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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

If you want to look at it rationally you have to factor in the risks you are taking by selling it on the black market. These risk include:

- How will you whitewash the money? Alternatively how will you spend them on the black market? You can't buy houses, cars or stocks with black money.

- Will you get paid? - Secure anonymous payments that are guaranteed are not trivial. I don't know if there are escrow services for the black market, but this is definitely risky. We are talking about shady actors after all.

- Will you get caught? If do you will probably end up in prison.

When you take the above in to consideration I think most people would prefer $10.000 legitimate US dollars without risk to $100.000 that might end up giving you ten years behind bars.

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Bitcoin would be the preferable way to get payed in this situation.

How would you escrow it so that you can be sure to actually get the funds? Sure they're not going to pay up front and it would be over-trusting to give a crack away on the promise of later funds, so ...

That's not really a problem specific to Bitcoin only. I've seen Bitcoin Escrow services but I'm not sure which ones are trust worthy.

No, indeed I wasn't pitching that as a problem with BTC - just in general how can you ensure a secret transaction will go through. You'd need a trusted escrow, a trusted escrow would probably need to have a business address [and other things] for you to trust them ... but that means they'd be registered to handle money in all likelihood and that means records of your transaction that law enforcement could eventually get hold of?

Your word is incredibly important for criminal enterprises. If you fuck someone over and somebody finds out, nobody will ever do business with you again (besides the whole 'getting shot' thing). Escrow services (by way of a middle-man you both trust) are only necessary for really big jobs. In general you pay first and get your goods once payment is confirmed.

I can see that working in meatspace but here we're talking about selling an idea on the web - the buyer is very unlikely to be able to track you so they're unlikely to front the money.

Suppose you found a bug, couldn't cash it in with Google because of where you live and so were selling it on. The buyer won't release the funds, would you really give up the goods? Even with an escrow, proving the transfer and performing the transaction with minimum risk seems problematic to me.

- the buyer is very unlikely to be able to track you

the buyer will probably be easily able to track you, if they are paying 100k for hacks on the black market, they would have the resources to find you easily

Yet they're getting the cracks from you .. which suggests you're good enough to be able to hide yourself away. Use anonymising proxies to connect to a machine that you Tor off to a BTC wallet that only takes in washed coins, or something. Even being able to spend 100k on [potential?] server cracks doesn't seem enough resources to be able to take down Tor?

If they try and trace you just send a spike!!1111one

true, but any small mistake in the process on your part can come back to hurt you, look at how silk road got taken down

Anyone who sells on the black market already knows the answers to these. Malware, botnet and black market security researchers also know all the answers to these. Let's just say that in general, it is actually trivial to launder money from black market transactions, as long as you don't get the attention of the feds and you stick to non-US markets.

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