Quote from: N1ghtmare on September 24, 2012, 10:15 amAnd we believe that Silk Road was founded on the principles of free market. Silk Road is supposed to be the freest of them all.There ya go! Silk Road IS a free market - vendors are free to charge what they like, and they do so because people are willing to pay the asking price. It goes back to the basic laws of supply and demand - there is a huge demand for good LSD and very little supply here. If ten LSD vendors arrived on the scene tomorrow and started selling top quality LSD at half the price of their competitors, the competitors would either have to drop their prices to match the new vendor's, or stop selling LSD altogether if it became unprofitable for them to sell it at such a low price.You rail against the prices charged, but as this IS a free market you're more than welcome to set up shop yourself and sell LSD at a much lower price. If the supply of top quality LSD increases and the new vendors charge lower prices, LSD prices will fall in general as vendors try to recapture their market share. Supply and demand.Put simply, you may be unwilling to pay the prices advertised but the reason that prices remain "high" is because others are willing to pay them. And I place "high" in quotation marks as the view of prices being high is entirely subjective. It is relative to how much money each person has, and whether they value that money more than the item they're trading that money for. That is true for every single purchase that has and will ever be made. The item being purchased has more value to the purchaser than the coins in their pocket, whether it be a loaf of bread or a Rolex watch. Whilst you obviously value 82.66 Bitcoin more than a sheet of LSD for $1,000 (current Bitcoin value), others clearly value the LSD higher than the Bitcoin, hence the reason that vendors can charge the prices they do.- grahamgreene