Silk Road forums

If you're that concerned about losing the package, domestic shipping has the lowest chance of interception.

first, my biggest worry is that a vendors acct could be compromised by le (is this likely)?

It's not likely but it is possible. Browse around the forum and you'll find threads about suspicious vendors. Usually they try to get you to pay with a trackable payment system like PayPal or Western Union. NEVER do that. Only use bitcoins and the escrow system on SR. Stick with vendors who have a long history of successful transactions and you reduce the chances of interacting with LE . Remember, they can't send real drugs, so an LE vendor would quickly be identified as a vendor who never sends product, or sends fake stuff. It would be hard to differentiate LE from a scammer in that sense.

second, i can't figure out how much sr charges for escrow on an order between 20-35 bitcoins...any answers would be greatly appreciated...thanks

SR doesn't charge the buyer anything. Vendors pay a commission, but that's usually incorporated into the price of the product.

You don't have to sign for it -- just have to more or less take ownership of the package.  Picking it up and walking away with it suggests you own it and expected it -- that's good enough for them in most cases I think.

This is why in some ways a PO box is worse than a home address. If a package is placed in your mail box and you get the mail, you can bring it inside with the rest of the mail and claim you were going to have it returned to sender, but obviously you needed to put a note on it before you stuck it back in the mailbox. When a package is placed in a PO box, if you don't immediately take it to the clerk and you walk out of the post office with it, you've undeniably taken ownership of it. Basically, there's more plausible deniability with a home address, since you have to go out of your way to pick up mail from a PO box and leave with it, while you're more of a passive recipient of the mail that gets stuck in a home mailbox.

@ThePhoenix. gpg says no valid OpenPGP data found.

Edit: Ok, that second key imported just fine.

such low weights, you have to wonder if they were perhaps trying to make an example out of these two.

It could be that LE is facing increasing pressure to crack down on mail order drugs. While I have no stats, I bet that because of SR, BMR and increased use of the internet to get drugs, there are a lot more small orders going through the mail. They may not be able to shut down SR, but if they pursue the smaller quantities, they can scare people away from using it.

Agreed, if DPR can find out the source of the attacks and pass the info, I'll happily dedicate all of my resources to destroying whatever hardware the attacks source from, shit I'll even pay my guys double time...

You realize that people who attack the site are as anonymous as you are when you connect to it. Their attacks go over the Tor network.

Personally I think they went up solely because of WordPress beginning to accept them (WordPress is the 22nd most-visited site on the internet).

That was an interesting turn of events and could get WordPress into trouble. American corporations are prohibited from doing business with certain countries, like Iran and Cuba, yet they explicitly stated in their press release that this would allow Iranians to pay for services. I wouldn't be surprised if the US government investigates.

There's a thread on this forum that aggregates delivery success statistics. Overall, 96.5% of packages arrive safely, but that number doesn't tell the whole story. A package is much more likely to get seized in customs, sot he delivery success rate there may be 93-95% while delivery success for domestic shipping is higher than 99%. For small amounts, they won't do a controlled delivery. They'll send you a letter.

So your best bet is to order small and domestic.