I think it's a really positive thing that people are able to leave reviews for drug purchases. In the absence of FDA regulation, a public reputation system incentivizes dealers to avoid harming their customers with dangerously-adulterated products.
In the midst of an opioid crisis, with people overdosing on heroin cut with fentanyl, having this accountability can save lives. There's a subreddit (whose name I won't mention) that facilitates meetups between opioid sellers and users, encouraging buyers to leave feedback once the meetup is complete. I'm glad it exists.
Drug dealing is commerce that happens to be illegal. It's completely logical that most of the considerations of an ordinary market apply here. Drugs are a "victimless crime" in the technical sense that if all goes as planned, none of the people involved would have any complaint afterwards.
The thing is, the article doesn't mention the market for less victim-less crimes. It seems like a market for "murder for hire" would be a bit less reliable than a market for drugs - which is a relatively good thing.
Even more, those aiming to illegalize drugs inherently are aiming to make markets not function for drugs - aiming to make the experience more dangerous and costly than it would be otherwise. The most hardcore drug-warriors are open on this question but others try to sugarcoat it.
Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero.
There can be huge negative externalities involved with drug use, as anyone with a family member who has a drug problem could tell you.
Even in the most enlightened societies one would have to acknowledge that support and rehabilitation for the small percentage of users who have problems creates a burden on society.
Since these costs are generally not borne by either party to the transaction there is a fairly straight-forward case for regulation here.
For this reason I do support banning some drugs and regulating most of them (including cigarettes and alcohol).
I don't think this is inconsistent with free market ideology at all. As far as I know, no one wants a totally free market for semtex, plutonium or nerve gas (I do admit those are perhaps overly emotive examples).
Alcohol has some of the worst negative externalities of any drug of abuse. It's a causal factor in a huge proportion of road traffic accidents and domestic violence. It kills about 88,000 Americans annually due to overdose, accidents and chronic illness. Typical recreational doses are inherently toxic.
When we criminalized alcohol, the negative externalities got worse. Gangsters murdered each other in the street for control over distribution. The profits from bootlegging were funnelled into other organised crime. People were blinded and killed by adulterated booze. Billions of dollars were lost in tax revenues. The overall consumption rate towards the end of prohibition was only about 30% lower than before.
The evidence is clear - criminalisation kills. Unless you're in a totalitarian regime with closed borders, you can't stop people from taking drugs. What you can do is effectively regulate the drug market, provide proper care and support services and minimise the harms to drug users.
Criminalizing alcohol is a bad way for society to recover the cost associated with it. Social factors mean that enforcement becomes poor and very selective, you lose tax revenues so there is less money in the short term to use for enforcement, and as you said the evidence is clear.
Instead there seems to be two effective strategies, both used for alcohol and tobacco, which is taxation and state monopolies. Taking Sweden as an example, the taxation is made per liter of sold alcohol. The stronger (and assuming bigger effect on society), the more society demand in compensation. Depending on the drink and original price, the tax can actually become several times higher.
Here the money is ear marked for things such as reducing traffic accidents and domestic violence. If the cost are increased you simply increase the tax. Police has a strong incentive to catch this form of tax evasion as part of the money goes to them, and social norms are rather accepting since only poor people are disproportional effected by the price increase.
Similar for state monopoly, the state has a direct incentive to punish would-be completion. From a social perspective, my guess is that people are rather used to monopolies. Each year there is more and more merges leaving fewer companies that actually compete, and naturally prices goes up. Regardless if it is an icecream, a fridge, gass, a phone, a moive, or a news paper, you can best that most products is made by just a handful global companies, or a single one.
And as for the effect, there seems to be a fair correlation to heavy taxation and decrease use. The tax has never been as high in Sweden as now and the use has never been so low.
Home made wine (up to 20%) is legal to make and drink also in Sweden, but it is illegal to sell. In general I think there is a few limiting factors in play:
Students generally rush the process and the quality and taste is terrible.
Car ownership among students is down and on campus there is fewer reason to drive.
The culture is generally focused on hard spirits and beer, not wine.
I agree, and I generally support "regulation" of drugs rather than criminalisation.
I don't think that an unfettered free market is the right solution though since addiction robs people of the kind of agency we typically assume people have in free market exchanges. That, plus an awareness of social externalities.
Your argument is not correct. You shouldn't argue that criminalizing kills, if you are against it you should argue it kills/harms more than regulating. That is harder to prove with the prohibition period data.
Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero.
The selling of drugs may be undesirable some people's minds, "society" may decide it should be suppressed. That's your judgment but drug use remains "victimless" in the sense I described earlier - all people involved want the event to happen. Theft or assault are against cooperative victims who will come to police to complain (in the case of murder, the relatives would). So enforcement dynamics are different. That is all.
I'd mention that those opposed to drug laws would say the costs are predicated on the enforcement itself.
For example you might have a land owner and a factory, and both parties involved are perfectly happy for the factory to pump toxic waste straight into the ground. Neither party wants the police involved.
The economic exchange is between two mutually cooperative parties, but... they are often not the only ones affected by the trade. Which is why we regulate pollutants.
Your analogy of the polluting factory works if discussing the substances you listed which are not passively controlled under use, or in the case of second hand smoke. I think we can (and must) discuss those seperately for the sake of clarity of conversation.
On the topic at hand, using heroine to intoxicate one’s self is very victimless. Injection needles are sharp and carry disease. Alright, but scissors are sharp, sex carries disease and heroine was initially introduced and prescribed as a pharmaceutical. Social and economic externalities of drug use is highly subjective and difficult to isolate, which is among most rational arguments for legalization. Drugs always both solve problems and create new ones. Each situation is more than likely drastically different and impossible to readily comprehend, involved with and conflated with mental health, legal systems, moral judgements, embarrassment, fear.
Results of approaches actively considerate of this complexity (Portugal’s controversial policies come to mind) tend to suggest that the economic and social problems you mention may moreso be a result of simplistic accusations like the factory analogy.
I began trying to phrase my comment above in a fashion as "values free" as possible simply to illustrate different "enforcement challenges" in different crimes. It seems the comments keep coming to back my comment being interpreted in value-based fashion.
Not that I wouldn't want to engage in a discussion of the merits of drug legalization but here I'd want keep the thread that "victimless" can simply be conceived of as a "how" question concerning a particular kind of act without recourse to asking the question of "whether" the act should happen.
In the crimes usually described as victimless, the main thing is that all the individuals "actively involved" are seeking to make the act happened. To say this is not to claim that those who might be effected once the act happened aren't harmed, scared, victimized, etc. We would thus distinguish "active victims" (those mugged, murder, robbed, etc) and passive victims (relatives, friends, society...). So we could perhaps distinguish "active-victim-less" crimes and say all crimes have passive victims - for those who want this set of value judgments.
You are a victim. ‘Victimless’ is of course a relative descriptor. A ‘victimless crime’ is generally a crime without violations of civil liability. Drug use is still widely considered non-victimless, on the grounds that drug use generates wide untamely chaos and cruelty. And so we banned it. When I say drug use is a victimless crime, I mean to reasses that view. To me, it’s an unfocused assessment of the issue and a reactionary solution to boot.
Losing friends to drug overdoses is terrible and not to be devalued. I’ve lost 2 close friends to drug overdoses: one heroine and another prescription painkillers, both while I was off at college. I really understand.
If we map an event chain to the tragedy, things get existential fast. We have to ask why they used the drugs. Maybe it was peer pressure, maybe depression, self-esteem. My cousin is addicted to painkillers prescribed to him for a back injury from his best friend hitting him with a jet ski. My point is just that things are usually very complicated. Naturally, we want someone to blame, but let’s be cautious, lest we create new problems.
Concluding we are victims of the substance makes sense in numerous ways, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and has failed outright as a solution to the problem (see war on drugs) and I think we can do better.
If we intend to prevent it from happening again to you and others, we want to look at the causes with an open mind.
I would argue that in a lot of cases, people become victims due to the current laws and societal standards surrounding drug use.
The illegality of (for example) heroin drives:
* uncertainty of quality/content of drugs purchased --> higher risk of harm/overdose from use
* often, reliance on crime to fund --> financial and/or criminal impact on families/friends, and/or wider society
* social exclusion of users --> emotional impact on families/friends
If heroin was legal, regulated, freely/cheaply available, and then became no more socially unacceptable than (for example) alcohol or cannabis, then most of the current 'victims' would cease to be victims any longer.
Obviously false. The people cleaning up after an overdose don't want it to happen. The family watching a member trash a career don't want it to happen. "Involved" doesn't begin to capture the number of people dealing with the event if you just consider the direct participants.
That is true, but not really relevant to the issue of consent. Those people choose to be involved. Their decision to be involved in a drug user's life doesn't give them the right to dictate the life choices of the drug user.
It's not an issue of consent when you're describing it as "victimless". The victims, those who suffer from it, are far more widely spread than just those who can directly consent to the act.
Victimhood is all about consent. A victim is someone who had their rights violated, which is conventionally understood as having their person or property transgressed without their consent.
Creating a moral framework that gives those who consented to involvement in a third party's life a right to determine how the person and property of that third party is utilized necessarily creates tension with the individual rights of the third party, and conflicts with a moral framework based on both consent and self-ownership.
Your definition of victimhood is idiosyncratic, and apparently quite specific to your moral framework, which seems to have an obvious problem in that it declares all externalities to be moot (i.e., no involuntarily affected party has moral standing because it creates tension and conflict with the moral standing of the directly consenting participants).
That's fine if that's how you want to resolve the problem--just declare that no indirect participants matter--but insofar as it fails to appreciate their experience, I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.
My definition of victimhood is the conventional one, and how it is used in a formal context.
It also addresses externalities, by distinguishing nonconsensual acts from consensual ones. If a person deliberately over-eats, and dies from obesity related illness, they are not a victim, and their family's loss is not an externality, as the term is defined in economics. If a person is shot and killed by an armed robber, they are a victim, and their family's pain and suffering is an externality.
The reason the former is not an externality is that the 'asset' which the third parties lose, which, let's say, is the love and care the individual would have given their family if they had stayed alive, was destroyed by the wilful acts of that individual. Since the love and care is the individual's to give, it is also the individual's to choose to not give. Their decision to not give it is therefore not an externality.
In the case of the latter, the victim had every intention of giving their love and care to their family for many years to come, and would have done so, if their individual rights had not been violated in the act of murder that they were the victim of.
This is a coherent moral framework that is consistent with the definition of both 'victim' and 'externality', and exactly how the justice system sees victimhood and damages.
>>I think you're going to have trouble selling your moral framework as anything but a Randian fantasy of callous self-determination.
Comments like this don't really add anything to the discussion, except perhaps revealing your own presuppositions and ideological biases.
It sounds like you’re equivocating on the term “victimless crime.” The term is very commonly used to refer to crimes where no people who are directly involved in the crime are harmed. It doesn’t mean that the act has literally zero social costs.
Externalities are a completely separate argument. Externalities can apply to actions regardless of their legality, and are completely orthogonal to whether an action is a victimless crime.
It's because I read that the poster's argument was: drugs are a "victimless crime" and therefore regulating drug sales is a market distortion and pointless.
My counter-argument was that there are negative externalities to many kinds of drug sales and use.
I agree that these concerns are orthogonal but I did not feel that the conclusion was supported by the argument and therefore shifted the field somewhat. I don't think the precise definitions of the terms are central to the discussion.
I do wonder if we're getting a bit caught up on regulating versus criminalization.
Yet if we compare the regulated drug market to the unregulated one (mostly perscription painkillers vs marijuana) the regulated market has arguably worse outcomes and higher costs.
Also, Kurz Gesagt has a great video on addiction--it's not as simple as blaming the problems/externalities solely on drugs: https://youtu.be/ao8L-0nSYzg
My assumption is that most recreational drug users are choosing caffeine, alcohol, marijuana, perecription painkillers, perscription amphetamines, probably in that order.
I know heroin use exists, but I've never personally met a regular heroin user in my life. So my comparison is the regulated vs unregulated market broadly speaking and representative of what's commonly being consumed.
If you watched the Kurz Gesagt video, there is a point to be made that extreme disassociative addiction is rooted in unhappy life circumstance, not in the drugs themselves.
Personally I could be in favor of some regulations around heroin, but the ones we have now create more problems than they solve.
> The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero.
There's an argument to be made that most drugs provide a social benefit as well as imposing a social cost, and that for some drugs, the benefit is significantly greater than the cost. Examples might be Modafinil, LSD microdosing, some amphetamines, etc.
Proper drug education would likely go a very long way towards ameliorating addiction problems (the main contributor to negative externalities in drug markets).
Why are people using heroin? Are they depressed? In pain?
What about amphetamines? Do they have ADHD?
Moreover, how many first time users actually know how to/understand the importance of properly titrating up, or even safe dosages of the substance they're using?
Not to mention that people taking substances for underlying mental issues might finally appear on the radar of their GP.
> even safe dosages of the substance they're using?
Can anyone, even experienced and properly educated users, truly know the safe dosages when the potency (and potentially even the substance itself -- see, e.g., the fentanyl analogues used in heroin) of the drug in question are unknown?
> Drug sale and use is not victimless. The costs vary with the type of drug and the enforcement regime but the social costs never go to zero.
You could substitute 'drug' with just about anything and that would be true.
Sell cars? They put out poisonous fumes.
Sell electric cars? People still crash into each other with them.
Sell kitchen knives? People stab each other with them.
Sell toilet paper? People flush it into the municipal sewer system.
Make a funny TV show? People will watch it when they should be spending time with their children.
Drugs aren't special. There are societal costs to every technology. No product is victimless if the criteria you demand is that the societal cost is zero.
I don't even disagree with you on practical matters. I just deeply resent how you have defined that word. When no action is victimless, there is nothing that cannot be outlawed. In fact, that's the same line of reasoning that is used to ban books (via 'corrupting public morals').
> none of the people involved would have any complaint afterwards.
Rating the buyer's satisfaction depends a heck of a lot on your timescale. For many drugs and many users, sure, it's a net positive out to infinity.
But in the midst of an opioid crisis, we need to acknowledge that many people are having their brains broken in a way that their short term preferences (yes, more fentanyl please!) are completely out of sync with their long-term ones (shit, I wish I hadn't destroyed my life).
Treating the drug market like some idealized commodity exchange seems naive and harmful.
Not only that, but some of those markets (mostly defunct ones by now though, and only a minority) hired "official" doctors to answer questions from the users on drug use or similar.
You also have communities (like the "DNM avengers" one) that will freely and anonymously test the products of some vendors to confirm whether or not what they are selling is in fact the product described, and how pure it is. Some vendors in turn will proudly link to the posts describing those tests.
How would the end buyer know if the tests were genuine? The vendors could easily be paying for good results since there’s zero transparency or ability to check.
Absolutely. For those testing communities too, reputation / track record is everything. And since a lot (but, sadly, still a minority) of customers will also reagent the product themselves - a lot of them in countries, especially in the EU, where such a test is free and anonymous thanks to non-profits or even in some case government backed services - any divergence is in theory quick to appear and would cast doubt on their reputation. But that's only the theory, and as you say it's far from a perfect system.
The community I mentioned (I don't know if it's still active) used to ask vendors for samples to test; but also ordered product from those same vendors (and others) as "fake" customers in order to make sure the product actually being sold is the one they tested. They also had donation runs with the community at large (both to pay for the tested products and to remunerate themselves).
They could also just send in pure / accurately labeled stuff in for testing, unless the testing company is ordering stuff at random from an alias / PO Box or something to prevent sellers from masking their true products ingredients.
This has happened on a few occasions (all of them opioids laced with fentanyl by vendors). The community tends to name and shame such vendors a lot when it occurs, and markets will ban them; but the very anonymity linked to the process makes that easy to circumvent, unfortunately.
In any case, the general advice to people ordering from vendors for which there hasn't been a longstanding reputation + published reagent tests is for their customers to reagent the product themselves, especially for opioids.
During the SR era I was a viewer of the network but not a participant. I didnt realize the extent these vendors went to. I had a friend who did know one vendor in person and supposedly he was very very meticulous and calculated with his actions.
Yeah; the largest ones are not single vendors but whole operations with strong opsec: use of separate fully encrypted laptops dedicated to the activity, networks of "senders" that'll roam the country sending the packages from different and random mailboxes, pyramidal networks where a main vendor will sell wholesale to re-sellers (those networks also tend to appear naturally - some DNM vendors are simply selling what they bought wholesale from vendors they never even talked to), preparing the packages themselves in isolated dedicated room and with protection to make sure no DNA is present in the packages, etc. in general I imagine it probably can be a pretty low-risk (but probably not low effort) method of making money illegally, compared to traditional drug dealing. And some vendors must have seen their fortunes explode if they hanged on to at least some of their past gained BTC given the recent price hike.
But then again you also have the (from the point of view of law enforcement) low hanging fruit: vendors that encrypt nothing, keep a full record of all their customers, tend to ship with very bad stealth, etc. those are the ones that tend to get arrested. Fortunately if you're a customer it tends to be easy to pinpoint those vendors - the lack of care and professionalism tends to display itself also in their profile or during simple communications.
And if you can't test it (but you indeed really, really should - and if not easily available to you, a lot of DNM markets also have sellers of reagent tests), at the very least start with minute amounts - and a sitter - before increasing it.
Right, which is why they exit scam. Build up a good reputation and when the amount you can run with equals what would be years of "honest" work profits, you then run away, set up a new account and start over again.
It's kinda funny to notice that in the article the writer is describing the stereotype of a drug dealer being untrusted, yet based on my experience and what I've seen, I would rather trust an online drug dealer than for example my bank or the people running our government. That's kinda fucked up right there, won't you say ?
You're comparing apples with oranges. A drug dealer is a peon, someone at the very bottom of an enormous multinational pyramid who sells a commodity product in a market where every disgruntled customer has the ability to put them behind bars, rather than just leave a bad review online.
This is actually the most prime example of an 'untrusted' relationship. If it weren't for the total imbalance of power you have to bring the full force of the government down on a drug dealer without any need for a reason, you wouldn't do business with them at all.
If, on the other hand, you had to do business with the head of one of these multinational drug syndicates, you would start to understand this power dynamic more completely, as the power balance would flip. All of a sudden, the person you are dealing with no longer fears law enforcement. They are no longer a peon - they have bought off people in the government, acquired arms, trained a small army of their own, and now have to power to kill you or your associates without fear of reprisal. Would you still describe doing business with these people as a 'trusted' transaction? Of course not. You would start showing up to all your business dealings with your own goons, weapons, and armored vehicles. There would be zero trust that each transaction wouldn't end in a firefight.
Compare this to walking into your local bank branch, where with the correct documentation a typical local branch manager can give you a loan for over $1M without having ever done business with you before. That is the definition of a trusted transaction.
You've just become so desensitized to the marvel of it all that you might not be aware of what the alternative looks like.
This is actually the most prime example of an 'untrusted' relationship. If it weren't for the total imbalance of power you have to bring the full force of the government down on a drug dealer without any need for a reason, you wouldn't do business with them at all.
How does a buyer do that on the darknet? Hell, how does the buyer do that on dealer that's part of a well set up network? Do you think cops don't know who many of the dealers are already? They can't or won't touch them, and as a buyer you have zero power to make that happen.
I don't know how's the market where you are, but I can assure you that nobody I know who buys or bought drugs ever even considered going to the cops - even when they got robbed and smacked around by a dealer.
If you were considering selling your company to Jamie Dimon - well, you can probably trust that he's not going to kill you, but you will show up with an army of lawyers and investment bankers to make sure you get a fair deal.
It's because the incentives of your drug dealer are more aligned with your well-being than the incentives of your bank or government. That's not always the case, but when it happens, even the worst criminal can be a better friend than a legit operation, for which the only reason not to screw you over completely is the potential legal fuss.
This is one argument against capitalism as a whole, and it's worth taking seriously. Capitalism is still the best tool we have, but it's not without downsides.
Example: open source is the communist model, and it works very well. To each according to their need, from each according to their ability. No one owns anything, and you're free to fork or vote with your feet.
Ditto for illegal drug markets. If you're unhappy as a merchant, you have a number of options. No one owns you. You can switch to a different market, or start your own (if you're suicidally ambitious).
The interesting part is that the drug markets end up combining the best of both capitalism and communism in that sense.
But only in that sense. Obviously, unregulated drugs are risky. Yet even without regulations, it's remarkable how rare it is to hear about unhappy customers.
I don't see how open source is a communist model, nobody is coerced to publish their code, they do because they want to, even several companies are making some of their source code public for improving the trust that their client has in their product and increase their sales.
It's not capitalism either, because open source developers don't sell code, or write code under pressure of earning a living. They just write it and give it away.
Not sure what the right word is, but textbook-definition communism fits - open-source code isn't really owned in practical sense.
My understanding is you have an automatic copyright on the code you create. When you share you can optionally grant a license BSD etc. to let people use that code subject to X. So the code subject is owned.
This is wavering off topic, but since it's an intersting topic and you asked, let's do it.
Open source is inherently communistic because nobody owns anything. You have control over your own project, but that's where it stops. You cannot force open source maintainers to do something. This is unlike capitalism; at a standard company, your NDA forces you not to disclose secrets. In open source, there are no secrets to disclose, short of drama and private infighting. A non-compete prevents you from forking the business you work for. These are unenforceable in Cali, but the rest of the US is not so lucky.
You are bound to a paycheck that determines your fate. This is the essence of capitalism.
Contrast that with open source: people don't merely contribute because they want to. It increases their reputation. Ditto for a review system on darknet markets.
Both of these things are very unlike capitalism. So if not communism, then what? Not libertarianism. There's no ownership, and ownership is central to libertarian ideals.
I don't think you'll find many libertarians who say people couldn't share property in a community - only that it must be the choice of each individual¹. Which is how open source works - each person decides what to open source, and many even take from open source to create their own proprietary products.
I think the question as a whole doesn't really make sense, since "open source" can't be separated from the whole economies in which it is created.
(¹ communists would object that the choice is often illusory or even non-existent, but that's another issue)
"Communism" — the leading capital due to its being the first word in the sentence — is an economic model. "Communism", the Soviet-style phenomenon is not "communism", either in principle, or in practice.
Yet we insist on conflating them, and argue against the one whenever the other is mentioned, as if it's synonymous with both.
At the very least, they're related in that every attempt to implement the economic model ends up the totalitarian government. The Russian Revolution was the first of several experiments.
The problem with both is the same. The benefits are only derived if everyone follows the system, but human nature dictates that will not be the case. The problem is with the nature of what is voluntary. Most homeowners in a non communist country, presumably don't want to leave their home, or join a commune. When you determine everyone MUST participate, the distinction you make evaporates.
It's really hard to make comparisons here because 'homeowners' in Russia and China, which did not have strong middle classes at the time of their revolutions, tended to also be landlords/rentiers. Arguably both of those countries were closer to feudalism than capitalism, and the collectivist policies which ensued were to a large extent responsive to those circumstances.
The problems with the 'voluntary' nature of capitalism are best summed up by Anatole France: How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!
...because it's so voluntary to participate in western capitalism?
EDIT: Point being, the economic milieu one finds one's self in, is that in which one tends to be obligated to participate — especially at the lower levels of power within that model.
That is: regular folk are trapped in the system they're born into. It is not meaningful to call their participation voluntary on their part. They may have nominally more freedom within the model in capitalism, but they're, on the whole, just as obligated to participate; they are just as much grist for the mill, under either model.
In places with an established drug scene I'd expect that unhappy customer == dead dealer, because other parties will work to protect their commons (reputation of the market) against random defectors looking for quick buck.
The people I knew who dealt drugs had terrible judgement and repeatedly ended up in jail for stupid shit like getting in fights or trying to intimidate a police officer. I would not put my life in the hands of a person like that.
It's not even that their actions are immoral, it's that their judgement is so poor that you cannot depend on them behaving in their own long-term interest.
Maybe online dealers are different, but I would always worry it's just the same idiots behind a new anonymous account.
It's having "skin in the game", in the sense that Nassim Taleb uses the phrase. The trust goes both ways and both of your reputations are more or less equally at stake. With a bank, the stakes are not symmetrical.
Reviews on SR were rarely negative because the venders didn't do "some bad business". They did really good business, followed by really bad business and disappeared. It was common for vendors to cash out ESPECIALLY on the 4/20 sales and various other sales. They would offer incentives to FE (finalize early, ie release funds from the arbitrage) for months. Then, they would have a big sale. People would FE because they had such good rep, and then the vendors would disappear.
It was a common tactic. I'm not a DNM researcher anymore, but I'm sure it is still a common tactic. I expect that few reliable dealers are around for more than a year. That was certainly the case with SR, and the few that followed quickly in their footsteps.
The new markets are based around forums instead of marketplaces because the markets themselves were bigger targets (everyone considers the forums owned) and the markets offered no real security for buyers or sellers. It was just a costly place to unite the two, and often a source of theft themselves (hacks, or corrupt admins absconding with the funds.)
Acting like it was some sort of utopia is ridiculous. I'm very much on the liberty side of the political landscape, but we don't do anyone any favors by sugar coating the darknet drug industry.
The lack of street violence doesn't mean that there aren't wars raging. From the sources of the heroine (mostly from rural Afghanistan), cocaine (mostly from the jungles of South America), and as close as Mexico thousands die at the hands of violent monsters. Go watch some cartel videos on liveleak if you need a reminder.
We don't need to allow ourselves to be satisfied with violence as an externality. We need to consider massive changes in drug policy and defund the violence.
The comparison being to conflict diamonds (and conflict-free diamonds) - a lot of wars are fueled and escalated by revenues from natural resource extraction, and a pretty simple kind of ethical consumption is to decide to not buy diamonds from, say, the DRC. The market will adapt somewhat, especially if the good is a commodity whose origin can be obscured in the supply chain, but substituting a whole different good avoids that problem. Buy gems other than diamonds, for example.
Sugar is not conflict free- most comes from sugar cane, which is at fault for major deforrestation. In addition renewable carbohydrates are all part of a artesic market, meaning if you push them with subsidies on one market (bio-fuels), the subsidy propagates via demand to all connected markets. Meaning Sugar prizes rising is a indicator for future conflict due to missing food.
IMHO, It's only conflict free if you grow it yourself unfortunately. I don't smoke myself but I plan to summer in Colorado in 2018 and grow a crop to give to oncology patients and the like.
Not to be nitpicky, but why would these patients (who will be depositary of your good will) think any different from you as to "it's only conflict free if you grow it yourself"? They may as well use this moral standing to reject your crop.
I meant that if you buy it in stores, you are generating a lot of taxes that are used to do shit like bomb the fuck out of Libya, fund the mercenaries that intelligence already knew were going to shift from FSA to fighting for ISIS (because we knew ISIS was taking over certain areas in the drug trade and certain oil fields. The ~1M people dead in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last dozen or so years because of our interventionism without any serious plan for success.
I don't care if the patients have my politics. Most people don't. I just want to help people that have serious shit going on.
Commercial pot growing in California comes with some serious illegality (especially when it comes to environmental regulations), but as far as I know the level of violence involved is relatively low.
On a long enough timeline, and with enough at stake, everything is an exit scam.
The only way to fix it is to reduce the stake and timeline. You design ventures around limiting exposure to both and you won't end up getting burned by them when the balance tips, because the balance will never get to the point it could.
One of the hard lessons I've learnt from my many years in crypto.
> offer incentives to FE (finalize early, ie release funds from the arbitrage) for months
Not too familiar with DNMs, but why would someone agree to this? Just to save a buck? Seems clear it is against your interest, good or bad reputation. What's the stated rational from seller for this, just "I want more liquidity"?
That was some of it, but often it was just because cash could be tied up in shipped product for a week or two if you didn't FE. It kept "good" vendors from being able to grow because they weren't able to increase their supply to list new product on the sites.
> For instance, on eBay less than 2 percent of all feedback left is negative or neutral. One explanation is that dissatisfied customers are substantially less likely to give feedback. It means the most important information, the negative reputation data, is not being captured.
Can negative feedback on eBay be cancelled? Because if it can be, then I'll give you a much more plausible explanation - sellers bribe customers to revert their negative feedback. This is pretty much standard practice among companies selling on Polish equivalent of eBay/Amazon, Allegro. The bribes are usually heavy discounts and/or free products. Part of the reason this happens is because for a seller, it takes only few negative reviews to lose promoted spots in the service, which can be life-threatening for a small business.
It's against the ToS, considered Feedback Extortion. Most sellers don't want to risk their account, being totally banned is a much bigger deal than being less promoted for a while. Messages like that are monitored, and I assume transactions are too. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but most sellers will just suck it up and deal with the rare negative. Further as a seller you don't want to "just give out refunds/free stuff" every time someone throws a negative at you because you're just inviting in all the scammers.
Also sellers cannot leave negative feedback for buyers -at all- so that also contributes.
For those that missed it yesterday, Nautilus is on the brink of bankruptcy [1], yet here it is once again with an article featured on the HN frontpage. If you appreciate the content, and are in a position to do so, please consider subscribing.
It is somewhat amusing that the cocaine in the stock photo costs 0.13BTC at a price of $27. I know people who have bought weed for the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in today's bitcoin (even post crash).
The comment about eBay is interesting - that negative feedback is scarce because people don't bother if they're unhappy. I think one aspect is that it's more difficult to leave a negative review, and if you've ever sold on eBay then you're probably more reluctant to neg other sellers. I'm certainly willing to wait for a seller to sort things out rather than give them a negative, because of the stigma not having 100% can bring you.
TL;DR Seller did wrong and it cost _me_ reputation.
I left a neutral feedback one time because of a legitimate seller problem, but otherwise things were fine. The feedback didn't affect his seller score.
The seller left negative retaliation feedback and then offered to have us both unpublished (or something) the feedback so that it didn't affect my reputation.
I learned you don't ever leave negative feedback on ebay.
I wish you could have personal blacklists of sellers so they don't appear in your own search results.
Many years ago I avoided leaving negative feedback on a seller that agreeably accepted a return on stuff that was obviously counterfeit. A couple years later I felt like an idiot when I received garbage again, then realized that it was the same seller that had tried to quietly scam me before.
> Many years ago I avoided leaving negative feedback on a seller that agreeably accepted a return on stuff that was obviously counterfeit.
I would've never sent it back. Explain this situation to your credit card company.
If it isn't illegal by statute to send counterfeit goods, it's certainly against policy. All financial institutions have policies against moving these goods around if you can prove to some very low standard that the goods are counterfeit (take a handbag to a Macy's and have the counter clerk tell you it's counterfeit.)
It's also against eBay policies to require the return of counterfeit items:
> If a buyer suspects that an item is counterfeit and there are strong indicators that the item is counterfeit, the buyer isn’t required to return the item to the seller. The buyer agrees to cooperate with us to ensure the proper disposal of the item. In such cases, we refund the buyer for the full cost of the item and original postage, and the seller reimburses us for the refund. The buyer may not sell the item on eBay or elsewhere.
This would be easy for Ebay to fix: simply don't show feedback until both parties have left feedback, or the time limit for leaving feedback is reached.
Isn't it too soon to call this a crash (honest question)? I mean, it's at 12k or so now. It was at 6k a month ago. In the eyes of skeptical me, even not knowing anything about financial markets, those numbers don't exactly seem like crashing. Yet.
I think the past norm was for sellers to leave positive feedback when they received money, and for buyers to leave positive feedback when they received a product that was accurately described.
I have had good experiences buying and selling large items like computers on eBay, but I don't like the new practice of sellers withholding feedback until they get positive feedback.
Somebody in the comments of the article brought up a good point. What happens when the site gets shut down? As apparently is the case according to the comment author.
I know it's a trope, a huge joke and everything, but this seems like a perfect place to leave notes on the blockchain. It's something that can't be "cleaned" outside of the darknet, it's permanent, and supposedly impossible to forge a private key to manipulate one party's records. It would make it possible for customers to look back for the records of that wallet, or some tagged transactions to see a record of interactions to give credence to the reputation of that user.
It's a neat idea, removing enough anonymity in a world of the anonymous to establish trust, but not enough to establish a hard identity in order to carry reputation across the *net.
There are meta sites (like Grams) that aggregate reviews from all the other marketplaces. Sure, blockchain would be more decentralized, but in this case what's easy is good enough.
I think it would be interesting to build a reputation system like this on top of Ethereum, where each Ethereum address has a reputation associated with it and the darknet markets simply read that reputation into their UIs. That way even if the market gets shut down and loses their database, the vendor reputation system would still persist.
What are the latest dark net markets these days anyway and have they gone Monero native yet?
2-of-3 multisig will at least provide software level trust of the escrow process. The reviews on quality of goods would still be important though, but from an enforcement side it will be exponentially more expensive to take down one of these sites.
Prior DNM busts typically also got the warchest of everything held in escrow, making it more worthwhile to try and nab cryptocurrency. They were also aided by transparency blockchains to determine social graphs, which Monero makes almost impossible.
I checked a few sites I found from the list in the sidebar of /r/darknetmarkets. A couple of them allowed paying into their escrow service with Monero, and for vendors to receive Monero, but it looks like they're still fundamentally based on a multisig Bitcoin transaction.
This seems like a mistake to me; I would have expected faster Monero adoption, especially with Bitcoin hitting performance bottlenecks.
yeah, darknetmarkets should have dropped bitcoin completely a while ago
I'm not sure Monero's 2-of-3 multisig is actually merged into production yet, but they have 2-of-2 so thats still a real limitation. Also Monero has and will hit performance bottlenecks very quickly too, cryptonote coins have no layer-2 scaling solution on the roadmap. Although they have had adaptive block sizes from day 1, the block sizes grow very slowly compared to spikes in traffic. The transaction fees would quickly reach unoptimal $ amounts, but the market itself would just require larger deal flow.
These days: Dream (highly unprofessional / suspicious), Libertas, CGMC (only cannabis & psychedelics, extremely well done), and Zion (up and down due to DDOS). The last one at the very least support Monero, but I believe it's not the only one. That list is only a list of the "true" markets; there are also numerous forum-based ones. A lot of the above also handle multisig (including monero multisig), to make sure a vendor can get his coins even if the market disappears.
There's also a galaxy of small websites / forums opened by single vendors themselves, in order to sell directly.
> "One explanation is that dissatisfied customers are substantially less likely to give feedback"
This is given as a truth in the article but the opposite seem to be the truth for the app stores. From a pool of around 300k app users using our apps, organic reviews are much more likely to be negative. The explanation to this is believed (at our company) that unhappy users want to retaliate where the majority of users, the satisfied ones, doesn't have the energy or incentive to leave a review. The way we develop apps nowadays always include a prompt to rate after $conditionOnlyActiveUsersMatch is met. This skews our reviews to the positive side, leaving us with 4.5+ ratings. If we didn't artificially "game" the stores by asking happy users for reviews, we would be at one star because of the organic reviews being from 0.001% angry users.
I've never been on the darknet. Where are all these reviews? Are there different drug selling sites where the sites are trusted enough not to remove negative reviews?
The big ones don't seem like they remove negative reviews. That would be fairly easy to spot by the reviewer and would hurt the markets reputation, which is worth a lot more than one dealer.
Ironic how this is being published right after nautil.us suffered a large reputational loss after not paying their writers. I wonder whether the author got paid for this yet or if they will get paid. Clearly, the reputational loss wasn't enough to deter them from writing this article.
Edit: "Reproduced with permission from Hachette Book Group.". So they likely got it for free to promote the book.
Not sure if completely on topic, but I know of a few friends who every now and then when they go to party do some Ecstacy and they told me a site like https://www.pillreports.net/ is invaluable to them in that they can check the quality of the stuff before they actually buy it, because a bad batch can actually kill you. In such a case, reviews can actually save your life and, I guess, guarantee you a good time.
In high risk/high volatility environments, it's either regulation or reputation. That's why the smell of regulation is always telling: the inter-human natural trust scheme can't cope with the risk... or someone is looking to bend it in favor of one side.
As someone who genuinely believes that providing a legitimate (or as legitimate as possible) avenue for people to purchase drugs (I'm less sold on arms trafficking and sale of stolen credit cards) I was surprised to find how much a genuinely felt like I disagreed with the bulk of this articles content.
While I haven't been in the market for any drugs for a while I know enough people who regularly frequency DNM's and I tend to check in every now and then just because I find the whole ecosystem fascinating.
This article seems to imply that the entire dark net market thing is as simple as ebay or airbnb, but it's actually a lot more complicated. There's a ton of extra stuff you need to do to protect yourself not just from the vendor/buyer but also from the market places themselves, because they are also "untrusted" this means things like multisig transactions and the like are a must.
Additionally the view that a vendors pseudonym is important is just flat out untrue since people realised how much money there was to be made by hacking vendor accounts or claiming a known vendors name on a market that vendor does not yet have a presence on. The key thing is being able to do what is generally considered reasonably high degrees of security based validation, by verifying an identity out of band from the market. This means using GPG keys that you have sourced from previous interactions to communicate, double checking with vendors over wickr or secure anonymous email services to ensure they are the person you are dealing with on a marketplace.
Essentially once a vendor has a reputation the marketplace becomes irrelevant entirely. If it where me, I'd rather do a direct deal using GPG encrypted messages over wickr with a vendor I trust than buy from a vendor I don't personally know on a market that I shouldn't trust (exit scamming must be way to tempting).
I admit that I'm not entirely engaged with the current workings of the DNM's at the moment, but other than being a place where new vendors can earn some reputation, the value add isn't that high. And now that it's a mainstream activity (relatively to buying drugs in the open before silk road) I feel like it's only a matter of time before new vendors can earn enough reputation just frequenting reddit boards on the topic and making sure they have good opsec. As soon as they get one or two people happy with what they've bought, it's all word of mouth from there. (Obviously they need to deal with security of being on the clear Web, or just set up their own onion site)
With regards to a point that was mentioned about block chain history being useful here, it isn't. All it does is help law enforcement, unless you mix your coins appropriately through a trusted party in which case the history if your transactions isn't verifiable and it's useless anyway.
What are useful are services like grams, which (at least when I last checked) scraped reviews from market places, reddit, etc and aggregated them based on the vendors public key.
I feel like this article was either written about 5 or so years ago, or the information it contains simply hasn't been updated in a very very long time.
Yes, and they do. Which is why people should rely on the gpg keys of vendors as well as watching forums and other buyers to work out if things have suddenly become suspicious.
No one trust the reviews written on the site. They could be easily faked, along with reputation, in most (all, in different ways) DarkNetMarkets. You have to research on communities (on the "white" web, reddit for example) where each sellers has feedback, and famous ones got their products verified by indipendent company.
Arguably, you should phrase that as 'funny seeing the DNM famous Gwern showing up in the HN comments of this article' :). I'm much better known for my DNM work like my DNM archives than I am on HN, I think.
Higher up the chain reputation is still everything, they don't deal with anybody who has 'paper' floating around showing they colluded with the authorities at some point. It's common for gangs to distribute paperwork on each other that gets leaked from investigations/court proceedings/prisons. There is no escrow in real life either, so reputation is the sole currency to set up exchanges with any criminal above selling baggies at a nightclub.
> Would you buy a toaster oven from someones cargo van on the side of the road in a shady street or prefer to purchase it form Amazon?
Locals who know the owner of that cargo van will quite often prefer that source, as evidenced at least by the very fact that the van is still there selling toaster ovens. That's a form of reputation-based purchase, too.
Could be, but sadly it wasn't explicit. I interpreted it the way I did, because plenty of semi-permanent merchants I've seen do their business from vans, for reasons most likely involving location permits.
> No.... You buy from a dealer in a club or somewhere else
Have you ever bought drugs? When you move to things like pills, and don't have the ability to test yourself, the dealers reputation or trust with you is paramount.
I think the main take away is, "trustworthiness [consist of] competence, reliability, and honesty" and how these markets/vendors/customers create it; by satisfying all the above.
In the midst of an opioid crisis, with people overdosing on heroin cut with fentanyl, having this accountability can save lives. There's a subreddit (whose name I won't mention) that facilitates meetups between opioid sellers and users, encouraging buyers to leave feedback once the meetup is complete. I'm glad it exists.