On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything
nautil.us
nautil.us
In the midst of an opioid crisis, with people overdosing on heroin cut with fentanyl, having this accountability can save lives. There's a subreddit (whose name I won't mention) that facilitates meetups between opioid sellers and users, encouraging buyers to leave feedback once the meetup is complete. I'm glad it exists.
The thing is, the article doesn't mention the market for less victim-less crimes. It seems like a market for "murder for hire" would be a bit less reliable than a market for drugs - which is a relatively good thing.
Even more, those aiming to illegalize drugs inherently are aiming to make markets not function for drugs - aiming to make the experience more dangerous and costly than it would be otherwise. The most hardcore drug-warriors are open on this question but others try to sugarcoat it.
There can be huge negative externalities involved with drug use, as anyone with a family member who has a drug problem could tell you.
Even in the most enlightened societies one would have to acknowledge that support and rehabilitation for the small percentage of users who have problems creates a burden on society.
Since these costs are generally not borne by either party to the transaction there is a fairly straight-forward case for regulation here.
For this reason I do support banning some drugs and regulating most of them (including cigarettes and alcohol).
I don't think this is inconsistent with free market ideology at all. As far as I know, no one wants a totally free market for semtex, plutonium or nerve gas (I do admit those are perhaps overly emotive examples).
When we criminalized alcohol, the negative externalities got worse. Gangsters murdered each other in the street for control over distribution. The profits from bootlegging were funnelled into other organised crime. People were blinded and killed by adulterated booze. Billions of dollars were lost in tax revenues. The overall consumption rate towards the end of prohibition was only about 30% lower than before.
The evidence is clear - criminalisation kills. Unless you're in a totalitarian regime with closed borders, you can't stop people from taking drugs. What you can do is effectively regulate the drug market, provide proper care and support services and minimise the harms to drug users.
Instead there seems to be two effective strategies, both used for alcohol and tobacco, which is taxation and state monopolies. Taking Sweden as an example, the taxation is made per liter of sold alcohol. The stronger (and assuming bigger effect on society), the more society demand in compensation. Depending on the drink and original price, the tax can actually become several times higher.
Here the money is ear marked for things such as reducing traffic accidents and domestic violence. If the cost are increased you simply increase the tax. Police has a strong incentive to catch this form of tax evasion as part of the money goes to them, and social norms are rather accepting since only poor people are disproportional effected by the price increase.
Similar for state monopoly, the state has a direct incentive to punish would-be completion. From a social perspective, my guess is that people are rather used to monopolies. Each year there is more and more merges leaving fewer companies that actually compete, and naturally prices goes up. Regardless if it is an icecream, a fridge, gass, a phone, a moive, or a news paper, you can best that most products is made by just a handful global companies, or a single one.
And as for the effect, there seems to be a fair correlation to heavy taxation and decrease use. The tax has never been as high in Sweden as now and the use has never been so low.
> Due to its low cost and simple production process, kilju is mostly drunk by low-income people or heavy drinkers, such as students and alcoholics.
Students generally rush the process and the quality and taste is terrible.
Car ownership among students is down and on campus there is fewer reason to drive.
The culture is generally focused on hard spirits and beer, not wine.
I don't think that an unfettered free market is the right solution though since addiction robs people of the kind of agency we typically assume people have in free market exchanges. That, plus an awareness of social externalities.
The selling of drugs may be undesirable some people's minds, "society" may decide it should be suppressed. That's your judgment but drug use remains "victimless" in the sense I described earlier - all people involved want the event to happen. Theft or assault are against cooperative victims who will come to police to complain (in the case of murder, the relatives would). So enforcement dynamics are different. That is all.
I'd mention that those opposed to drug laws would say the costs are predicated on the enforcement itself.
For example you might have a land owner and a factory, and both parties involved are perfectly happy for the factory to pump toxic waste straight into the ground. Neither party wants the police involved.
The economic exchange is between two mutually cooperative parties, but... they are often not the only ones affected by the trade. Which is why we regulate pollutants.
On the topic at hand, using heroine to intoxicate one’s self is very victimless. Injection needles are sharp and carry disease. Alright, but scissors are sharp, sex carries disease and heroine was initially introduced and prescribed as a pharmaceutical. Social and economic externalities of drug use is highly subjective and difficult to isolate, which is among most rational arguments for legalization. Drugs always both solve problems and create new ones. Each situation is more than likely drastically different and impossible to readily comprehend, involved with and conflated with mental health, legal systems, moral judgements, embarrassment, fear.
Results of approaches actively considerate of this complexity (Portugal’s controversial policies come to mind) tend to suggest that the economic and social problems you mention may moreso be a result of simplistic accusations like the factory analogy.
I have never used it, but have lost friends to it. How am I not a victim?
Not that I wouldn't want to engage in a discussion of the merits of drug legalization but here I'd want keep the thread that "victimless" can simply be conceived of as a "how" question concerning a particular kind of act without recourse to asking the question of "whether" the act should happen.
In the crimes usually described as victimless, the main thing is that all the individuals "actively involved" are seeking to make the act happened. To say this is not to claim that those who might be effected once the act happened aren't harmed, scared, victimized, etc. We would thus distinguish "active victims" (those mugged, murder, robbed, etc) and passive victims (relatives, friends, society...). So we could perhaps distinguish "active-victim-less" crimes and say all crimes have passive victims - for those who want this set of value judgments.
Can I get more clinical?
Losing friends to drug overdoses is terrible and not to be devalued. I’ve lost 2 close friends to drug overdoses: one heroine and another prescription painkillers, both while I was off at college. I really understand.
If we map an event chain to the tragedy, things get existential fast. We have to ask why they used the drugs. Maybe it was peer pressure, maybe depression, self-esteem. My cousin is addicted to painkillers prescribed to him for a back injury from his best friend hitting him with a jet ski. My point is just that things are usually very complicated. Naturally, we want someone to blame, but let’s be cautious, lest we create new problems.
Concluding we are victims of the substance makes sense in numerous ways, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and has failed outright as a solution to the problem (see war on drugs) and I think we can do better.
If we intend to prevent it from happening again to you and others, we want to look at the causes with an open mind.
You've got some good points, but your 'victimless' assertion is highly questionable.
The illegality of (for example) heroin drives: * uncertainty of quality/content of drugs purchased --> higher risk of harm/overdose from use * often, reliance on crime to fund --> financial and/or criminal impact on families/friends, and/or wider society * social exclusion of users --> emotional impact on families/friends
If heroin was legal, regulated, freely/cheaply available, and then became no more socially unacceptable than (for example) alcohol or cannabis, then most of the current 'victims' would cease to be victims any longer.
‘Victimless’ is a subjective term, and maybe too much to justify it’s use.
Obviously false. The people cleaning up after an overdose don't want it to happen. The family watching a member trash a career don't want it to happen. "Involved" doesn't begin to capture the number of people dealing with the event if you just consider the direct participants.
Creating a moral framework that gives those who consented to involvement in a third party's life a right to determine how the person and property of that third party is utilized necessarily creates tension with the individual rights of the third party, and conflicts with a moral framework based on both consent and self-ownership.
That's fine if that's how you want to resolve the problem--just declare that no indirect participants matter--but insofar as it fails to appreciate their experience, I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.
It also addresses externalities, by distinguishing nonconsensual acts from consensual ones. If a person deliberately over-eats, and dies from obesity related illness, they are not a victim, and their family's loss is not an externality, as the term is defined in economics. If a person is shot and killed by an armed robber, they are a victim, and their family's pain and suffering is an externality.
The reason the former is not an externality is that the 'asset' which the third parties lose, which, let's say, is the love and care the individual would have given their family if they had stayed alive, was destroyed by the wilful acts of that individual. Since the love and care is the individual's to give, it is also the individual's to choose to not give. Their decision to not give it is therefore not an externality.
In the case of the latter, the victim had every intention of giving their love and care to their family for many years to come, and would have done so, if their individual rights had not been violated in the act of murder that they were the victim of.
This is a coherent moral framework that is consistent with the definition of both 'victim' and 'externality', and exactly how the justice system sees victimhood and damages.
>>I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.
Comments like this don't really add anything to the discussion, except perhaps revealing your own presuppositions and ideological biases.
Externalities are a completely separate argument. Externalities can apply to actions regardless of their legality, and are completely orthogonal to whether an action is a victimless crime.
My counter-argument was that there are negative externalities to many kinds of drug sales and use.
I agree that these concerns are orthogonal but I did not feel that the conclusion was supported by the argument and therefore shifted the field somewhat. I don't think the precise definitions of the terms are central to the discussion.
I do wonder if we're getting a bit caught up on regulating versus criminalization.
The sale and consumption of sugary drinks is not victimless either, but there's a multi-billion dollar industry behind it.
You're making a great argument for regulating Coca-Cola. (And it's one I happen to agree with.)
Also, Kurz Gesagt has a great video on addiction--it's not as simple as blaming the problems/externalities solely on drugs: https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg
I know heroin use exists, but I've never personally met a regular heroin user in my life. So my comparison is the regulated vs unregulated market broadly speaking and representative of what's commonly being consumed.
If you watched the Kurz Gesagt video, there is a point to be made that extreme disassociative addiction is rooted in unhappy life circumstance, not in the drugs themselves.
Personally I could be in favor of some regulations around heroin, but the ones we have now create more problems than they solve.
There's an argument to be made that most drugs provide a social benefit as well as imposing a social cost, and that for some drugs, the benefit is significantly greater than the cost. Examples might be Modafinil, LSD microdosing, some amphetamines, etc.
Why are people using heroin? Are they depressed? In pain? What about amphetamines? Do they have ADHD?
Moreover, how many first time users actually know how to/understand the importance of properly titrating up, or even safe dosages of the substance they're using?
Not to mention that people taking substances for underlying mental issues might finally appear on the radar of their GP.
Can anyone, even experienced and properly educated users, truly know the safe dosages when the potency (and potentially even the substance itself -- see, e.g., the fentanyl analogues used in heroin) of the drug in question are unknown?
You could substitute 'drug' with just about anything and that would be true.
Sell cars? They put out poisonous fumes. Sell electric cars? People still crash into each other with them. Sell kitchen knives? People stab each other with them. Sell toilet paper? People flush it into the municipal sewer system. Make a funny TV show? People will watch it when they should be spending time with their children.
Drugs aren't special. There are societal costs to every technology. No product is victimless if the criteria you demand is that the societal cost is zero.
I don't even disagree with you on practical matters. I just deeply resent how you have defined that word. When no action is victimless, there is nothing that cannot be outlawed. In fact, that's the same line of reasoning that is used to ban books (via 'corrupting public morals').
Rating the buyer's satisfaction depends a heck of a lot on your timescale. For many drugs and many users, sure, it's a net positive out to infinity.
But in the midst of an opioid crisis, we need to acknowledge that many people are having their brains broken in a way that their short term preferences (yes, more fentanyl please!) are completely out of sync with their long-term ones (shit, I wish I hadn't destroyed my life).
Treating the drug market like some idealized commodity exchange seems naive and harmful.
You also have communities (like the "DNM avengers" one) that will freely and anonymously test the products of some vendors to confirm whether or not what they are selling is in fact the product described, and how pure it is. Some vendors in turn will proudly link to the posts describing those tests.
The community I mentioned (I don't know if it's still active) used to ask vendors for samples to test; but also ordered product from those same vendors (and others) as "fake" customers in order to make sure the product actually being sold is the one they tested. They also had donation runs with the community at large (both to pay for the tested products and to remunerate themselves).
Although no one dies if their video card is slower than advertised.
So do the many laws that would see them on manslaughter or even murder for providing lethal drugs.
In any case, the general advice to people ordering from vendors for which there hasn't been a longstanding reputation + published reagent tests is for their customers to reagent the product themselves, especially for opioids.
But then again you also have the (from the point of view of law enforcement) low hanging fruit: vendors that encrypt nothing, keep a full record of all their customers, tend to ship with very bad stealth, etc. those are the ones that tend to get arrested. Fortunately if you're a customer it tends to be easy to pinpoint those vendors - the lack of care and professionalism tends to display itself also in their profile or during simple communications.
This is actually the most prime example of an 'untrusted' relationship. If it weren't for the total imbalance of power you have to bring the full force of the government down on a drug dealer without any need for a reason, you wouldn't do business with them at all.
If, on the other hand, you had to do business with the head of one of these multinational drug syndicates, you would start to understand this power dynamic more completely, as the power balance would flip. All of a sudden, the person you are dealing with no longer fears law enforcement. They are no longer a peon - they have bought off people in the government, acquired arms, trained a small army of their own, and now have to power to kill you or your associates without fear of reprisal. Would you still describe doing business with these people as a 'trusted' transaction? Of course not. You would start showing up to all your business dealings with your own goons, weapons, and armored vehicles. There would be zero trust that each transaction wouldn't end in a firefight.
Compare this to walking into your local bank branch, where with the correct documentation a typical local branch manager can give you a loan for over $1M without having ever done business with you before. That is the definition of a trusted transaction.
You've just become so desensitized to the marvel of it all that you might not be aware of what the alternative looks like.
How does a buyer do that on the darknet? Hell, how does the buyer do that on dealer that's part of a well set up network? Do you think cops don't know who many of the dealers are already? They can't or won't touch them, and as a buyer you have zero power to make that happen.
I don't know how's the market where you are, but I can assure you that nobody I know who buys or bought drugs ever even considered going to the cops - even when they got robbed and smacked around by a dealer.
If you were considering selling your company to Jamie Dimon - well, you can probably trust that he's not going to kill you, but you will show up with an army of lawyers and investment bankers to make sure you get a fair deal.
Example: open source is the communist model, and it works very well. To each according to their need, from each according to their ability. No one owns anything, and you're free to fork or vote with your feet.
Ditto for illegal drug markets. If you're unhappy as a merchant, you have a number of options. No one owns you. You can switch to a different market, or start your own (if you're suicidally ambitious).
The interesting part is that the drug markets end up combining the best of both capitalism and communism in that sense.
But only in that sense. Obviously, unregulated drugs are risky. Yet even without regulations, it's remarkable how rare it is to hear about unhappy customers.
Not sure what the right word is, but textbook-definition communism fits - open-source code isn't really owned in practical sense.
Open source is inherently communistic because nobody owns anything. You have control over your own project, but that's where it stops. You cannot force open source maintainers to do something. This is unlike capitalism; at a standard company, your NDA forces you not to disclose secrets. In open source, there are no secrets to disclose, short of drama and private infighting. A non-compete prevents you from forking the business you work for. These are unenforceable in Cali, but the rest of the US is not so lucky.
You are bound to a paycheck that determines your fate. This is the essence of capitalism.
Contrast that with open source: people don't merely contribute because they want to. It increases their reputation. Ditto for a review system on darknet markets.
Both of these things are very unlike capitalism. So if not communism, then what? Not libertarianism. There's no ownership, and ownership is central to libertarian ideals.
I think the question as a whole doesn't really make sense, since "open source" can't be separated from the whole economies in which it is created.
(¹ communists would object that the choice is often illusory or even non-existent, but that's another issue)
Yet we insist on conflating them, and argue against the one whenever the other is mentioned, as if it's synonymous with both.
The problems with the 'voluntary' nature of capitalism are best summed up by Anatole France: How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!
EDIT: Point being, the economic milieu one finds one's self in, is that in which one tends to be obligated to participate — especially at the lower levels of power within that model.
That is: regular folk are trapped in the system they're born into. It is not meaningful to call their participation voluntary on their part. They may have nominally more freedom within the model in capitalism, but they're, on the whole, just as obligated to participate; they are just as much grist for the mill, under either model.
It's not even that their actions are immoral, it's that their judgement is so poor that you cannot depend on them behaving in their own long-term interest.
Maybe online dealers are different, but I would always worry it's just the same idiots behind a new anonymous account.
Reviews on SR were rarely negative because the venders didn't do "some bad business". They did really good business, followed by really bad business and disappeared. It was common for vendors to cash out ESPECIALLY on the 4/20 sales and various other sales. They would offer incentives to FE (finalize early, ie release funds from the arbitrage) for months. Then, they would have a big sale. People would FE because they had such good rep, and then the vendors would disappear.
It was a common tactic. I'm not a DNM researcher anymore, but I'm sure it is still a common tactic. I expect that few reliable dealers are around for more than a year. That was certainly the case with SR, and the few that followed quickly in their footsteps.
The new markets are based around forums instead of marketplaces because the markets themselves were bigger targets (everyone considers the forums owned) and the markets offered no real security for buyers or sellers. It was just a costly place to unite the two, and often a source of theft themselves (hacks, or corrupt admins absconding with the funds.)
Acting like it was some sort of utopia is ridiculous. I'm very much on the liberty side of the political landscape, but we don't do anyone any favors by sugar coating the darknet drug industry. The lack of street violence doesn't mean that there aren't wars raging. From the sources of the heroine (mostly from rural Afghanistan), cocaine (mostly from the jungles of South America), and as close as Mexico thousands die at the hands of violent monsters. Go watch some cartel videos on liveleak if you need a reminder.
We don't need to allow ourselves to be satisfied with violence as an externality. We need to consider massive changes in drug policy and defund the violence.
I never understood that. Is Sugar considered conflict-free?
Like what happens with diamonds: https://www.salon.com/2013/01/07/the_myth_of_conflict_free_d...
There has to be trust at some point right?
I don't care if the patients have my politics. Most people don't. I just want to help people that have serious shit going on.
The only way to fix it is to reduce the stake and timeline. You design ventures around limiting exposure to both and you won't end up getting burned by them when the balance tips, because the balance will never get to the point it could.
One of the hard lessons I've learnt from my many years in crypto.
Not too familiar with DNMs, but why would someone agree to this? Just to save a buck? Seems clear it is against your interest, good or bad reputation. What's the stated rational from seller for this, just "I want more liquidity"?
Exactly, FE listings tend to be cheaper
> What's the stated rational from seller for this
I think that "bitcoins dropped in price by 30% since two seconds ago" was at least one of the reasons.
Can negative feedback on eBay be cancelled? Because if it can be, then I'll give you a much more plausible explanation - sellers bribe customers to revert their negative feedback. This is pretty much standard practice among companies selling on Polish equivalent of eBay/Amazon, Allegro. The bribes are usually heavy discounts and/or free products. Part of the reason this happens is because for a seller, it takes only few negative reviews to lose promoted spots in the service, which can be life-threatening for a small business.
Also sellers cannot leave negative feedback for buyers -at all- so that also contributes.
https://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/feedback-extortion.html
The comment about eBay is interesting - that negative feedback is scarce because people don't bother if they're unhappy. I think one aspect is that it's more difficult to leave a negative review, and if you've ever sold on eBay then you're probably more reluctant to neg other sellers. I'm certainly willing to wait for a seller to sort things out rather than give them a negative, because of the stigma not having 100% can bring you.
I left a neutral feedback one time because of a legitimate seller problem, but otherwise things were fine. The feedback didn't affect his seller score.
The seller left negative retaliation feedback and then offered to have us both unpublished (or something) the feedback so that it didn't affect my reputation.
I learned you don't ever leave negative feedback on ebay.
Many years ago I avoided leaving negative feedback on a seller that agreeably accepted a return on stuff that was obviously counterfeit. A couple years later I felt like an idiot when I received garbage again, then realized that it was the same seller that had tried to quietly scam me before.
I would've never sent it back. Explain this situation to your credit card company.
If it isn't illegal by statute to send counterfeit goods, it's certainly against policy. All financial institutions have policies against moving these goods around if you can prove to some very low standard that the goods are counterfeit (take a handbag to a Macy's and have the counter clerk tell you it's counterfeit.)
> If a buyer suspects that an item is counterfeit and there are strong indicators that the item is counterfeit, the buyer isn’t required to return the item to the seller. The buyer agrees to cooperate with us to ensure the proper disposal of the item. In such cases, we refund the buyer for the full cost of the item and original postage, and the seller reimburses us for the refund. The buyer may not sell the item on eBay or elsewhere.
https://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/money-back-guarantee....
Now, they'll just buy one of your (cheap) items and leave negative feedback as a buyer if they can.
Don't sell and buy on the same account.
Isn't it too soon to call this a crash (honest question)? I mean, it's at 12k or so now. It was at 6k a month ago. In the eyes of skeptical me, even not knowing anything about financial markets, those numbers don't exactly seem like crashing. Yet.
I have had good experiences buying and selling large items like computers on eBay, but I don't like the new practice of sellers withholding feedback until they get positive feedback.
I know it's a trope, a huge joke and everything, but this seems like a perfect place to leave notes on the blockchain. It's something that can't be "cleaned" outside of the darknet, it's permanent, and supposedly impossible to forge a private key to manipulate one party's records. It would make it possible for customers to look back for the records of that wallet, or some tagged transactions to see a record of interactions to give credence to the reputation of that user.
It's a neat idea, removing enough anonymity in a world of the anonymous to establish trust, but not enough to establish a hard identity in order to carry reputation across the *net.
2-of-3 multisig will at least provide software level trust of the escrow process. The reviews on quality of goods would still be important though, but from an enforcement side it will be exponentially more expensive to take down one of these sites.
Prior DNM busts typically also got the warchest of everything held in escrow, making it more worthwhile to try and nab cryptocurrency. They were also aided by transparency blockchains to determine social graphs, which Monero makes almost impossible.
This seems like a mistake to me; I would have expected faster Monero adoption, especially with Bitcoin hitting performance bottlenecks.
I'm not sure Monero's 2-of-3 multisig is actually merged into production yet, but they have 2-of-2 so thats still a real limitation. Also Monero has and will hit performance bottlenecks very quickly too, cryptonote coins have no layer-2 scaling solution on the roadmap. Although they have had adaptive block sizes from day 1, the block sizes grow very slowly compared to spikes in traffic. The transaction fees would quickly reach unoptimal $ amounts, but the market itself would just require larger deal flow.
There's also a galaxy of small websites / forums opened by single vendors themselves, in order to sell directly.
This is given as a truth in the article but the opposite seem to be the truth for the app stores. From a pool of around 300k app users using our apps, organic reviews are much more likely to be negative. The explanation to this is believed (at our company) that unhappy users want to retaliate where the majority of users, the satisfied ones, doesn't have the energy or incentive to leave a review. The way we develop apps nowadays always include a prompt to rate after $conditionOnlyActiveUsersMatch is met. This skews our reviews to the positive side, leaving us with 4.5+ ratings. If we didn't artificially "game" the stores by asking happy users for reviews, we would be at one star because of the organic reviews being from 0.001% angry users.
Edit: "Reproduced with permission from Hachette Book Group.". So they likely got it for free to promote the book.
While I haven't been in the market for any drugs for a while I know enough people who regularly frequency DNM's and I tend to check in every now and then just because I find the whole ecosystem fascinating.
This article seems to imply that the entire dark net market thing is as simple as ebay or airbnb, but it's actually a lot more complicated. There's a ton of extra stuff you need to do to protect yourself not just from the vendor/buyer but also from the market places themselves, because they are also "untrusted" this means things like multisig transactions and the like are a must.
Additionally the view that a vendors pseudonym is important is just flat out untrue since people realised how much money there was to be made by hacking vendor accounts or claiming a known vendors name on a market that vendor does not yet have a presence on. The key thing is being able to do what is generally considered reasonably high degrees of security based validation, by verifying an identity out of band from the market. This means using GPG keys that you have sourced from previous interactions to communicate, double checking with vendors over wickr or secure anonymous email services to ensure they are the person you are dealing with on a marketplace.
Essentially once a vendor has a reputation the marketplace becomes irrelevant entirely. If it where me, I'd rather do a direct deal using GPG encrypted messages over wickr with a vendor I trust than buy from a vendor I don't personally know on a market that I shouldn't trust (exit scamming must be way to tempting).
I admit that I'm not entirely engaged with the current workings of the DNM's at the moment, but other than being a place where new vendors can earn some reputation, the value add isn't that high. And now that it's a mainstream activity (relatively to buying drugs in the open before silk road) I feel like it's only a matter of time before new vendors can earn enough reputation just frequenting reddit boards on the topic and making sure they have good opsec. As soon as they get one or two people happy with what they've bought, it's all word of mouth from there. (Obviously they need to deal with security of being on the clear Web, or just set up their own onion site)
With regards to a point that was mentioned about block chain history being useful here, it isn't. All it does is help law enforcement, unless you mix your coins appropriately through a trusted party in which case the history if your transactions isn't verifiable and it's useless anyway.
What are useful are services like grams, which (at least when I last checked) scraped reviews from market places, reddit, etc and aggregated them based on the vendors public key.
I feel like this article was either written about 5 or so years ago, or the information it contains simply hasn't been updated in a very very long time.
Would you buy a toaster oven from someones cargo van on the side of the road in a shady street or prefer to purchase it form Amazon?
Locals who know the owner of that cargo van will quite often prefer that source, as evidenced at least by the very fact that the van is still there selling toaster ovens. That's a form of reputation-based purchase, too.
Have you ever bought drugs? When you move to things like pills, and don't have the ability to test yourself, the dealers reputation or trust with you is paramount.