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Messages - astor

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1876
Silk Road discussion / Re: Cocaine Price Fixing - Nod Uncensored & Up Late [Adults Only] [TOP SECRET]
« on: March 21, 2013, 08:32 pm »
Meh, buyers can form cartels too, by boycotting vendors they don't like. If the prices are fixed and/or too high, don't buy the product and wait for somebody better to come along.

1877
Off topic / Re: Other .onion sites ?
« on: March 21, 2013, 08:27 pm »
Cleaned Hidden Wiki

http://3suaolltfj2xjksb.onion/hiddenwiki/index.php/Main_Page

1878
Security / Re: BTC speculation hyper bubble
« on: March 21, 2013, 04:28 pm »
Quote from: astor on March 21, 2013, 06:29 am
Of course there's no way to be sure, but I doubt more than a small fraction of that is from an increased SR userbase.

I take that back. There are indirect ways to measure relative growth in SR's userbase.

Look at some forum stats:

Code: [Select]
                12-08   13-02
New members     4066    3831
New topics      5417    10146
New posts       62348   87007

For whatever reason, there were anomalously high user registrations last August. In July and September there were 3428 and 3665. So ignoring that, there seems to be a 40-100% increase in forum activity based on topics and posts.

I also remember about 5000 listings on the market back then and 8000 today.

So we can estimate that SR's growth has been between 50-100% since August.

Still, the exchange trade volume has increased 10 fold and most of that was in the last 2 months, which is why BTC price has skyrocketd. If SR accounted for 10% of exchange trade volume back then, then it might be 2% today.


1879
Security / Re: BTC speculation hyper bubble
« on: March 21, 2013, 06:29 am »
Quote from: lelmeriodici on March 21, 2013, 04:55 am
The third threat is that something happens to SR.  In August of 2012,  $87 million USD worth of Bitcoin was in circulation and a Carnegie Mellon study found that SR did revenue of about $2 million USD (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/study-estimates-2-million-a-month-in-bitcoin-drug-sales/).  Considering the data that came from a study two months later that found that 78% of Bitcoins aren't being actively traded (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/78-percent-of-bitcoin-currency-stashed-under-digital-mattress-study-finds/), SR accounts for 10% of Bitcoin activity.  I would suspect it might even be higher than that.  Point is, SR is probably currently the single most influential factor to the value of Bitcoins.  If SR continues to have something of a monopoly on this business, then one day the administrators go rogue, the BTC may suffer a hit it cannot recover from if vendors and customers don't find somewhere else to congregate quickly.

I think that fear is unfounded at this point. August 2012 data is quite old in this rapidly evolving economy. USD exchange volume has gone up 10 fold since then:

https://blockchain.info/charts/trade-volume

and will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Of course there's no way to be sure, but I doubt more than a small fraction of that is from an increased SR userbase. The number of legitimate uses of bitcoin is expanding and diversifying. The FinCEN report that came out a few days ago and affirmed the legality of bitcoin will give many large and mainstream businesses the confidence to integrate it as a payment option.

Bitcoin isn't dependent on any single merchant anymore, if it ever was.


(It's also noteworthy that when SR suffered an extended downtime in November 2012 because of a huge increase in users, there's no noticeable blip in the exchange trade volume. There were bigger spikes in October.)

1880
Technical support / Re: Downloads via TOR
« on: March 21, 2013, 05:21 am »
I don't think TBB has a setting like that.

Have you tried saving to a different folder? Disabling antivirus software (probably not a good idea, but it might be quarantining the file)? Checking your Security Zone Policies (if you're on a recent version of Windows)?

Those are some of the suggestions made here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cant-download-or-save-files

1881
Security / Re: Law enforcement disguised as vendors?
« on: March 21, 2013, 04:53 am »
Quote from: kmfkewm on February 21, 2013, 10:03 am
DEA agents have full exception from controlled substance act. They are allowed to purchase, use and sell all controlled substances, in an undercover capacity.

I read a DEA manual a while back that said agents are not allowed to consume drugs. It pointed out that some state agencies allow officers to take drugs if their life is in danger, but the federal government makes no such exception. It even gave tips on how to get out of a situation where they are expected to take drugs. They should make up an excuse like, "I have to take a drug test for a job tomorrow."

I'm not saying that no DEA agents take drugs, maybe some do, but officially, on paper, they aren't allowed to.

Not sure where I found the manual, but it might have been this: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=12280.msg115436#msg115436

Unfortunately, it doesn't exist anymore.

1882
Silk Road discussion / Re: Silk Road is down bigtime
« on: March 20, 2013, 05:32 pm »
Quote from: jackstraw on March 20, 2013, 05:39 am
There was a bitcoin crash so to speak back in September of 2012.   I know cause it fucked me when the coins I just bought went down like 5 bucks a coin and I was prepping to get a qp.   It wasn't a huge thing but it pissed me off that it happened on the same day I was trying to do my deal.   Since then the btc has done nothing but head skyward.   Wish I hadn't spent all the coins I had bought for as little as $5....but hindsight is always 20/20 as they say.   I don't know too many people that predicted the rate to be hitting the $60 mark as it did today.    Crazy fuckin currency that's for sure.   Agreed that hedging now is just more money in DPR's pockets.   Vendors with large stash's of coins must be loving this dramatic rise.

You're talking about this:  http://torimagesbp2vt3u.onion/i/gBgh.png

The drop doesn't look as big on that graph because BTC price is averaged over some time period.

That crash was caused by the pirateat40 scam. There was a lot of chatter on bitcointalk.org beforehand of people fleeing.

If you're going to mess around with bitcoins, you really should be reading the forum and keeping up on the latest news, rumors, etc.

Several factors are helping bitcoin right now. In the last few months, legal businesses like Wordpress.com and Reddit have started accepting it. The FinCen report a few days ago made bitcoin officially legal in the US. It wasn't illegal before, but the US gov had not taken an official position on it. Now it's explicitly legal. That paves the way for much wider adoption among mainstream businesses. And there haven't been any major hacks or thefts in a long while. That  helps to build confidence.

Unless some catastrophic event happens, I expect BTC price to keep rising for some time. So not holding onto your coins from $5 is a sunk cost, but you can always buy now and still make money.

1883
Silk Road discussion / Re: Silk Road is down bigtime
« on: March 20, 2013, 02:20 am »
Quote from: onesickpuppy on March 20, 2013, 02:17 am
Yeah but if that was the case then the clearnet onion.to site wouldn't be able to access  SR either right? It has to make a tor connection on your behalf. Unless the hidden service descriptor is being selectively published to only a small part of the tor net?

If a lot of people access SR through onion.to (which I believe is the case), then it would already have an established circuit to SR and wouldn't need to fetch the descriptor.

Anyway, I'm getting this error:

onion.to
silkroadvb5piz3r.onion is currently unavailable. Proxy timed out while trying to connect. (4).

You might have been able to access it through an existing circuit that has been severed now. Try again.

1884
Silk Road discussion / Re: Silk Road is down bigtime
« on: March 20, 2013, 02:11 am »
Quote from: onesickpuppy on March 20, 2013, 02:05 am
But seriously, then why isn't it available as a hidden service according to tor? Usually when I get a timeout the error on the page says that it is a timeout. In tis case it says it can't even establish a connection

It could be that the server is up, the web server is running, but the Tor client crashed or there's something preventing it from publishing its descriptor.

I know that's definitely what that error means. Here's a bug report saying the same thing:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5363

"It seems Tor is still broadcasting the hidden service descriptor (otherwise it would say "hidden service unavailable, try again later") but nobody is actually able to make a connection."

1885
Silk Road discussion / Re: Silk Road is down bigtime
« on: March 20, 2013, 02:01 am »
Quote from: onesickpuppy on March 20, 2013, 01:56 am
Yes, yes it makes sense... So it is down right now. I wonder if it has to do with everyone with BTC's wanting to spend them NOW before they go down in value by $10 tomorrow. Not that I know that for a fact, but that would suck

A lot of people bought BTC yesterday, which bumped the price by 20%. Looks like they finally got those BTC into their SR accounts. ;)

1886
Silk Road discussion / Re: Silk Road is down bigtime
« on: March 20, 2013, 01:55 am »
Quote from: SelfSovereignty on March 20, 2013, 01:33 am
It ain't down:
Quote
INFO  Average time required for activity update cycles: 80.19 seconds.

It's taking an average of 1 minute and 20 seconds just to contact the site and d/l a page or two, but it ain't down.

It may have been doing that when you tried, but now I'm getting the error that I posted.



1887
Silk Road discussion / Re: Silk Road is down bigtime
« on: March 20, 2013, 01:51 am »
Quote from: onesickpuppy on March 20, 2013, 01:20 am
Yeah but usually when tor is trying to connect to it, I see silkroadvb5piz3r.onion:80 being tried in the Tor Network Map window. I see the status change from connecting to open, or closed, but now I don't even see that.

The hidden service is down. The hidden service descriptor is not being published. That's what this means:

[Notice] Closing stream for '[scrubbed].onion': hidden service is unavailable (try again later).

If your Tor client can't fetch the descriptor, it won't know what the intro points are, and it won't build circuits to them.

1888
Security / Re: Facebook through tor
« on: March 20, 2013, 01:42 am »
What do you mean at a clearnet site? Signing up through open wifi or something?

You could do that, but Facebook gives a lot of shit to accounts that change IP addresses all the time. It triggers their spammer algorithms and your account may end up on various levels of lock down, unable to send messages to others, comment on their status updates, etc., they may require you to phone verify (which you could do with a burner), or they could shut down your account without warning.


1889
Security / Re: Tor video chat, audio chat, or text chat?
« on: March 20, 2013, 01:36 am »
Or to put it another way, if they haven't deanonymized Freedom Hosting and Silk Road, they don't care about deanonymizing you. :)

1890
Security / Re: Tor video chat, audio chat, or text chat?
« on: March 20, 2013, 01:09 am »
In a very rough sense, yes.

As a regular Tor user, your client makes requests and open connections to other servers. When you (effectively) become a server, because your client is a hidden service, others can open connections to you. That's where new attacks come in.

It's *kind of* like broadcasting your online status, and allowing strangers to find you.

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