Silk Road forums

Go with Mint it is like Ubuntu but even easier. If Ubuntu is almost ready for the masses, Mint is.

With the development history of bitcoin having government ties and the documented history of drug trafficking by the CIA and other government agencies in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's all somehow tied into moving slush funds covertly somehow.

The development history of Bitcoin has governent ties? News to me.

If you want to contribute to Tor I would highly suggest using a cheap VPS to do so , preferably anonymously registered at that, if you are anything other than a small time customer. This is especially true if you plan to run an exit because multiple people who ran exits have been raided after dumbass police traced some other person to them.

Truecrypt doesn't protect from hackers at all though, only from people who already have physical access to your computer. Plus it only protects from them if they are retarded and don't know how to covertly obtain passphrases, or just cold boot memory into a forensics laptop.

VMs can be useful for security, but it is a matter of having the right type of VM and also knowing the benefits and limitations. Isolating network facing applications into VM away from Tor and your real IP address can be a very big security boost in some ways, for one it can eliminate all possible IP leaks / DNS leaks etc. For two it can make it so even if you are rooted the attacker can not obtain your real IP address unless they break out of the VM and get to the host. It has disadvantages too though, primarily it increases complexity, which means that it is easier for the attacker to root your VM than it would be for them to root the same OS running on bare metal. The type of VM used has a lot to say about how hard it is for the attacker to break out of the VM and how much easier it is for them to root the VM versus the same os being run on bare metal. Paravirtualization seems to be the best of both worlds. Check out Qubes OS it is pretty cool security oriented distro that is based on Xen, it lets you create security domains and automatically puts every application you launch into a VM that is isolated into a security domain you set.

Windows is still widely considered to be the least secure choice of OS, and using Truecrypt for FDE doesn't protect from anything but a small range of potential attacks. You should still use FDE on your real disk  though, and of course not rely on FDE of a virtual drive.

If you are not using some sort of GUI isolation, be it from VMs or from mandatory access control profiles, any compromise of a windowed application is pretty much game over. You could have a Tetris application that has lowest possible user privileges pwnt, sucks because your desktop environment almost certainly is broadcasting keystrokes to all windowed applications, so they can spy on your keystrokes and EOP to root after you SU.

Pretty much what it boils down to is that you can use the best encryption algorithms every place you possibly can, and the best anonymity networks in the world, and it isn't going to do shit to protect you if you are hacked. Using encryption and anonymizers is important, but hardening your OS and using advanced configuration techniques and technologies to protect from hackers is just as important, and Windows is about as specialized for high security against hackers as *BSD is for gaming.

If you don't think you need to worry about being hacked just look up CIPAV. When FBI runs into a wall trying to identify a target who is using strong encryption and anonymizers, they turn to their arsenal of zero days and potentially-unpatched-exploits and try to find a combination that lets them by pass the security functionality that they can't directly break. DEA was working on developing a similar set of pre-packaged hacking tools for tracing and wiretapping targets using crypto/anonymizers as well, I heard about that for the first time about two years ago. 

sniff a shit ton of ketamine you might feel better for weeks

You have it backwards, Sweden requires more data retention than USA does.

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15826462,00.html

USA has no laws at all about data retention. NSA sucks everything up but it is illegal for them to be doing so. Swedish signals intelligence agency does the same thing though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_traffic_database. Pretty much any country with a signals intelligence agency and any significant amount of internet traffic passing through them does the same exact shit though. USA is one of the only places that doesn't currently have mandatory data retention laws. Germany had them for a short while but their high court deemed them to be illegal last I heard, and demanded all the logs that had been kept up to that point be destroyed. Data retention is mandatory for all members of the EU but some have ignored the mandate.

Of course if feds want to log data they can legally force people to start logging if they can get court orders. But USA remains one of the few places where dragnet logging is not required by law.

You shouldn't deposit them back into your same old wallet that defeats the point of mixing, you need to make a new wallet. I would personally try to hide the fact that you are using a mixing service too, one option would be to cash out into something like Pecunix and then to an exhanger for a bank wire. That will hide the fact that you used a mixing service unless someone gets records from both Pecunix, the exchanger you used and the Bitcoin exchanger you use to get Pecunix. Your best bet would be to get it cashed out to a Western Union money wire and pick it up with a fake ID, or cash it out of an ATM with an anonymous debit card. That way you avoid having unaccounted for money suddenly showing up in your bank account from an E-currency exchangers bank account.