Quote from: eeee on April 22, 2012, 12:34 amOh dear, children coming out of the wood work. So, to elaborate, the BTC trail, proof of deposit slips, and intercepted packages are somewhat in the context of "human error" like you say, but the authorities use these things as their "evidence". I say TOR is not safe, because if they really wanted to look into you, they don't have to look further than your ISP for 100% of all incoming/outgoing packet information. It WILL be decrypted and analyzed, trust me. The BTC trail : everything leads back to YOU and YOUR IP(If you use the bitcoin client wallet). I suppose if you used online wallets with vpns and such, it may be harder. This isn't really human error considering its the way bitcoins were meant to work, but then I guess, humans programmed it this way? Think about it... You buy coins from MT GOX. They have all of your personal information, send the coins to you, you tumble or middleman them, but its still not hard to trace it to you and the road. The concept that they will not investigate personal use is absurd. You're receiving drugs in the mail. This is called DRUG TRAFFICKING, no matter the amount. What would i do in order to shut down the road if I cant find its hidden host service? I would simply become a vendor, and a btc middleman. Gather and collect as much information as possible, and strike with force, all at one time. I bet the DEA even has prizes in the office for who ever collects the most addresses. So what if I cant hit the dealers, hitting 10k USA buyers with drug trafficking and probably possession after a raid, will generate thousands in court fees and costs in fees for them. This makes it worth it, YOU essentially fit the bill for their hard work. Call me crazy or tin foil hat man, but i truly believe they are investing quite a bit of time and money into address harvesting for this very purpose. If no one is around to buy the drugs, the site will be rendered useless in the USA, and further potential users would be stupid if they bought anything. So, to re cap, my opinion is that the general notion that they're only going for dealers is 100% dead wrong. They will come after you, the 2 gram marijuana purchaser. My point being, LE is monitoring BITCOINS, and TOR. They also have "good" vendors here set up for address harvesting. In these 2 regards, Silk Road, is NOT safe, even if you dont buy from one of their vendors, they will still come after you with their evidence of drug purchases via btc traces, and possible ISP monitoring.Thank you for your long and rambling post. Can I suggest you use paragraphs in future? Once again your style and use of syntax doesn't exactly evoke the image of a trained "Information Security" specialist but let us gloss over that.So your points seem to be as follows:1. The BTC trail can be followed.We're aware of this. In the nature of things it's necessary in order to conduct business. As Regicide mentions many sellers, myself included, offer services to vendors to convert their Bitcoins to cash/precious metals which can be sent in the mail. The fact that you can detect which coins have been sent to a particular address isn't a problem in and of itself unless you use a traceable method to buy or sell them such as transferring funds from a bank account.2. Proof of deposit slips amount to evidence.I have several deposit slips for Intersango sitting in my desk drawer in my office where I work. All this proves is I have bought Bitcoins which I do as part of a legal business which sells Bitcoins for cash. Indeed without a corresponding warrant to search the records of the BTC exchange itself, the deposit slips by themselves are useless as it wouldn't be possible to detect to which address the Bitcoins had been sent. Even then you would still have not much to go on as vendors in the SR have a mixer built into their account.3. Intercepted mail is "evidence".Yes indeed, if you have contraband delivered to your home address you could be arrested, it's a risk. I'd qualify that by comparing it with the risk of hanging around on seedy street corners buying narcotics of unknown quality from dangerous looking hoods, who of course may be undercover LEO. No way to check their feedback score of course.4. TOR is not safe as an analysis of your ISP's traffic will detect packets, which can be decrypted.This is what makes me doubt you specialise in IT Security. Even when I was studying in High School we all knew that Onion Routing wasn't susceptible to analysis in this way. It's true that an analysis of your ISP's logs would reveal the fact your connections have been torified but this would do you no more good than if I intercepted an e-mail you'd received which had been encrypted by PGP - I could analyse every byte of information in it until the cows come home as we say in England but there'd be no way to know the contents. 5. You buy Bitcoins from MtGox who have "all" your personal information.Anyone with an e-mail address can open a MtGox account - I have one myself and used it for multiple transactions without revealing a thing about my own bank account or other personal information. It's true you can't access it from Tor easily but there are any number of VPN's you can use - my personal favourite is Shellmix.6. SR is vulnerable to BTC Man in the Middle attacks / LEO posing as vendors.We've been discussing this in another thread called "Can Police break the law"? Firstly, as I mentioned already how do you know the shifty looking guy standing on a street corner offering you dope isn't an undercover Police Officer or a paid informant? I know that isn't the case for other sellers on SR through analysing their feedback.It is possible in theory of course for a shadowy LEO to set up a vendor account on here but they'd have to sell a considerable amount of drugs before they had enough information to make it worth their while - when you examine the minute quantities being sold this way compared to the huge amounts being sold on the streets outside schools and churches, it makes you realise why they'd pile their limited resources into more public and wide ranging methods of prosecuting drug dealers. Also this method couldn't be used against sellers, as they don't have to give out their personal details to conduct business - the most that could be done is dusting a package for prints.7. It's possible to find a person's BTC wallet address by determining their IP address if they're running a BTC client on their machine.Even if an ISP kept such information about applications accessing the BTC block chain all this would prove is that you were running a Bitcoin client, not that you personally received coins to a specific address. Once again using a VPN would circumvent this issue in any case.None of this of course means that we shouldn't be vigilant but what you're saying is just nonsensical.V.