Silk Road forums

I wasn't able to find specific information about that, but Tails uses LUKS/dm-crypt for encryption, so presumably it implements a safe and standard cipher like AES-256-CBC.

As long as you use a strong password, you should be fine.

This is a complicated topic, and there isn't one central thread about it, more like dozens. Furthermore, there is always a trade off between security and convenience, so it really depends on what you are willing to do.

For example, I would tell you to ditch Windows, but most people aren't willing to do that, or have special requirements for using it.

The simplest advice is to use Tails. It solves a lot of problems for you: it has a suite of torified applications and provides transparent proxying to protect against data leaks. It's Linux, so malware is pretty much nonexistent. It's portable, you can put it on thumb drive which can be flushed down the toilet in an emergency, but you also have the option of enabling a persistent volume, where you can save data like URLs (to protect against phishing) and strong passwords.

Nobody knows.

Here's an interesting thing about the market. If it were widely known that bitcoins will increase in value to $500 by the end of the year, everybody would buy bitcoins until they increased to $500 right now. The current market price is exactly what most people believe bitcoins are worth, or will ever be worth. Yes, some people believe they will be worth more, but the reason they are able to buy them is because other people are selling them, believing they will be worth less. The weighted average, minus a few technicalities, is exactly the last trade.

BTW, I like your sig.

I don't know, but we're at $103 now. Huge trades going on, 900, 800, 500 BTC.

Oh, as to how they do it, the relays are public and lists are available in a variety of places. You can browse them at torstatus.blutmagie.de. So ISPs can easily get all the IP addresses of relays and block them (or watch connections to them).

Finding bridge users is more difficult. Either the BridgDB has to be queried from multiple angles, or they DPI for Tor hand shakes. Obfsproxy bridges use transports that look like other kinds of connections, making that more difficult.

Whether or not that article is correct, that is one snazzy graphic.

Let's put some different numbers on it. Adi Shamir and a colleague analyzed the block chain up to block 180,000 and determined that 22% of bitcoins were in circulation (78% have never been transferred between addresses). Assuming that number is still valid, of the 11 million coins that have been mined, about 2.4 million are in circulation. At the current exchange rate, that's $240 million of wealth.

Of course, not all of these coins are being exchanged for state backed currency. Many of them are simply transferred between addresses owned by the same person. It's impossible to know how many are exchanged, because even if we knew how much trade was going on at all the exchanges, we know very little about F2F exchanges, like on localbitcoins.com.

Also, a lot of the coins are bought and sold multiple times by day traders. If I sell 10 BTC, wait for the price to drop a few percent, and buy back 10.5 BTC, on paper that looks like 20.5 BTC have been exchanged, but really only 0.5 BTC has.

So the real question is, how much money will be spent on bitcoins this year by people who don't later sell them. $50 million? Maybe, I have no idea.

Now let's look at Silk Road. The $22 million figure for annual sales is a lower bound. Nicolas Christin admits in his paper that he can only estimate the public listings, based on public reviews. We don't know how many stealth vendors and listings there are, and these may be the biggest sales on the site. Vendors build trusted relationships with a few buyers, then go stealth and offer bigger orders. It seems like you would want to, in order to make up for lost public sales. So SR's annual revenue could be twice the lower bound or more.

By that measure, SR makes up close to 100% of actual trade for goods and services in the bitcoin economy.

Well, who knows. It's all guess work. Don't believe that 20% figure in the article either, because they don't know.

But even in this scenario, what would it mean if SR goes out of business? Probably not much. There would still be $200 million in wealth transferred around and day traded, and that would continue, and probably grow.

Nob's kilo of heroin is $69,500.

http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/silkroad/item/0e55379b32

Who knows if it's real.