Quote from: Bungee54 on August 08, 2012, 09:15 pmTraveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplaceNicolas ChristinCarnegie Mellon INI/CyLabnicolasc@cmu.eduhttp://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1.pdfFascinating study. This bit was rather interesting:Quote6.1 Ethical considerations Conducting this research yielded some ethical quandaries. Since we are analyzing data from activity that is, in most jurisdictions, deemed as criminal, could this work directly lead to arrest or prosecution of individuals? If such were the case, should it be published? We answered negatively to the rst question. Indeed, the data we collected is essentially public. We did have to create an account on Silk Road to access it; but registration is open to anybody who connects to the site. We did not compromise the site in any way. Perhaps, bypassing the authentication mechanism and associated CAPTCHA by reusing an authentication cookie could be construed as a hack. However, we argue this is nothing more than using a convenient feature that the site operators have willingly offered their visitors. Indeed, nothing would prevent the site operators from setting authentication cookies with very short expiry dates. Considering that the data we obtained is available to anybody, we do not think this work adds any additional risk for the Silk Road operators, their customers or their sellers. In fact, as routinely expressed in user forums [6], Silk Road operators seem to espouse crypto-anarchist ideals (see, e.g., May [18]) and to that end, willingly make their website  and, as a result, its data  publicly available.Also, if their estimate of the monthly revenue is accurate, I can see why DPR and company don't need to maintain their own seller accounts.Also, this paper might finally answer the question of what percentage of the BTC market is. My extraordinarily rough guestimate (which is probably wrong) based on the current bitcoinwatch.com figures with lots of gratuitous rounding off places Silk Road trade (total revenue) at somewhere between 3.5% and 4% of the entire BTC market.So much for the panicked posts on the Bitcoin Talk forums about Silk Road and other black markets (of which SR is arguably the largest) leading to the demise of the currency. If this paper kills that tired old argument then it will have at least done one good thing.A pity there was no mention of Lim's land rover, though.