Am I the only one here that gets a little terrified by this kind of thing? I mean I'm fine if they're just selling recreational drugs. But, we all know that there are much worse things people will be selling on these crypto markets than just plain old LSD and marijuana. Can we find a way to help law enforcement police at the very least the really, really bad stuff?
> Law enforcement was designed to protect people (or their property) from the actions of other people, not themselves.
Two points:
1. I can think of many counterexamples to this: Self-harm, suicide attempts, people doing dumb stuff like playing with fireworks. We as a society have decided that if you're a danger to yourself, it's OK to have other people stop you and lock you up until you're not. Of course, people disagree on what counts as self-endangerment.
2. Self-endangerment is not the reason most anti-drug people favor strict punishments. They're concerned about the effect drug use has on society. eg: Worrying that addicts will commit crimes to get their next fix.
I lean very libertarian, so my view is that these substances should be legal and taxed commensurate to the harm they cause. That said, I feel compelled to find flaws in arguments no matter what side they're on.
I think that the really really bad stuff here is e.g. Human trafficking, chemical weapons, assassination services, etc...not even any drugs, and as you've pointed out, people harming other people. How do you police that here, or don't you?
All of those require physical actions apart from just a digital transaction. At some point a human is trafficked somewhere from somewhere else, they can follow that. Chemical weapons are sent somewhere from somewhere, they can follow those. An assassin shows up somewhere, they can grab them there.
All of which can be orchestrated by the police themselves. In an anonymous transaction the other party could very well be the FBI.
Although I mention it in the comment, drugs aren't my primary concern. What about for example: child porn, forced prostitution, contract killings, etc. These things all existed before crypto-markets, it just seems like crypto-markets make life so much easier for these types of things (if they are as effective as advertised). Sure, we can police the "meat space" part of these transactions, but at what cost?
The existence of a marketplace does not constitute the existence of criminal activity, or vice versa. Rather than focus on the monetary transaction, I believe we should focus on the crime itself.
Pushing the monetary transactions for criminal behavior toward the public consciousness is, IMHO, beneficial to law enforcement, even if there is no clear or reasonable way to prevent or even track the monetary transactions themselves. So long as people are educated about criminal behavior, we can have a culture where law enforcement is actually effective; after all, real crime happens away from keyboard.
Sweden has very restrictive laws around alcohol, eg taxation, where, how and when it can be sold. The purpose of this is to prevent people from falling into addiction (hurting themselves), as that would eventually lead to them getting unemployable, more prone to sickness and in general be a pita for people around them and an increased cost for the whole society. Whether that works or not is another topic but that is what those laws are designed for.
Many countries, UK and Denmark for example, also have penalty tax on sugar and fat to prevent prevent from getting fat (protecting people from themselves) as it increases health care cost.
> Can we find a way to help law enforcement police at the very least the really, really bad stuff?
Much like strong end-to-end crypto has already made it extremely hard to investigate potential criminal activity via wiretapping, and will make it impossible in the future once it's ubiquitous, cryptocurrencies and decentralized markets will do the same to the ability of the governments to track crimes by following the money.
It's not really a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a thing. Regulating it is not feasible (you can ban crypto, but enforcing that ban is another matter entirely), so societies will have to adapt.
The more interesting question is, what does it do to the ability to tax. "Diamond Age" comes to mind...
I'm kind of wondering why that is. Since darknet markets are getting busted one after another, why hasn't everyone migrated to OpenBazaar? It would seem like a prime opportunity.
1.) Lack of anonymity - AFAIK it doesn't yet have integration with tor-or-similar, although this is coming soon
2.) Network effects - hardly anyone is buying or selling anything on OpenBazaar, so there's not much motivation for anyone new to move there. I hope this changes. I use eBay for almost all of my online purchases, and I would love to see the day where OpenBazaar replaces eBay for all or most of my uses.
As jstanley points out, that's our yet-to-be-released version 2. The current version 1 has no Tor support at all and never will (it uses UDP and is incompatible with Tor).
You're not the only one. These services have destroyed peoples' lives by providing them easy access to coke, meth, and heroin. Contrary to opinion, the vast majority of these people would not have found those drugs in the streets.
There are no easy solutions here, but it's false to claim that these services are inherently better than what came before. They may make it safer to acquire the drugs, but they also make it much easier to do so.
I don't think we should lock people up for possessing these drugs, but an unregulated marketplace with easy access to a Willy Wonka factory of narcotics is deeply troubling.
If people are getting crack from it, does it matter what type of market it is? People are saying this is where the drug trade might migrate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14828864
I think it's scary that (a) these markets are here to stay, and (b) anyone with a computer and the most basic technology skills will be able to get any hard drug they can imagine delivered right to their doorstep.
Again, there's nothing to be done, really. That's just the way the world is now. But it's unfortunate.
Firstly, there are absolutely no illegal drugs currently being sold on OpenBazaar. It's almost exclusively novelty items at the moment.
Secondly, if Alice wants to sell crack, and Bob wants to buy it, I don't see why you or I or anybody else has the right to stand in the middle and say that's not allowed.
I accept that you think it's not good for Alice and Bob to be able to transact however they like, but you must accept that lots of people do not agree.
No one is arguing that Alice and Bob should be prevented from engaging in good ol' American trade.
We're arguing that when drugs are ubiquitous -- as easy to access as pushing a button -- you'll spawn far more addicts than would have otherwise been created.
When an addict's life is destroyed by these horrific tools of pleasure we've created, are they going to take solace in the fact that they were able to use technology to enable their habit?
People become addicts for many reasons. One of the main ways is by being at a party among friends. No one expects to be addicted to this stuff, so they try a bit.
In the old days, they had one option: Get more from their friend, which may not work forever. In modern times, they can get as much as they want from the darknet markets. Bitcoin ATMs make it trivial, too. You don't even need to be vetted by Coinbase.
It's not just theoretical. People have witnessed the markets causing this.
Doesn't that mean we should also shut down casinos, for example?
I don't think the answer has ever been "make it so people can't buy the stuff", because that can't work. Instead, I believe that education, quality control, and help towards addicts would work much better.
Education, quality control and help towards addicts implies the need for regulation and taxation of profits. For instance, gambling and casinos tend to be permitted but tightly controlled by law in many countries, for exactly this reason. An entirely anonymous market will have trouble enabling regulation and taxation to offset the damage done.
Absolutely. It's well established that drugs aren't a problem. I mean, it's only the leading death cause of young Americans. Nothing to see here folks.
That's somewhat of a strawman argument: if you think dealing crack is the same as dealing human beings, where do you even draw the line? Is it not OK to deal in anything, on the basis that it could be a human being if you changed it to a human being?
The difference when dealing a human being is it's no longer a transaction between only Alice and Bob. There's now a third person involved who has every right to object to the transaction. Decentralised marketplace or not.
"Both" of these problems? The problem is dealing in human beings, right? What's the other problem?
Am I proposing that the tools to solve human trafficking go away? I wouldn't put it that way. Lots of societal progress comes with trade-offs. There will certainly be challenges for law enforcement but I'm confident they'll solve them.
The world isn't going to descend into a chaotic state of everyone buying and selling everyone else just because free-trade becomes ubiquitous.
The OP said "Can we find a way to help law enforcement police at the very least the really, really bad stuff," I think you're eliding his entire concern when you just say "I'm confident they'll solve them"
Most 11yos don't have access to hard drugs. This significantly lowers the barriers to access for a tech savvy child or teenager, who is not equipped to properly evaluate the various risks in either the transaction or the drug itself. Many parents will not understand these markets and their kids will. It is obviously not directly responsible for anyone's actions but it changes the landscape considerably, and puts a finger on the scale of underage drug use.
No, what is unfortunate is that we are living in a world where you can be persecuted for handling your own body and mind as you, and not some bureaucrat, see fit. What is unfortunate is that people are put daily in jail for actions where there is no victim. What is unfortunate is that people who create safe environment for drug users to buy clean hihq quality drugs from rated sellers, are serving double life or committing suicides. What is unfortunate is that majority of society thinks like you do.
