Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: fuckthepolice101 on August 07, 2012, 05:37 pm
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http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1.pdf
Abstract:
Nicolas Christin
Carnegie Mellon INI/CyLab
nicolasc@cmu.edu
Working paper
First version: May 4, 2012.
This version: August 1, 2012.
Id: paper.tex 1286 2012-07-30 21:29:14Z nicolasc
Abstract
We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We
gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls
of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods
being sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through
examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used
as a market for controlled substances and narcotics. A relatively small “core” of about 60 sellers has
been present throughout our measurement interval, while the majority of sellers leaves (or goes “underground”) within a couple of weeks of their first appearance. We evaluate the total revenue made by all
sellers to approximately USD 1.9 million per month; this corresponds to about USD 143,000 per month
in commissions perceived by the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been
operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over the past few months. We
discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results, including ethical considerations for
future research in this area
see the pdf for the full paper.
Discuss?
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The general pine thoughts are that Academia is awesome. They have people working on economic analysis of black markets, the most efficient algorithms for smuggling packages, the latest business plans, the best way to package product to prevent dogs detecting it. All for free! Gloriously free!
It's just a matter of pulling it all together from discrete sources like so many lego blocks.
Thing is about LE, is that they have a huge blind spot in that they don't think criminals don't read things like criminology journals.
In fact, this is true. That is: the criminals they catch certainly don't read scientific journals. Egro: no criminals read scientific journals. And this is true! The criminals who read scientific journals aren't criminals! They are business people. I mean they help the local community by laundering money in your area :)
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Viewable online here:
https://viewer.zoho.com/docs/urlview.do?url=+http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1207.7139v1.pdf
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In case anybody thinks I was joking above, check out the Cocaine Auction Protocol. They must have some badass drug smugglers working on gaining tenure at the University of Cambridge or something, that's all I'm saying :D
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For real? DPR makes almost $150,000 per month off this site?
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o.O
Call me naive, but the $ numbers that are associated with the black market, keep amazing me. Incredible.
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o.O
Call me naive, but the $ numbers that are associated with the black market, keep amazing me. Incredible.
This is nothing, wait until next year!
The statistic that keeps me up at night is that if you found a way of mass producing LSD, you could retail from the Silk Road at 30 million dollars per kg and glut the entire market from here. O_o
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the main sr cold storage wallet had 600K bitcoins at one point
yeah good luck pulling that out of the network without raising any eyebrows.
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the tactical issue created from this paper's daily / annual revenue estimates (for SR admin and vendors) just made SR a blip on DEA / ICE / etc's radar. The Senator's posturing last year was very political. This has given middle management federal employees a number that is worth pursuing and allocating resources to attack, imho. And they'll inflate the $22,000,000.00 number to $35mil if they ever break through.
stay vigilant.