The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable

[Eugen Leitl]

http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable

The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable

  Adrian Chen b Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine
can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or
light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.

About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope
to Mark's door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. "If
you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn't have even
noticed," Mark told us in a phone interview.

Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a
listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of
good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid
to his digital shopping cart and hit "check out." He entered his address and
paid the seller 50 Bitcoinsbuntraceable digital currencybworth around $150.
Four days later the drugs, sent from Canada, arrived at his house.

"It kind of felt like I was in the future," Mark said.

      
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Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users'
purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a
combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system,
Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used
electronicsband seemingly as safe. It's Amazonbif Amazon sold mind-altering
chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on
Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of "sour
13" weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for "Avatar"
LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James
Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large
portion from the U.S. and Canada.

But even Silk Road has limits: You won't find any weapons-grade plutonium,
for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of "anything who's purpose is
to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons
of mass destruction."

Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don't
point your browser there yet. It's only accessible through the anonymizing
network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.

Once you're there, it's hard to believe that Silk Road isn't simply a scam.
Such brazenness is usually displayed only by those fake "online pharmacies"
that dupe the dumb and flaccid. There's no sly, Craigslist-style code names
here. But while scammers do use the site, most of the listings are legit.
Mark's acid worked as advertised. "It was quite enjoyable, to be honest," he
said. We spoke to one Connecticut engineer who enjoyed sampling some "silver
haze" pot purchased off Silk Road. "It was legit," he said. "It was better
than anything I've seen."

Silk Road cuts down on scams with a reputation-based trading system familiar
to anyone who's used Amazon or eBay. The user Bloomingcolor appears to be an
especially trusted vendor, specializing in psychedelics. One happy customer
wrote on his profile: "Excellent quality. Packing, and communication. Arrived
exactly as described." They gave the transaction five points out of five.

"Our community is amazing," Silk Road's anonymous administrator, known on
forums as "Silk Road," told us in an email. "They are generally bright,
honest and fair people, very understanding, and willing to cooperate with
each other."

Sellers feel comfortable openly trading hardcore drugs because the real
identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured.
If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road's users with computer forensics,
they'd have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user's tracks on the site. The site
urges sellers to "creatively disguise" their shipments and vacuum seal any
drugs that could be detected through smell. As for transactions, Silk Road
doesn't accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can
be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins.

Bitcoins have been called a "crypto-currency," the online equivalent of a
brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by
banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin
holders' computers. (The name "Bitcoin" is derived from the pioneering
file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and
have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of
a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across
borders as free as bits.

To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using
a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk
Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth
about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day. Right now
you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. That's probably
more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to
pay a premium for convenience.

Since it launched this February, Silk Road has represented the most complete
implementation of the Bitcoin vision. Many of its users come from Bitcoin's
utopian geek community and see Silk Road as more than just a place to buy
drugs. Silk Road's administrator cites the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of
Agorism. "The state is the primary source of violence, oppression, theft and
all forms of coercion," Silk Road wrote to us. "Stop funding the state with
your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market."

Mark, the LSD buyer, had similar views. "I'm a libertarian anarchist and I
believe that anything that's not violent should not be criminalized," he
said.

But not all Bitcoin enthusiasts embrace Silk Road. Some think the association
with drugs will tarnish the young technology, or might draw the attention of
federal authorities. "The real story with Silk Road is the quantity of people
anxious to escape a centralized currency and trade," a longtime bitcoin user
named Maiya told us in a chat. "Some of us view Bitcoin as a real currency,
not drug barter tokens."

Silk Road and Bitcoins could herald a black market eCommerce revolution. But
anonymity cuts both ways. How long until a DEA agent sets up a fake Silk Road
account and starts sending SWAT teams instead of LSD to the addresses she
gets? As Silk Road inevitably spills out of the bitcoin bubble, its
drug-swapping utopians will meet a harsh reality no anonymizing network can
blur.

Update: Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in
an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would
like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are
recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are
anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis
techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin
users.

"Attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin, given existing
statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is
pretty damned dumb," he says.