I think you have misinterpreted my ideas. Time for a platypus rant from my burrow.--Neither Bitcoin nor the Silk Road nor the Darknet markets are about to die just because some seriously overly confident bureaucrats shrug their shoulders at our various libertarian positions and think this an excellent opportunity to garner yet more funds from the fund of central government by hyping SR even further than it already has been in the media.The essential reason for this: We do not need to ask permission. We are cipherpunks. We have our own Moral Code. This is something that annoys me about some posters on here. They perceive themselves as criminals or worse, not criminals at all. For a simple reason, neither of these views makes any sense if you're cryptoanarchist.Yes, I believe the *State* considers me a criminal. I pay heed to such knowledge, and amend my affairs accordingly.But no, I do not believe I *am* a criminal for a one second. I believe their moral code is wrong and mine is right. In their moral code, I am a criminal. In my moral code, I am not a criminal. It's not complicated.This is for me, an important distinction. This is why I do not like Limetless's ideas about what it takes to be a 'business man' and all that macho bullshit because he is defining his actions by what the State considers him to be. This view is a self fulfilling prophesy of violence, and positively detrimental to everybody involved. Put simply; if the State says you are Scum, and then you begin to believe it, then you have lost the war. You will notice bizarre things in this distorted world view. That wearing a hoody or black leather jacket makes you somehow dangerous or tough, when for everybody else you're simply loudly signalling *catch me, catch me* with your clothes, your body language, your behavior. If you shave your head, wear long hair into a pony tail, have a car that bounces on its wheels or a vehicle with "legalize weed" bumper stickers, don't be so surprised when your local police take a second look at you. You're practically telling them to catch you for fuck's sake.Get a business suit, talk like a normal person and treat people with respect and honor. And lo, it shall be returned to you in the guise of a much different risk profile. It's practically urban camouflage for the drug war. I cannot emphasize enough that law enforcement strongly believe in ridiculous stereotypes about drug vendors and drug consumers.Side Note: Furthermore, the words "junky" or "addict" and "dealer" are their words, not ours. Stop using them. Some people do need to get off drugs like opiates because they have become wholly dependent on them, but they are NOT junk, which is what that word is implying. They are human beings too, not sorry excuses of humanity. Use "consumer" and "vendor" instead. Drugs are not a dozen or so euphemisms, they are generically described as "product" and should be described by their chemical or scientific names, not their street names. This also makes it easier to talk about them. This is a more important concept than many people realize, our vocabulary influences our rational decision making. This is why the language of business is different to normal language, it puts people in the correct frame of reference.Conversely, as I was saying before, it is bad to not consider oneself as being thought of as a criminal, because this is dangerous to your security. You should think like, and look through the eyes of your adversary in order to beat him, which is why some LE agents on this forum are probably attempting some LE equivalent of "total immersion", an anthropological technique to understand the natives. They are attempting the opposite of what I described you should be doing with your appearance. Standard stuff really.Anyway, back to bitcoins and obtaining them:--When bitcoin is made illegal and the exchanges are raided/shut down by legal means, this will not change anything. There may be a brief lull, but then we'll be on the road stronger than ever with over the counter mechanisms. Much stronger than ever. We will simply consolidate our territory and build entrenchments. A respite from the speed of our progress might even come as a welcome relief to some of us.I know, not think, that the DEA, FBI, AFP, Interpol, Europol, SOCA and every other LE agency of any size is trying to shut down the Silk Road and the darknet markets. They study every single post on this forum. Believe it.They will not succeed. You can shut down severs, you can even murder people, but you cannot destroy the network. A network which is in fact much, much bigger than all those agencies put together. This is a wave of epic proportions, it is unstoppable. It unites two powerful elements. The power of the illegal drug markets, that resilience and stability of supply, has established an unlikely alliance with another tribe, the computer hackers. That is the real unreported news story about SR. When you get some of the smartest and most determined people on the planet and the money supplied by the drug markets, you have one helluva war on your hands. The State paid tens of millions to attack the Farmer's Market, a mere outpost with barely a million dollars in market transactions. They cannot be proud of that, they only nailed a handful of guys barely making a regular job's wages. Winning that battle wasn't a triumph, it was a disaster. Consider what that implies for a market the size of the Silk Road... The budgetary escalations will be too much to bear, they will be forced to adopt new procedures by establishing special new task forces, small units of technically competent LE officers, in fact they have done and are currently pretending to have given up, thrown their hands up to the air, so far. This is bullshit and it is obvious bullshit.Consider that information has, until recently, been largely a weapon utilized by the State and the State alone against its various opponents. They are used to being an active informational adversary, using data to corral their targets and crush them. Divide & Conquer. They are not used to their own weapons being turned on them. They have been using them for so long, that in fact they don't genuinely comprehend the idea they might not be the only ones who can use them. They consider opponents who use their methods as outliers, or agents of other States, which is even appropriate given that we are setting up our own territory on the network. In our society today, what the Database says is the truth. When you can't rely on that, you got a problem. They break into SR's servers. Fine. They can do that to dozens of black market servers. It doesn't really change anything about the network. Next year there will be an explosion of new services to replace lost ones. We employ the Swarming War Doctrine more so online than the real world currently does, that is our true paradigm edge. Once our customers have the right defenses (anonymity solutions + encryption), then for them it is merely a case of learning the correct URLs to type in or the adaption of a procedure, a mere inconvenience, only necessitating being in the right places known to discuss product. Unsophisticated customers will be busted. Sophisticated customers will never be busted.It must be understood that if we return the favor by breaking into their servers they're utterly fucked. That just needs to happen *once* and they have had a digital Pearl Harbor. I am not suggesting that we actually wipe their data, because that would be an act of war. There is a critical difference between *having* tools and power and *using* them. I am saying that if we are physically under attack, if the State responds in a disproportionate manner, then we will have no real compulsion to hold back our hand. It would be us or them. This is where my philosophy parts ways with kmfkewm, he wasn't opposed to the idea of sending mailbombs, at least in theory. I, on the other hand, am completely against physical violence saving extreme circumstances. In a different, non violent sense however, my theory of war goes further than his ideas of offense in the case of mailbombing. I say, as long as the game is played by the rules and proportionately, then that is that. You takes a ticket and the risks associated with said ticket. It is proxy warfare all the way. But... if the game itself changes, and the government acts in a disproportionate manner, then we have nothing to lose, and they have everything to lose. A centralized state attacking decentralized targets? Works well when facing a conventional opponent. Not so much if not. You must understand, in such a scenario it is necessary to go all the way in order to survive. That doesn't just mean destroying the agencies pursuing us directly, it means zero tolerance for the entire government. I'm talking about a situation in which merely ordering from the Silk Road becomes punishable by life imprisonment or death, not because of the quantity or product you ordered, but merely as a deterrent, as an example to deter others because the State realizes it is entirely ineffective against the online trade of illicit product and turns from bully into killer. That is grounds for Revolution. That is the straw which breaks the camel's back, and leads to all out asymmetric warfare.I am not certain the right people in LEOs grasp how dangerous it would be if an arms race spun out of control between our more impetuous comrades and any of their LE agents who've obtained "War Drug Religion". We require a balance of powers, because absolute positions will only lead to extremism.We are about to enter the Cold War of the Drug War. That much is completely certain. The State will not win, and it will be a ridiculously expensive process with little to show for it. But this is still much better than having a hot war, Vietnam War style, which would drag us both into the gutter.You have your part to play in what is to come. You should not be a bystander unless you believe you have no stake in your liberty. It doesn't matter if you don't know how to code, or even how to use PGP! There is a practically infinite number of useful things you can do to help the cryptoanarchists make a better, freer, more liberal world. You can act as a bitcoin merchant in Bitcoin over the counter markets. You can act as a spy within the enemy's territory. You can undermine their propaganda efforts. You can publicize the existence of the Silk Road and other darknet markets to all and sundry. You can act as a transhipper, or offer services and products on the darknet that are perfectly legal, but difficult to obtain anonymously.In short, you all have a role to play in the next CryptoWar. Proverb: Traveller, there are no roads. Roads are made by walking.