Silk Road forums

There have been some issues with the exchanges lately.  Mt Gox's market share has dropped substantially, and its price has diverged from the other exchanges.  Many buyers buy from exchangers who base off of the mtgox rate, while the sellers prefer the other rate.  So, we have to compromise.  Until further notice, we will use the current average of mtgox and bitstamp, the two largest exchanges and update every hour.  I hope this is agreeable to everyone.

With the unedited interview, did you deliberately revise your answers to avoid stylometric profiling? There are some very specific turns of phrase there, and I've noticed a few grammatical/spelling errors you've made in other posts, suggesting a pattern.

Or perhaps you have no NON-DPR presence online? 

Good interview.  Have to admit, wish it was with me 

I do intentionally obscure my tone and try to throw in phrases that might send someone down a blind ally.  If you notice anything that might be revealing, please let me know privately.

Glad you liked the interview.  We've had our fun too though, eh?

Loved the article just like everyone else was saying. I hope the full interview does get published eventually, hopefully soon.


To DPR or any other members here, how hard is it to run a tor relay to help out? How much knowledge would one need to run one, resources, expenses, upkeep and security possible problems? Any info would be very helpful.

I'll get someone to put a document together for us.  The most simple way is to use your home computer.  In the vidalia settings you can click "sharing" and then "Relay traffic inside the Tor network".  Your home IP address would then be in the public tor node directory.  There "shouldn't" be anything wrong with this, but if you want to run one anonymously, you'd be better off renting a server and running the node out of a datacenter.  I just put it on the to do list to make all of this really easy for you guys.  It's fun too and nice to know that you are helping people in oppressive countries speak out and also helping people access Silk Road.

Quote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on August 14, 2013, 05:16 pm

I've gone ahead and implemented one behind the scenes change that I think has improved things a little bit already.  The vendor weight, which determines their percent ranking as displayed on the vendor pages is now determined with just two variables: sales volume and age of sales.  So, the vendor weight is the sum of all of their transactions, but each transaction is weighted from 100% today down to 0% once it is 8 months old.  There is a whole thread in the vendor forum of vendors who are really pleased with the effect this change has produced.

I noticed an issue yesterday where a noob buyer changed his feedback from 1/5 to 5/5 but my overall percentage ranking never improved like it should or at least didn't return to what it was previously.
Could be anything to do with the update?

no.  there could be a couple of reasons for it.  If it's an issue for you, you can contact vendor support and they'll dig around and see what's up.

DPR, I thought the article was well done and your interview was great. Normally I brush off people who say "we're part of this pro-libertarian anti-government movement", but I think after this article I'm finally feeling it. We're part of the revolution. Fuck yeah.

That being said, I have two questions:

1. If the title of DPR has been passed off before, was the same PGP key passed? If so, how can we trust your PGP key?

2. What's the rationale behind silkroadlink.com? Won't it bring a lot of people who don't care about their security, posing a security threat to themselves?

1. The DPR key was passed off to me.  You make a good point though that the original DPR could pose as the current, so when that key is used, you are in a sense trusting the present and past DPRs.  I was actually just thinking of updating the key.

2. It will hopefully help people learn about SR, Tor and Bitcoin.  It's really up to them how deep down the security rabbit hole they want to go, but I think things are secure enough that it won't be a big issue.

great ideas everyone.  I'm really glad I opened up the discussion.  The delivery success rate and transit time metrics are ones I've wanted to have for a long time.  The problem with transit time is when to count an item as delivered (when it's finalized?  What about FE?  Depend on the user to submit the data?  What about different postage options like express vs first-class vs. international and variations in the postal systems of different countries?).  Then the problem with delivery success rates is the same problem we have with feedback in general, which is fraudulent data, whether it's vendors padding their own stats, or knocking their competitor's stats, or buyers using their review as leverage over the vendor's stats.

So as you can see, it's a tough nut to crack in its own right.  For now, I'd like to focus on improving just vendor feedback and reviews.  I've been playing around with different systems and parameters and seeing how it affects the current and historical stats.  One thing I keep coming back to is something that was said earlier in the thread:  "money talks".  It's looking more and more like the most important parameter for weighting buyers and sellers is simply how much money they've spent/earned.  Basically, it's really hard for a scammer to fake feedback from buyer accounts that have spent lots of money with vendors who have lots of sales.  I think one of the main reasons for this is that, to fake a transaction, you still have to pay the commission, so pretending to be a top vendor through dummy transactions with high volume buyers simply costs a lot.

I've gone ahead and implemented one behind the scenes change that I think has improved things a little bit already.  The vendor weight, which determines their percent ranking as displayed on the vendor pages is now determined with just two variables: sales volume and age of sales.  So, the vendor weight is the sum of all of their transactions, but each transaction is weighted from 100% today down to 0% once it is 8 months old.  There is a whole thread in the vendor forum of vendors who are really pleased with the effect this change has produced.

I'm still liking the idea of decoupling the 1 - 5 review and the written feedback.

Another idea I am liking is displaying not just the average review expressed as a percent, but the actual distribution of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 point reviews.  I think this will make it much more acceptable to leave a 4 because instead to damaging the average, it just puts a little more weight in the 4 column.  This is something Amazon does and I think we should adopt it.

This, I think, is enough to chew on for now and get pushed out into production so we can see it in action.  We don't want to change too much at once because it is hard to foresee all of the effects a change will have until it is actually made.

I'm thrilled to see positive responses so far.  I thought the article was decent as well.  There was quite a bit more to the interview than was published.  It took about 6 hours to conduct if I remember correctly.  Andy mentioned that he'd like to publish the whole thing word for word, so hopefully that will go up today as well.

Dread Pirate Roberts, apart from buying and distributing massive quantities of illegal drugs, what else can we do to support your libertarian cause?

Because of you and this site a lot of us have become very wealthy, but it's more than just the money to me. I feel like we are part of something revolutionary, creating a life lived the way we want instead of having it dictated to us by a power-hungry government that rarely has our best interests at heart. I want to fight for this in any way possible.

That is admirable of you Mitch.  One thing pops to mind... run a Tor relay.  If you run it as a relay node and not an exit node, you won't run into any problems with LE (all traffic to and from will be encrypted) and you will be helping people access sites like SR more quickly and securely.  The Tor network is good, but it would be great if there were tens of thousands of relays instead of a couple thousand and only a few hundred high capacity ones.

It is possible to just donate to relay operators, but I think it is much better to run your own.  If one group runs most of the relays, that's not really a distributed network.