a general distrust in the federal government in the first place. It's not a secret at this point that the US government has an incredibly powerful intelligence gathering and spying apparatus, and there have been many signs that they are very willing to spy on those with questionable morals, regardless of whether or not there's any proof they're doing anything wrong.

For sure. Some have the same concerns about Tor. I mean, Paul Syverson does work for the US Navy. But of course, he's an ornery idealist who would never stand for Tor being backdoored. At least, that's the story. I'm ~90% convinced, but how would one be sure? Except that the code is open-source, anyway.

> So it's a legitimate concern that this software will be some sort of honeypot to hack and monitor those ... who have a moral code that doesn't align with the federal government ...

Yes. And it's not just about the US. The US government is a serious threat for many non-Americans, and does pretty much whatever it likes on the Internet. There are effectively no rules, and no justice. Only the raw exercise of power.

> ... regardless of whether or not there's any proof they're doing anything wrong.

Well, who gets to decide what's wrong?

Absolutely worth mentioning - because it implies similar roots as Tor: a project that provides a platform for plausible denials communication for the intelligence community in the case of Tor - for a "dénivelé" marketplace in the case of Open Bazaar.

Things like iran-contras would probably be easier today (under many Panopticon watchers) with such tech available.

Eh, fr/en autocorrect, too late to edit:

plausibly deniable communication

"deniable" marketplace

Sure, unconstitutional military actions like Iran-Contra would be easier. But the key point is that suitably educated and skilled individuals can also do such stuff. Without nation-scale (or even corporate-scale) resources. That's what I meant about democratization of freedom.

Yeah, the point I was trying to make, is that having a real, anonymous digital marketplace might be very useful to intelligence agencies, so it might make sense for them to help build one. Without looking to build in back doors - just like naval intelligence might want an onion router system that works, and has enough traffic going through it that picking out the (smallish) sub-set that is intelligence traffic isn't trivial (eg: a traditional, secure, encrypted (overlay) network that is only used by a single/handful of intelligence agencies isn't very robust/useful for hiding communication).

OK, got it. And indeed, that is the Tor Project argument.

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