Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder Of Silk Road

Two problems:

1. If not enough people pay for a fire brigade, the fire brigade is complete shit even if I do pay for it, because I can't fund a brigade all on my own. (If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.)

2. If my neighbor's house is on fire, I really, really want the fire to be put out even if my neighbor hasn't paid for the brigade. I do not want the brigade to wait until my house is burning. (If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.)

3. If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.

Using tax money to put on an event of that scale where there was effectively only one organisation with the resources to provide security services is bound to make that one organisation optimize for cost saving.

If you had only private sporting events then security companies and event organizers would eventually optimize to a state of security that best served the expectations of their customers.

I had never worked security before, nor have I science.

http://pastebin.com/WNmLmKqL

He's a pioneer. When SR has strange technical problems, he can't just jump on IRC or Stack Overflow and ask. He has to deal with attacks against Tor no one else has experienced. I don't know of anyone else betting more heavily on the security of Tor (at least the hidden service aspect).

He's also just plain inspiring. He had a bold idea, coded it up, kept it working, by himself or with a small group, despite opposition by the worst possible adversaries. He puts his life on the line for his principles. If the world had more brave and highly capable people like him, we might not still be in the drug war.

"In public choice theory, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. One example is spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

A black market - almost by definition - is one in which the players are cut off from the channels of official lobbying or patronage that make rent-seeking a viable economic strategy.

That's not to say that a dark symbiosis can't develop between black marketeers and legitimate authorities. For instance, the police, by enforcing laws against drug trafficking, increase the risks of trafficking. This increases prices and profits alike. High profits attract a constant supply of traffickers, who also tend to be far more ruthless than the average businessman, which brings additional layers of criminality to the trade, thereby ensuring continued employment for the police - to say nothing of an unsettling expansion of their powers.

But at no point do the traffickers and the police feel a mutual need to formalize this relationship, since public opinion remains, on balance, opposed to the narcotics trade. That is to say, the police can rely on the ballot box to stay employed, stripping them of any incentive to do business (at least on an open, institutional level) with traffickers. Meanwhile, the traffickers can count on public opinion to keep police on the beat, and need not go to any further expense to keep their racket going.

Contrast all this with the retroactive extension of copyright terms which has got to be the canonical example of true rent seeking, illuminating the practice in its most naked and unproductive form.

EDIT: An more germane example is the lobbying done by pharmaceutical companies with an interest in keeping the law and public opinion in opposition to illegal substances that may have pharmacological properties. Because these substances are too well known to be patented, their legalization could lead to patent-free formulations that reduce demand for patentable substitutes that pharmaceutical companies have created, or ones they could develop in future. Blocking the legal use of one widely and cheaply available substance to create a market for a more expensive but conceivably inferior alternate is a text-book case of rent seeking.

It's like saying a road has no value because stuff isn't created on the road, just moved.

As for ethics, you could sleep better after buying a kilo of coke on silk road than paying your taxes.

It would be useful for busting buyers, but no more so than traditional cop-on-the-street sting operations.

I have no one to share my thoughts with in physical space. Security does not permit it, so thanks for listening. I hope my words can be an inspiration just as I am given so much by everyone here."

Definitely a cop.

Silk Road itself doesn't even have a discrete place for users to enter their public key; it is only by convention that most vendors put it at the end of their profile text.

Perhaps one day western societies will be able to have an adult conversation about drugs, but for the time being shrill reactionaries still set the tone. Meanwhile for every one dramatic walking-cliche of a drug casualty out there killing themselves and making the world shittier, there are at least a handful of responsible drug users conducting perfectly normal and successful lives. For any drug you can name.