<nettime> Internet Digital Black Friday: First Bitcoin "Depression" Hits

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Sun Jun 12 09:44:51 PDT 2011


At 01:43 AM 6/12/2011, Jeffrey Paul wrote:
>This guy doesn't know that The Silk Road is a hidden service that can _only_
>be accessed via Tor - and he further doesn't know the difference between
>"elicit" and "illicit".

Surprisingly, there are lots of techies who can't spell (you'd think a 
field that requires deep attention to grammars and syntaxes in artificial 
languages would primarily attract people who can do the same in natural 
languages, but it's been obvious for decades that that's not close to 
universal), and there are techies whose native language isn't English, and 
there are spell checkers that will fix misspelled words inaccurately 
because they're not looking at grammar.)

And even if you can only access the service using Tor, that doesn't mean 
you can't set up Tor wrong, which was one of his points.  And while he 
mentioned that that kilo of coke you're being shipped may be coming from 
somebody the Feds are watching, people dealing in that kind of volume are 
more likely to be careful.  But people buying personal-use retail 
quantities of drugs, like the guy buying that 10-strip of acid?  They're 
more likely to be buying it from somebody who's not careful, or for that 
matter the dealer may be a Fed or an informant.





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