Silk Road forums
Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: nomad bloodbath on February 02, 2013, 01:39 am
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Recent Sheep marketplace PM's to vendor to me is the most ass backwards way to try to create competition to Silk Road.
It screams just in the name alone to avoid by demeaning the entire member ship it might get...by calling everyone a sheep.
I crossed my mind how might a competition marketplace might prove it's self not to be a LE honeypot or a scam site?
Surely a healthy competitor to Silk Road has a demographic but how does one start with the auto LEO honeypot or Scam site being the automatic response to new marketplaces being created with a true sense of honest and responsible alternative to Silk Road and it's sink or swim guidelines?
X)
nomad
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Interesting :-)
+1 to ya Nomad!!
Peace,
ChemCat
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I think that first and foremost it must allow vendors to register for free. SR really should allow vendors to register for free as well imo, because if LE run such a site and charge for registration of vendors, it will give them an economic advantage of being able make infinite sting vendor accounts while keeping the legitimate accounts expensive and therefor less prevalent. However, I do think SR has earned our trust and for this reason I do not take it as a bad sign that they charge for vending accounts, although I certainly would have if they charged from the very start.
Additionally, any competition will need to be totally open as far as vending goes, free to register to vend and anyone can vend. If a site meets this criteria we can at least be much more certain that it is not 100% LE vendors.
Another technique would be to recruit vendors from the private forums, a lot of them can be vouched for to various degrees by people who are already a part of the established silk road community. Also, of course the competition could try to recruit SR vendors as well, who already have established reputations. So do vendors with SOS pages.
So I do think it would be possible to compete with SR to an extent, at least to give good faith of legitimacy. It would be something similar to what OVDB was though. But on a more practical level it would be enormously difficult to compete with SR in a traditional way: SR offers pretty much everything a site like SR can offer, it is secure and anonymous enough that it is still standing and nobody has stolen all of its bitcoins, it has had a massive advertising campaign given to it by the media establishments across the world, and it has a massive and established user base. I do have an idea for how someone could come to compete with SR in a sense, but it would be more like evolving SR to a new level rather than actually competing against it.
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I don't see it successfully happening unless the SR goes under. The strength of this place rests in its numbers and product selection, and trying to start a competitor to it from the ground up would be extremely difficult if not impossible. You could build a site as functional as Amazon, but if you don't have the userbase to make it appealing to customers, you'll still fail.
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The strength of this place rests in its numbers and product selection, and trying to start a competitor to it from the ground up would be extremely difficult if not impossible.
Unfortunately true.