Inside the ‘DarkMarket’ prototype, a Silk Road the FBI can't seize

AFTER EDIT: I note a downvote for disagreement. So I will ask the obvious follow-up question. With what part of the two questions I originally posted do you disagree, and what facts and reasoning should I consider to change my opinion?

In my opinion: most people incorrectly read an axiomatic nature to the "non-violence" (revolutionary) approach of Ghandi. Ghandi was not a pacifist in the lay sense. He was a pacifist in the terms of Vedic consciousness and was a daily student of Bhagavad Gita;

And that would prompt the question of why did he opt for non-violence as the 'correct' approach;

And per my analysis, he did so because he recognized that the British Empire motivated its political balast -- from aristocracy down to plebe; whatever held it together -- by the declared shared justification that "we are civilizing the world.";

And Ghandi basically put all of his forces towards attacking that notion;

And by demonstrating (beyond argument) to balast of the British Empire that Ghandi and the Indian Nationalists were in fact more civilized than the Empire, he basically demoralized the affective corps of that Empire. That is why he won.

In the current situation, the fraction of 1% that truly wield global power in our world view us nearly in sub-human terms. And the corporate mirror to the world -- under their control -- pretty much paints their opinion of "us".

To take your example, the motivation for the policy decisions that are accepted by the current regime's 'political balast' -- these are the bright young things furnished by the scientific, academic, cultural, and economic mills -- is their (pretty accurate) assessment that without the police force, without the governing order, the un-washed brethren would eat them up like so much cake. So here, the internalized justification is that "at least this violence is policy driven and under control".

If the layer under the elite balast -- that's the middle class -- demonstrates that they are thoughtful & capable of self determination and self ordering, then this order of things will collapse, just like the British Empire.

So, it is entirely appropriate to remember that "a people get the government that they deserve".

I understood it to say not only that "FreeMarket" would be a convenient name because it sounds like "free market", but also to say that such a place/site/network actually is the free market because if someone wants to buy X for $Y, and someone wants to sell X for $Y, then a transaction happens, end of story.

In other words, "FreeMarket" is simply an honest and straightforward name for what it is (or strives to be).

You don't have to play the politicians word games but totally disregarding their MO is playing into their hand.

http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1996/04/msg00462.html

That's exactly right. There's a flag for off-topic subthreads that I put on most of these, so they don't interfere with the real discussion.

If you look at a lot of the best practices documentation for Tor it makes everything sound like a huge hassle [1] so I can believe making a system secure against the concerted efforts of law enforcement is complicated.

[1] http://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-stay-anonymous-with-tor-1498...

It is human intelligence or infiltration by actors with a hidden loyalty. This has worked since the time immemorial for all sorts of security systems.

For FBI to bring it down they'll just need to repeat what they've done with Silk Road - pose as a straw buyers, get everyone they touch on record and use them to identify/arrest the users. Put out a request for a contract killing and arrest all responders. Bonus for putting a bounty on members turning in other members.

Even if this won't "shut down" the system itself, it would make it impossible to use safely.

GNUnet can be used to build a darknet of any sort: P2P chat, a social networking application, email, you name it. Brilliant people are plugging away at it to build a platform for people with less knowledge of cryptography (like me) to build this sort of stuff on top of.

They do have a P2P chat program built on-top of it so you can use that as an example and I think someone did their thesis on building a "facebook for GNUnet" on an older version. Not sure if that code is public though (it most likely is, I just don't know where).

Basically, you're going to have to trust yourself to see which arbitrators are scammers, based on reviews, some amount of which are likely to be fake. This doesn't really help the whole situation of avoiding scammers, just moves it around slightly.

Well, the broker's a middleman. He's going to add some commission to the price. A decentralised system allows you the option of trading directly with the other end of the deal and bypassing the middlemen that normally make money by connecting the two endpoint counterparties of a trade.

> Or something like Nadex, where you trade directly on the exchange and each trade between you and a market maker is essentially in escrow until the outcome is realized?

What if you don't want to use Nadex? What if you could get a better price trading directly with someone else instead? What if you want to trade something that Nadex doesn't support?

Tell people what they want to hear. People want to hear that they can trade illegally with zero risk of being caught: so tell them that. No need to sully people's minds with tedious details like the risk of design flaws, the risk of implementation flaws, dealers giving you up in a plea deal, undercover agents ... etc etc etc.

The most important lesson of security is that it is about probabilities, not certainties. You can only ever secure yourself against attackers with a given level of motivation and resources. When you brag about your security, you create a more motivated attacker. And the FBI is pretty well-resourced, as attackers go.