Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?

With weeks having passed, it should have been easy to implement some sort of emergency measure that would let them transfer money back to people who wanted it. Instead they continued doing business as usual - money in, but not out - while implementing things like this withdrawal countdown system, which arguably seems calculated to try and maintain some confidence and keep the BTC rolling in.

It seems very likely that this is in fact a big scam, particularly given the shady behaviour of prominent and admin-affiliated vendors also happening, but the blockchain info linked isn't in and of itself definitive proof of anything much right now.

If you have a legal entity behind something, like say, bitpay or coinbase, you can take legal steps if they screw you over. You can take them to small-claims etc.

And if you don't trust some entity, you can use escrow with bitcoins, it's possible to setup a transaction where the escrow provider has no way to get at the funds, but can just release to either of two addresses (back to you or forward to the merchant). But of course, the escrow provider would also be a legal entity, otherwise you'd have no recourse against them if you feel they unfairly resolved a dispute against you.

Bottom line is, if you engage in legal business, with legal entities, and take appropriate precautions, you are no less protected than using national currency and chargebacks. If you don't, well, you've got nobody else to blame but yourself.

  How is this a good rule of thumb?

If you don't want to be robbed, you've got to make sure any assholes who consider robbing you are going to decide not to because you can make bad things happen to them.

One way of making bad things happen to assholes who try to rob you is calling the cops, but you won't want to do that if you'll get arrested too.

There are other ways, of course. Depending on the market that may be chargebacks, marketplace reputation, the loss of future trade worth more than the profit from the robbery, tipping off the cops anonymously, pulling a gun and shooting the guy, killing their prized racehorse, whatever.

It's a good rule of thumb to keep the call-the-cops option open, especially if you don't have access to alternative means of dispute resolution.

Seems to me if you're a customer of bitcoin drugs marketplaces, you don't really have any options to make bad things happen to assholes. So that customers got robbed is unfortunate, but not surprising.

Exactly. It's all fraud now - much higher rewards with much lower risk of getting caught. Why try to break into a bank vault waving a gun in the air when you can skim relatively small amounts from millions of credit cards or commit identity theft and take out loans in someone else's name, all from a different country to your victim.