i already run such a venture made up of worldwide vendors that sell literally everything. if i could switch to bitcoin tommorow i would but our current system is quite anonymous with layers of plausible deniability i obviously can't get into detail about

some sites bitcoins are worth .87 to buy but if you want to sell they're only worth 0.42-0.53 per USD if i understand correcly. if i'm selling say 1g of MDMA for $60 I'll get roughly 68 bitcoins judging by the daily rates on most sites. when i sell i only get back $30, not much of a profit margin while you're risking years of incarceration. it could be doable but then throw in exchanger fees and it's not worth it. unless i'm totally wrong (?)

as for the anonymous distro network, i have no idea how this would ever work. to avoid detection, you must expedite as quickly as possible without sacraficing stealth since stuff is vac sealed and not designed to be passed around for weeks. also nobody in their right might would sign up to receive somebody else's drugs and traffic it without a huge cut. obviously those caught in the link would become informants to pass information about the next link, and everything would collapse. even if your shipping link had trust, when one retired he/she would just steal the next motherload of ounces passing through them and disappear.

silk road is a good idea, i can fill in all the vendor gaps they are missing (Yayo, cheaper and guaranteed better quality MDMA crystal, DMT, anything)  but it would be helpful if they told you where to stuff came from. if you're in ireland and you try to import weed from NL it's a waste of time

That's not true.  Just check the bid/ask spread on MtGox.com.  Like FatherMcGruder said, you can always set whatever price in bitcoins you like.


DMT?  Lovely.  Synthesized or extracted from plant material?

Think of it as a payment for reducing your risks.

Probably that particular exchange operator was not in a buying mood that day. Another exchanger would offer you more.

This crazy unstable exchange rate has made bitcoin more of a stock market game than a good money for commerce. It's difficult to set prices or plan ahead when it's changing so rapidly.

Coffee4Bitcoin can charge a fair price today, but by the time it is delivered the customer feels he has paid too much. I expect any product that can't be delivered immediately might produce these negative feelings.

The opposite has also happened, where a day or a week later, the BTC I collected was worth less than I paid for the coffee.

The intrinsic value of bitcoin is in it's unique utility. That utility is adversely affected by wild price changes.

I would think the major bitcoin holders have an incentive to pool their resources to do this to at least some degree.  Even the small holders might be persuaded to chip in a share of theirs, provided the fund was well-managed.

Like Gavin said, "spend a lot of money".  This is almost certainly not a money making venture, at least not directly.  However, it seems reasonable to me to think that a coordinated attempt to smooth out exchange rate shocks - not to control overall trends - would make Bitcoin a more attractive currency, driving its exchange rate up, and possibly leading to an overall gain for those coordinating the "smoothing".

To the extent that they filter out real price information and not just noise, sure they're creating distortions.  But people don't see invisible distortions; however, they do see exchange rates.

Yeah, probably better for them to just capitalize a bunch of market makers, while periodically weeding out the losers.

Reading this thread is funny. You guys vastly over estimate the probability that a package of drugs will be intercepted. I would estimate that about one out of ten thousand packages are intercepted. In the USA about 2,000 arrests are made every year of people who sent drugs or got drugs in the mail. Almost all of them are people who got drugs because sending can be next to perfectly anonymous.  Most packages that are intercepted are going through customs so are international, if it does not pass through customs the chances of interception is next to none. Most packages that are intercepted weigh at least several pounds, if it will fit in a normal envelope and is sent domestic the chances of interception are so small as to be insignificant. USPS handles over two billion mailed items a year within the USA alone. The USPI has a few thousand agents. ICE has a few thousand agents, just short of one billion packages are mailed from foreign nations to the USA every year. The best detection system they have is drug dogs and they can be countered near perfectly with proper vacuum sealing and packaging. Interception is not what you need to worry about.

Vendors need to worry that their customers are feds. The risk of this can be greatly reduced with security techniques. Orders should be encrypted with GPG so that if the vendors contact point is put under electronic surveillance they can not find the addresses of other customers placing orders. Tor can be used to prevent a trace through the internet, using random open WiFi connections can prevent them from determining who is using Tor in areas packages are shipped from and makes a trace more or less impossible even if they compromise Tor. A particular worry is application layer exploits being used to side channel anonymizers. So far the feds do not even do this against child porn sites, only very serious targets like actual child abusers and murder for hire vendors etc. Not many of the FBI are skilled enough to do these attacks, it seems none of the DEA. Some Intelligence agencies of course can, but I do not see them as a likely adversary against even a very public vending site. You can reduce the risk of application layer exploits with many techniques though, hardening binaries during compile, mandatory access control permission systems, layering hypervisors virtualization (including of network adapters), etc. The best option is to copy encrypted orders from one machine to another machine with NO ACCESS TO THE INTERNET in order to create an airgap, so even if the machine you get an order on is compromised with an application layer exploit the machine your decrypt orders on is safe. And of course use WiFi for when you get orders, so even if they break the MAC and go through hypervisor to real network adapter they can't totally fuck you with an anonymizer side channel. The only weak link is payment. Funding can be layered through digital currency exchangers and bounced around the world before it is cashed out with anonymous ATM cards. Bitcoin will be used by drug vendors more and more as it is easier. We really need a bitcoin mix or blind digital certificates on top of bitcoin to prevent financial network analysis though, Bitcoin is not an ideal solution by itself.

Let them analyze paper and such. First of all they already know your rough location from the return address postmark so they are not going to learn jack shit new. Second of all you can use products sold at major chain stores. Remember, It took them decades to trace the Unabomber and he was mailing fucking bombs. Plus they never could trace him via mail his brother had to report him before they even came close to narrowing in on him. Of course you should wear gloves. Latex gloves are not good enough by themselves, they are thin and dust forms on them and leaves rubber stamp impressions of fingerprints through them. One pair of latex gloves over thicker gloves for when you touch product, remove gloves after vac seal, bleach scrub vac bag and then new latex gloves.

Customers can open private mail boxes with fake identification documents. Return addresses must be switched frequently to protect from network analysis. Finances must be decentralized to protect from financial network intelligence, if multiple customers send payment to the same point it is weak to attack. Decentralized payment can already be accomplished with out Bitcoin. It is best to decentralize and compartmentalize the vending operation as well, one person to ship and one person to communicate with customers at least. Geocache works as well, particularly for localized markets. Swarming is a technique to minimize loss. Don't send a kilo of product to one person, send 100 grams to ten people. You should only worry about finances, get people with out investment capital to handle the more dangerous jobs.

I want drugs to be decriminalized. Not every drug dealer is only about profit. Give me freedom over profit any time. I am sick of non-sophisticated friends going to prison for their life for wanting to have fun. The government ruins all trust in the youth, who knows if anyone is a friend or an undercover. They see us as a threat and use drug laws to split us apart. They make money off of our lives and treat us like subhuman animals, demonize us with lies in the media and via propaganda campaigns. All so they can keep us under control and make profit off us, keep us under their brainwashing. All they say are lies, you think you know about drugs but you know nothing but shit spread via their many sophisticated PSYOP campaigns. Please, do offer high quality heroin at consistent purity to the general public, maybe you will save one of my friends from overdosing. The vast majority of heroin overdoses are caused by varying purity batches, a user gets 30% purity heroin and then when a 60% batch comes around they use the same weight but get double the dose. If all heroin was 100% pure there would be no heroin overdoses. There would be no deaths from ecstasy if tablets had really MDMA in them and not bullshit like PMA that evil criminals pass as MDMA for profit and end up killing the users. The vast majority of negative effects of drug use in public perception have no basis in reality. Most of the others are actually the product of prohibition. The DEA is HAPPY that they lower the purity of drugs even though varying purity is the number one cause of overdose for all drugs. Fuck those fascists, I can not wait for the day that they are brought to justice for the horrible crimes they commit, I can only hope that their punishment is MORE severe than the punishment they give to the people who hurt nobody who they trick into thinking are their friends only to ruin their lives.

PS: We better not talk about how to use bitcoin to support jews hidden in attics in Nazi Germany because it is against the law to support Jews, all morals aside law is law. I really never will understand you law drones it is like you are completely incapable of thinking for yourself.