Silk Road forums

Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: asdfg59 on February 24, 2012, 05:54 am

Title: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: asdfg59 on February 24, 2012, 05:54 am
How did this all get started? How long was it around before the Gawker article? Props to all involved.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: redforeva on February 24, 2012, 06:14 am
2011, a while, agreed
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: kmfkewm on February 24, 2012, 06:18 am
there were private online drug markets using e-gold, pecunix and liberty reserve for many years prior too
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: anarcho47 on February 24, 2012, 07:04 am
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: SouthSquareBiz on February 24, 2012, 08:03 am
there were private online drug markets using e-gold, pecunix and liberty reserve for many years prior too

e-gold! Wow, what a blast from the past. I was passing money through e-gold as early as 04. Been years. I used to fool around with HYIP investments. Oh, the stories.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: redforeva on February 24, 2012, 08:28 am
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)
Good read
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: pine on February 24, 2012, 01:58 pm
It was February 2011, right.

Hey, when is our anniversary? :)
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: ukbenjy on February 24, 2012, 08:07 pm
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)
Good read
+1. Did not know the start of this place was so turbulent. Major respect to you for sticking through it all, I know a lot of us appreciate that you did!
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: czxtvr on February 24, 2012, 08:09 pm
Wow you guys have been around for awhile...
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: Pharmville on February 24, 2012, 09:49 pm
Our history is the same as that of Anarcho47.  We sold stuff like crazy but bitcoin devaluations and trying to keep any sort of decent cash flow going while waiting for the money in escrow made it impossible to make a profit even though the sales were anything from pretty decent to outright fantastic in any given month.

The vendors who have stuck it out from May/June until now have sold an awful lot of product for a very small profit unless they had margins that were stratospheric.  Watching the price of the BTC today it even appears that it might start coming back to the levels it should be at according to real market forces and not the manipulations that it's so susceptible to. 

BTW, if there is anyone reading this thread who has *factual* information as to why the BTC took such a nose dive when there were huge numbers of new buyers registering on SR at the same time and a whole lot of them were ordering, I would be very interested to hear it.  I am working on other things and just don't have the time to look through all the different places that that info may be located.   But if someone already knows, please, by all means, share it with the rest of us.  :)

Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: anarcho47 on February 24, 2012, 11:15 pm
@Pham - the above poster is correct, and yes allowing short selling would have certainly mitigated the damage.

I was mining bitcoins long before I came across SR and I know some of the guys (as much as you can know someone on the internet) who had the big rigs running back below $.10/BTC who amassed over 100,000 BTC.  They sold alot into the rally and some of them panicked as it started nosediving and dumped BTC into the dive to try to unload.  There were a lot of idle coins sitting off to the side that piled on to the decline to try to save face.

Needless to say they still made off like fucking kings lol.  One guy I know made $500k in 6 months of mining, paid maybe $2,000 in electricity for it lol.  Those days are definitely gone, but that old-time miners were in on the decline because a few of them panicked and started dumping.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: friendlyoutlaw on February 24, 2012, 11:58 pm
Back in July of last year, there was a famous (if you follow the bitcoin community) theft of approximately $600k USD worth of BTC, by somebody who merely hacked into some guys computer and sent the coins off. This was very close to the time that MTGOX was hacked, and there was a LOT of phishing going on at that time.

That led to two big problems...first, a lot of people lost confidence in the currency, and panic sold...and also, you had the bitcoin thief (in addition to the honest, early adopting miners) looking to cash out some of their newfound fortunes,  so it created a lot of downward pressure on the value of BTC.

On top of that, it's not a regulated marketplace. There are people with amazing wealth and knowledge who know exactly how to manipulate markets. If you watched the bitcoin forums back when it plummeted down to $2, there was a lot of analysis to suggest market manipulation. They even refer to a mysterious "Manipulator"...as in "See the ridiculous bid wall at $5? Looks like the manipulator is at it again."

It's the wild west. I'm glad I'm not a vendor. I do not buy and hold bitcoins. I buy exactly how many bitcoins I need for whatever purchase on SR (plus a small little extra to protect against a slight price change in the transfer time), and then I spend them as fast as I can.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: QTC on February 25, 2012, 12:09 am
Back in July of last year, there was a famous (if you follow the bitcoin community) theft of approximately $600k USD worth of BTC, by somebody who merely hacked into some guys computer and sent the coins off.
It's funny that you mention this and the "manipulator(s)" later since I have heard rumblings from people I trust that the victim of that theft made it all up as an act of manipulation itself. I have no opinion on that but I'm inclined to believe that it's somebody with intimate knowledge about bitcoin since that theft has been analyzed in academic research studying deanonymization of the bitcoin network and nobody's tracked them down yet.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: Reseller on February 25, 2012, 12:11 am
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)
Great read sir.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: orbitalics on February 25, 2012, 03:41 am
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)
Good read

+1
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: lizardking on February 25, 2012, 03:55 am
What about the farmers market, how long have they been around? Longer than SR I'm sure, I remember scoring some 'cid from FM a while before I started using SR, and I was on SR when the forum was still part of the site. Last I checked they still haven't adapted to BTC which is a shame, maybe I should check back and see how things are going there. Its always been too expensive but at least it's reliable.

I'd like to hear more about the marketplaces that came before SR, if there are any other notable ones.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: QTC on February 25, 2012, 06:04 am
TFM has been around for many years in some form or another, it was RS before that, and it was a single vendor called Adam before that, he's been in the business for at least a dozen years and has flexed serious resource muscle in the past, way more than 99% of other vendors I know. Why don't you like the fact that they don't use bitcoin? Pecunix is awesome (and inflationary) and CIM works in a pinch too.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: momiji on March 06, 2012, 10:57 am
Not that it is the same thing, but if you look on old usenet logs from the 90s to early 00s you'll see drug activity online before it went completely private.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: pine on March 06, 2012, 11:00 am
Not that it is the same thing, but if you look on old usenet logs from the 90s to early 00s you'll see drug activity online before it went completely private.

Actually, there were drug deals done on ARPANET, which is the ancestor of today's Internet. That was in the 1960s.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: kmfkewm on March 06, 2012, 03:44 pm
The Hive is pretty much the oldest drug related forum that still has members in the scene today. They were mostly for chemistry but I have heard they had an underground market area for chemistry related things. The core group of people on the Hive talked via instant messages prior to its formation in 1997. RCML was also a very old drug market, it was a mailing list though. I don't know when it was operational but it must have been one of the first research chemical market communities on the internet. As far as the modern forums (post webtryp) go I think SL gets the award for being one of the pioneer, although not the first if you count non-polydrug markets (ie: weed only markets, opiate only markets). And of course 'the holy forum' was the dominant forum for all leet people (and one of the first widely international forums post web tryp, and one of the first forums that had lots of illegals on it, and pretty much the first forum that had bulk illegals). I could write a short history of the scene up but many people would probably not be very happy with that. I personally don't see anything wrong with talking about forums that are long dead, but some people think the 'never talk about fight club' rule should apply until their death, rather than the death of fight club (or many years after). There are histories of the scene floating around / that were floating around on various private forums. These days there have been entire splits of 'forum lines' though used to be the same core group of people behind everything but these days many different groups operate groups of forums. Decentralization FTW.

SR is hands down the most popular mainstream internet drug market to ever be. It also uses some of the best security honestly, although there is room for improvement for sure ;). It was also the first community to embrace bitcoin and one of the first to operate openly (OVDB launching almost simultaneously and BM coming shortly after). It was also the first rug market to get major media attention, and the second drug market to be structured similar to E-bay or Amazon (the others were more like OVDB with a forum and private message system versus a market interface). TFM was the first market to have a market interface built into their community afaik, but I am pretty sure the SR interface pwnt theirs. The first drug market that was a hidden service was called The DrugsTor and was a private forum community that only lasted for a few months before the bulk of its memberbase it went back to the clearnet under a different name. It had leaked its IP address via improper configuration anyway :P.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: wretched on March 06, 2012, 04:54 pm
but some people think the 'never talk about fight club' rule should apply until their death, rather than the death of fight club (or many years after).

just remember that in death, a member of project mayhem does have a name
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: DeoNonFortuna on March 06, 2012, 06:59 pm
[snip] I could write a short history of the scene up...
[snip] There are histories of the scene floating around...

Herodotus, the "Father of History", was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative. What you propose is noble work and you would be in good company.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: crazydancer on April 26, 2012, 02:36 am
Very nice topic!
A must-read for noobs like me!
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: themessenger2 on April 26, 2012, 03:08 am
Sick thread. Thanks for all who have contributed so far. I'm looking forward to learning more.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: pine on April 26, 2012, 05:03 am
Sooner or later somebody's going to write a book on it on the Silk Road. Look at all the material, most of it reactionary stabs, on Wikileaks, Anonymous, even Lulzsec. I hear even 4chan and 2chan have a couple of books written on them.

We talked about History, let's talk about the Future.

The Silk Road is a fascinating topic in it's own right that would have a general audience of millions if written in the appropriate popular style, kmf has at least one book in him, and a few others do too. I don't have a solitary doubt a publisher would run the presses. The newspapers across the world have mostly got the memo that SR is a verboten topic, which explains the really peculiar distributions of news and information related to SR.

Look at the kinds of magazines printing about the Silk Road. There isn't an English language broadsheet among them. Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Wired, Gawker etc. All are 'special interest' periodicals. The main branches of journalism are mute. Oh they know. It's their business to know such things. There are some exceptions, but I believe those are 'mistakes', calculated or otherwise (journalists are constitutionally unable to STFU, and tabloid reporters are the best/worst examples of that genre). You must have noticed that all those 'slips' all follow the exact same model of centering the piece on 'the Dark web'. SR is forbidden, but a term previously used exclusively in obscure academic journals is less so, especially since one can clump so much underneath that umbrella and beg forgiveness for any transgressions later.

Their loss is a publisher's gain, publisher's don't have the same legal constraints as journalists. Once a book is published, it becomes an unavoidable topic in the mainstream media. Even if that doesn't happen, there will come a tipping point, the only question is whether it's the breaking out of SR into the mainstream media, or else the demise of SR and some instructive Aesop's fables for the kids i.e. everybody ordering illicits from illegal websites gets banged up in prison and the dogs/high-tech gadgetry will always capture such posted items so it's a fail to even try. I mean, we know it would take > 6000 years just to scan just all the American mail inside of a year if it took 1 second per item to achieve that without false positives, but that's how the authorities will spin the narrative. The supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent state.

Much like the failure that was the 'Just Say No' campaign, empirical evidence will be at odds with the official story, so eventually they lose anyway. If the government is really super-smart, it will realize that there are all kinds of drug distribution systems, and some of them are much better than others if you want suppression of violence and drugs to remain illegal simultaneously. Look at what happened when the main men in Jamaica got the chop. Next stop: chaos indistinguishable from civil war. The army has learned the hard way that assassinations are an extremely limited tool to counter insurgent activity. The American Army that is. The armies of the Old World already worked that shit out several centuries ago. It's not a fucking new concept. Kill a representative of an organization that doesn't have a hierarchy, and you just turned the Hive into a Swarm which although initially baffled and inconsistent, will turn into a Hydra. Remember the network war the RAND corporation saw in the future, it is becoming more and more true everyday.

Will they realize that?
 
Yes. No, really! They actually will. But I predict they won't do anything about it. That is why the higher orders inside intelligence organizations feel such contempt for their 'betters' and their dumber younger brother, traditional LE persistently bumbling along whacking into every available obstacle. It's really almost admirable how much they and politicians manage to cock things up. That's why intelligence community isn't entirely cooperative with many parts of the government. Simply doesn't feel the others are mature to use information responsibly.

So it establishes regularly scheduled meetings of some kind (a small group is smart enough to realize that controlling external perceptions in case of accusations of arrogance/non-cooperative behavior arise), the purpose of which ultimately revolves around them receiving useful information while LE receives garbage (in prose) but gets to feel important/patriotic while doing so. Intelligence community thinks in a scientific way about information as well as politically. It can do this because it is very small and centralized. If the government were one entity with a coherent plan, then they would adopt a rational approach to all of this. But they are constantly deviled by the principal agent problem. For politicians, journalists and police officers, bitching about the problems of the world and promising to right them (whether they exist or no), is their principal method of climbing the career ladder, it is much easier to do than actually preventing hypothetical problems even if it's blatantly obvious that's what comes next.

Think I'm making all of this up? Can it really be that weird? Yes it can. Take fingerprinting technology. It's been around, as have fingerprint databases (in the traditional sense), for well over 100 years. Guess who has access to them all during this time? Of course. But LEO itself only established a working international fingerprint sharing program/central database a year ago. What commercial organization would be so slow off the mark?

I quote a paragraph directly from a police report here:

Quote
In March and April 2011 latent fingerprints
from unsolved serious crimes in Canada, the
United Kingdom and the United States of
America were searched against the National
Automated Fingerprint Identification System
as a pilot to establishing an international
fingerprint exchange framework, hosted by the
AFP. The pilot has occurred in conjunction with
CrimTrac and resulted in one identification of
a latent fingerprint from a Canadian unsolved
serious violent crime.

Jumping Jehoshaphat!




Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: mastic on April 26, 2012, 11:08 pm
There was bud2mail too b4
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: RxKing on April 26, 2012, 11:27 pm
I have read a lot of threads. This is hands down my favorite. I first came to SR in march of 2011. Created a name and looked around. Thought it was cool. But said " I would never sell on there. WTF is a bitcoin? No thanks". Now a year later I am on here and I love it. I LOVE BTC.

I just wish I knew the "name" I used to log in that  week. > :-\


Well I wanted to say "Thank You" to everyone before that made it what it is today. This is awesome.

And to those that have posted so far...... Thank you too! Great read.

RxKing
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: greatgreatgrandpa on April 27, 2012, 02:11 am
TFM has been around for many years in some form or another, it was RS before that, and it was a single vendor called Adam before that, he's been in the business for at least a dozen years and has flexed serious resource muscle in the past, way more than 99% of other vendors I know. Why don't you like the fact that they don't use bitcoin? Pecunix is awesome (and inflationary) and CIM works in a pinch too.

we found out the answers to these questions, i suppose.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: SuperDerp on April 27, 2012, 08:16 am
I found this site advertised on the bitcoin forums and when I first made an account there was only SR themselves selling shrooms and I think LSD and something else. Bitcoins were too volatile in pricing at the time and as soon as you paid for an order your bitcoins were now worth 50% less or more depending on which day it decided to crash or inflate

Before this site existed all the private forums like DSR, pip, undrugged existed but are all gone now.

Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: ®eptile on April 27, 2012, 01:11 pm
anyone else think that Silk Road is still selling shrooms under a different name? maybe another top shroom seller? i do!
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: dkmonk on April 28, 2012, 01:01 pm
anyone else think that Silk Road is still selling shrooms under a different name? maybe another top shroom seller? i do!

No, he probably just eats them and rakes in all the cash he makes off of what he created. That would be a totally worthless and dangerous move to keep selling on here when there is no reason for him to do it.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: anarcho47 on April 29, 2012, 01:47 am
I can confirm that DPR has not sold anything on here himself in a long time.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: breathe on May 27, 2012, 03:42 am
I remember joining around april or may last year, and seeing the price of one bitcoin going up to $30 and then down to 5 or 6 in a very short space of time. I'm glad it's stabilized now
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: mrduke on May 28, 2012, 01:58 am
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)

Great post, and very interesting. It made me nostalgic, and Ive only been here 1 month!  :D
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: theonetheonlyandy on May 28, 2012, 05:12 pm
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)


yes true many of the orginal vendors are gone. i hope most of the buyers are still here. like me i was in SR the same day the gawker article came out. buying was another story. but im still here. i really wish some of the old verdors came back like greenco and the orignal greengriant. also LTTM
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: Joosy on May 29, 2012, 10:41 am
It was also the first rug market to get major media attention

That's a load of bullshit, those Persian rug salesman have been all over the media with their "final liquidation clearance" advertisements for years.

(Great post btw  ;D)
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: zruck on May 30, 2012, 02:31 am
[snip] I could write a short history of the scene up...
[snip] There are histories of the scene floating around...

Herodotus, the "Father of History", was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative. What you propose is noble work and you would be in good company.

I'd pitch a bitcoin towards a compiled history. Any net scene is amazing to read - history from the perspective of people actually there.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: hipotinuse on May 30, 2012, 11:00 am
Interesting. 

So, all those old trading markets. Why did they disappear? Did the vendors and buyers get busted in most of them?

We should know the story of TFM.


But yrah, it's always good to learn from past mistakes. I want SR to last forever, I think it will be around for a long, long time. :)

Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: Knomo on May 30, 2012, 11:20 am
Silk Road was a topic on a Dutch television show, on national TV. That's how I found my way here :P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOHkmkWxjGs
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: trollsquad on May 31, 2012, 01:39 am
Silk Road was a topic on a Dutch television show, on national TV. That's how I found my way here :P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOHkmkWxjGs



Isn't it funny how all the news reports pretty much backfire on what they are trying to do. It's pretty much free advertising for SR.
I thought the dea and other world anti drug task forces would try and stop them from reporting it.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: blackend646 on May 31, 2012, 02:02 am
I wouldn't be surprised if they do. Silk Road has had a remarkably low amount of coverage in the USA, and the American sheeple and soccer moms would eat up a story like this. I would find it hard to believe if major "news" networks haven't run this story yet simply because they haven't gotten around to it.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: k1k1 on May 31, 2012, 11:24 am
My first experience with buying drugs online was in about 2001 (11 years already, lol didn't imagine it's that long time ago...). I've been part of a security-related irc community, which grew over the years to online-friends channel. Most of us did drugs and we all "knew" each other for years. I dunno when exactly the idea was born, but i still know how. One of our community wanted to try LSD with some friends, but hasn't got a chance to get it locally, so another one offered him to send him some pieces to any address he wants to, as a friendship service. Up from this day we regularly shipped us some pieces of drugs to each other, at the beginning we didn't take money from each other, it was more like exchanging some drugs to each other, so you could exchange a given amount of weed to coc, lsd or whatever you wanted to have. Couple of time later we also started to pay each other by sending letters with money in it. It all worked very fine for years and still does it sometimes, but most of us are doing drugs more rarely, stopped completely or lost connection.

I made my next online connection in a clearweb drug-related forum in about 2005/2006, we talked about growing and he offered me to send some sample of his and vice versa, later in the communication we mentioned we're both also interested in other drugs and he has good connections, so i did a few deals with him. Dunno how exactly we lost each other, but i haven't been online in the forum for a long time and he didn't log in either. I didn't try to reach him, because i was fully into drugs and made some connections locally, which completely did it for me over the years.

As i started my research about bitcoin, i was just into bitcoins, nothing more. I also did some mining, but to be honest i didn't really believe in it, although the idea was awesome. Unfortunately i stopped mining in the early days and only got very few coins "for free". After some time left, i did a new research about bitcoin and found that many fuckin things about it, that i could bite me in the ass i didn't do more on this topic. On my second research (short time before the $30 explosion) i found my way to Silk Road and was amazed how organized an online-drugmarket can be (i've never been to any other onion-markets before. had heard of the tfm before, but never was there on my own). Up from this time it's one of my favorite ways to get some drugs online and the payment by bitcoins is the perfect way if you don't know each other.
I do miss the real-personal connection a bit, but the community forums does a quite good job on this, even if there isn't that much person2person contact as i've experienced in the past.

Love that thread guys.... reminded me to the good old days and also interesting reading the posts of anarcho and kmf :)
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: kmfkewm on May 31, 2012, 01:18 pm
I know of one IRC drug scene as well, it has no real connections to the group of forums I think of when I think of the online drug community. I only know one person who was a member of it though, he sort of converted over to the forum scene. I wonder if it was the same IRC group that you are talking about.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: k1k1 on May 31, 2012, 02:27 pm
We don't understand us as part of IRC drug scene, we are just about 20 "friends" talking about mainly security related topics (nowadays most off-topic talk ;) ) and later in the evolution sending some drugs to each other, would be great coincidence if you would know one of my mates, but not impossible. Nowadays we all know each in other in person (besides the freaky paranoid ones or those outside europe) and are proud of our little community.
Although i knew that there is an irc drug scene, i've never been an active part of one.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: 420blindman on June 03, 2012, 03:53 pm
Great thread! I too want to see SR around for many years to come. 
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: beefy on June 04, 2012, 03:44 am
Nice read. Def. takes u back some years. i remember the hive. i was on it before the whole thing on nbc or abc. the guy should've really thought twice about the bee on his monitor, that was just a bad move. let's see, the first forum i was a part of where you could talk about sources and review them was DB. I loved DB cause you could find literally hundreds of sources in that forum. mexican pharmacies up the ying-yang. after DB closed (and i think it wasn't that long ago), i didn't find much information, just hung around places you just talk about it, but no sources allowed like BL. but after reading about something not related to drugs (computer security), i found out about tor and i found 3 sites (one of them being the hidden wiki) fairly quick after getting on tor that had links to everything. i'm not an active use yet on SR because after losing out on the whole tony debacle, i just decided to browse a little while longer and do my homework more thoroughly. Money is tight for me right now, so i don't have a lot i can just waste on something that might or might not come.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: breakface on June 06, 2012, 10:40 am
I'm bumping this cause it deserves it, I remember reading all about this website off of gawker, I actually found the article off of facepunch forums.  Anyways I remember trying to but BTC and they were like $25 a pop, the next week it was at $3.

Could someone explain what this whole 'tony' debacle was?  I remember him being a seller but that's about it.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: LeisureLass on June 06, 2012, 10:47 am
I'm bumping this cause it deserves it, I remember reading all about this website off of gawker, I actually found the article off of facepunch forums.  Anyways I remember trying to but BTC and they were like $25 a pop, the next week it was at $3.

Could someone explain what this whole 'tony' debacle was?  I remember him being a seller but that's about it.

You can check the last few pages of his thread:  http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=9108.msg230565#msg230565

or believe it or not, you can just google it
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: HardHustle on June 06, 2012, 11:38 pm
It started up early 2011, around the same time as OVDB, and about 4-5 months before the Gawker rush.  Very small at first - even DPR was a seller at the very beginning but fast moved to a strictly-administrator position.   That first Gawker rush changed everything.

I have been here for many of the site's new adaptations.  When I first started selling on here, there was no hedging against BTC fluctuations (and this is back when BTC was making its wild swings from $1.00 - $30.00+ and all over the map), so buyers would be hesitant to purchase while the price was going up, and sellers would cancel orders while the price was going down.  The few ones that stayed honest (myself included :)  ) hardly made any money at this time, and the currency issues alone completely wiped out more than a couple of sellers.

The forums also used to be right on SR Market, if any of you remember that.  How times have changed lol.  They were moved separate after the site went down for almost a week.  This was around the time that BM started up, and a lot of fuck-head individuals from over here opened up accounts under the names of reputable sellers over on BM.  It was a disaster, since most buyers didn't use PGP messaging to verify the vendor's identity, and was probably the largest cluster of scams in the history of this site.  It was a perfect storm of timing with SR being down, the BM site admin announcing his startup a few days before, and the waves of Gawkers hop-ons finally purchasing BTC only to be desperate to spend them as the BTC price plummeted.

Volatile times.  There aren't too many of us left from those days, but this is a complete cake-walk compared to what it was.  Multiple mods on the forums now, accounts of scammers being banned in decent response time, innovative changes implemented and in the works, a large community that is one of the best on the internetz, period.  I originally started this out as just an experiment and because i was a very early adopter of bitcoins (when you could mine and rake them in at less than $.10 per coin), and being an anarcho-capitalist this was my cup of tea through and through.  There were troubles, including the Canada Post strike which held up a bunch of my packages for 40 days (and they still made it through!  Even to the US), and it was an uncertain and new thing.  But it's been an awesome ride and I'm looking forward to the future :)

Shit I remember most of this. I originally came to SR back in summer of 2011 (idk if that was pre or post gawker but I DID find out via an article and his post on the BTC website). There were no forums, he just sort of posted stuff and people responded to it so it was real crude. Tons of terminology I couldn't understand (never been good at any of this) so it was kinda daunting. I didn't really know what I was doin. I mainly logged on to buy weed but back in those days u were lookin at 65+ an 8th so I was like fuck that and lost interest quickly, especially since I wasn't into any other drugs at the time. And yeah BTC fluctuated a lot I remember it usually went from 8 bucks to 18 and vice versa when I was around. Honestly when I came back I expected it would have improved (there were only a few hundred listings back then, i expected a thousand or two) and was shocked to see all the new listings at actually AFFORDABLE prices. So I stayed. Took me a year to come back but honestly I'm glad I did this site is like no other one I've ever seen before.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: HardHustle on June 06, 2012, 11:52 pm
Sooner or later somebody's going to write a book on it on the Silk Road. Look at all the material, most of it reactionary stabs, on Wikileaks, Anonymous, even Lulzsec. I hear even 4chan and 2chan have a couple of books written on them.

We talked about History, let's talk about the Future.

The Silk Road is a fascinating topic in it's own right that would have a general audience of millions if written in the appropriate popular style, kmf has at least one book in him, and a few others do too. I don't have a solitary doubt a publisher would run the presses. The newspapers across the world have mostly got the memo that SR is a verboten topic, which explains the really peculiar distributions of news and information related to SR.

Look at the kinds of magazines printing about the Silk Road. There isn't an English language broadsheet among them. Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Wired, Gawker etc. All are 'special interest' periodicals. The main branches of journalism are mute. Oh they know. It's their business to know such things. There are some exceptions, but I believe those are 'mistakes', calculated or otherwise (journalists are constitutionally unable to STFU, and tabloid reporters are the best/worst examples of that genre). You must have noticed that all those 'slips' all follow the exact same model of centering the piece on 'the Dark web'. SR is forbidden, but a term previously used exclusively in obscure academic journals is less so, especially since one can clump so much underneath that umbrella and beg forgiveness for any transgressions later.

Their loss is a publisher's gain, publisher's don't have the same legal constraints as journalists. Once a book is published, it becomes an unavoidable topic in the mainstream media. Even if that doesn't happen, there will come a tipping point, the only question is whether it's the breaking out of SR into the mainstream media, or else the demise of SR and some instructive Aesop's fables for the kids i.e. everybody ordering illicits from illegal websites gets banged up in prison and the dogs/high-tech gadgetry will always capture such posted items so it's a fail to even try. I mean, we know it would take > 6000 years just to scan just all the American mail inside of a year if it took 1 second per item to achieve that without false positives, but that's how the authorities will spin the narrative. The supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent state.

Much like the failure that was the 'Just Say No' campaign, empirical evidence will be at odds with the official story, so eventually they lose anyway. If the government is really super-smart, it will realize that there are all kinds of drug distribution systems, and some of them are much better than others if you want suppression of violence and drugs to remain illegal simultaneously. Look at what happened when the main men in Jamaica got the chop. Next stop: chaos indistinguishable from civil war. The army has learned the hard way that assassinations are an extremely limited tool to counter insurgent activity. The American Army that is. The armies of the Old World already worked that shit out several centuries ago. It's not a fucking new concept. Kill a representative of an organization that doesn't have a hierarchy, and you just turned the Hive into a Swarm which although initially baffled and inconsistent, will turn into a Hydra. Remember the network war the RAND corporation saw in the future, it is becoming more and more true everyday.

Will they realize that?
 
Yes. No, really! They actually will. But I predict they won't do anything about it. That is why the higher orders inside intelligence organizations feel such contempt for their 'betters' and their dumber younger brother, traditional LE persistently bumbling along whacking into every available obstacle. It's really almost admirable how much they and politicians manage to cock things up. That's why intelligence community isn't entirely cooperative with many parts of the government. Simply doesn't feel the others are mature to use information responsibly.

So it establishes regularly scheduled meetings of some kind (a small group is smart enough to realize that controlling external perceptions in case of accusations of arrogance/non-cooperative behavior arise), the purpose of which ultimately revolves around them receiving useful information while LE receives garbage (in prose) but gets to feel important/patriotic while doing so. Intelligence community thinks in a scientific way about information as well as politically. It can do this because it is very small and centralized. If the government were one entity with a coherent plan, then they would adopt a rational approach to all of this. But they are constantly deviled by the principal agent problem. For politicians, journalists and police officers, bitching about the problems of the world and promising to right them (whether they exist or no), is their principal method of climbing the career ladder, it is much easier to do than actually preventing hypothetical problems even if it's blatantly obvious that's what comes next.

Think I'm making all of this up? Can it really be that weird? Yes it can. Take fingerprinting technology. It's been around, as have fingerprint databases (in the traditional sense), for well over 100 years. Guess who has access to them all during this time? Of course. But LEO itself only established a working international fingerprint sharing program/central database a year ago. What commercial organization would be so slow off the mark?

I quote a paragraph directly from a police report here:

Quote
In March and April 2011 latent fingerprints
from unsolved serious crimes in Canada, the
United Kingdom and the United States of
America were searched against the National
Automated Fingerprint Identification System
as a pilot to establishing an international
fingerprint exchange framework, hosted by the
AFP. The pilot has occurred in conjunction with
CrimTrac and resulted in one identification of
a latent fingerprint from a Canadian unsolved
serious violent crime.

Jumping Jehoshaphat!

I swear to god this guy is like the einstein of silkroad.

I was aware you could code like a motherfucker but was completely unaware you could write so well. Fucking damnit I'm not one for riding dick but shit.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: dandan321 on June 07, 2012, 12:05 am
Wooooow crazy history, I have mucho respect for the creators. They deserve statues erected on the moon!
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: 12345 on June 07, 2012, 04:48 pm
interesting read, thanks
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: FenderGuitarMan on June 07, 2012, 05:35 pm
This is a great thread and my giant THANKS to the creators. How do you find out the onion addresses of other sites on the dark web? I'd like to check out the other drug markets but don't really know how. I found my way here from the gawker article and fell in love with the place. Having a little trouble finding a reliable and inexpensive BTC vendor right now. But otherwise this is awesome!
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: beefy on June 25, 2012, 08:15 pm
search for the hidden wiki. and through there, u can find 2 or more links sites. search through the posts on this forum for hidden wiki.
Title: Re: The History of Silk Road and BTC Drug Markets
Post by: jziuhbnscvyk on July 05, 2012, 09:08 pm
This thread has been an amazing read - thank you to all who have contributed :)