Silk Road forums

My speculation is the number of people they have busted must have been customers of the vendor .  Maybe keeping addresses too long

It sounds like all the people arrested were from that area. "Several counties" implies nearby counties, otherwise they would have said in several states, or throughout the United States.

I can't believe I just read through all this, but the other thread got me interested.

So, aside from the fact that nobody with zero prior chemistry knowledge claims to have made MDMA from the guide (the only claim I saw was from Limetless, but that was a skilled chemist), I'm wondering why anyone would do this, unless you plan to go large scale. It seems like a lot of work and money to synth drugs for your personal use, or just to sell small amounts. There's a reason why we specialize in modern society. It's efficient to do so, and in many cases it's only profitable to do something in large scale.

Why not leave the experts to making it and spend your time and money on enjoying it.

People are already making this at industrial scale, and the stuff on SR isn't adulterated with meth and bullshit like pressed pills used to be, so I'm wondering what the motivation is. Just a fun challenge.... that might land in prison for years?

BTW, here's a great site for (text)books: http://libgen.org

You can download over Tor, so it's safer that torrents. I found that Vogel book that's mentioned on the second page, although it's called Practical Organic Chemistry, not Organic Synthesis. Already had the Zubrick book (also from that site).

Anyone here prefer using a client as your bitcoin wallet as opposed to an online wallet?  Seems that with LE always lurking around that it's probably not good to get to deep into discussion but I think I prefer using the online wallet with an account that I can create.  What if my computer goes beserk or something happens on my client that jacks the client application?  With the online wallet service I like that you can access it from most anywhere at anytime, change your bitcoin address and then just sell your bitcoins. 

I feel safer storing coins in my own wallet, since I use encryption and backups. If something catastrophic happens, I'd rather it be my fault then some dickwads I have no control over. However, I'm also pretty confident that I won't lose my wallet. It's probably not a good solution for a lot of people.

I found this: http://failuremag.com/feature/article/point_of_no_return/

"All the incoming letters are sorted by a high-speed scanner that has a magnetic eye; it looks for indelible ink, which generally is an indicator of important documents. “A letter does not have ‘value’ unless it contains money, checks, an insurance policy—that kind of thing,” says Long. Any letter not identified by the magnetic eye as being potentially valuable is put on the fast track to a super size paper shredder. “To protect the privacy of the mail we’re required to shred it,” continues Long. “If you ever mail anything that didn’t get there, don’t worry. It’s shredded somewhere.”"

So as long as it doesn't have indelible ink on it, maybe they won't open it.

I've been avoiding this thread because quite frankly, it's my least favorite topic. It's been discussed to death on the forum, but it keeps getting bumped here.

Use the search function. There are at least 30 threads with VPN in the title, and many more besides.

The reason I take a/my listing down is that the coins are dropping faster than SR -can- correct with the pegged prices.
Say at 1300 its 1btc $150.....1310 only 1btc $100.
SR is still at 1 btc/$150 for at least some time.
It should be 1.5btc in the listing so selling now I will loose 50 $

Yeah, but for two months prior to the crash, you were making more money than the cost of your products. Since the BTC price was going up, the 24 hour average that SR uses was lower than the current BTC price at any time, and the buyer got charged more BTC (if the price was pegged to the dollar). So not only did you withdraw more BTC, but the price continued to rise until you cashed out, which for some vendors can be a few weeks.

Nobody complains when the going is good. Vendors were basically getting bonuses for 2 months, and the BTC crashed in one day, so then they cancelled orders, causing the buyers to lose money.

I tried figuring this out last week... and couldnt what so ever.

Im not computer savy and feel like  i had no chance...

but hopefully someone will put out an easy guide of how to for retards like me

Creating a hidden service is really easy. You basically uncomment 2 lines in the torrc. You can even create a hidden service with the Tor Browser Bundle, go to onion icon -> Settings -> Services. Of course, you'll need some actual services, like a web server, running on your computer.

The hard part is making your hidden service secure. I have a list of like 50 PHP functions that should be disabled, if you are going to use PHP, and there are many other things you can and/or should do to secure your HS, depending on what it's hosting.

It was definitely a coordinated attack to crash bitcoin: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c3uqd/this_is_a_fucking_disgrace/

I can't find it now, but there was a blog post that talked about a whole bunch of $106 sell orders that were coming in when BTC was at $170 or something like that. So it was a combination of lag (which my or may not have involved a DDOS attack) and coordinated buy/sell orders to influence the price.

It was certainly not the bitcoin community suddenly losing confidence in bitcoin en masse -- well, they did, because of the shenanigans, but not spontaneously.

However, I've seen no evidence that central banks were involved. I think people are having a hard time accepting that random market manipulators could have done this. There's certainly financial incentive for virtually anyone to do this, not just banks.