Topic: A Heroin Store - page 3. (Read 104723 times)

Hello everyone!

I am not into drugs, but I like puzzles, especially the ones that involve people. Here's my hypothetical scenario.
There is an initial investment and some risk you are never going to see it, but I assume this kind of business is quite profitable so it shouldn't be a problem. I read through this thread and the one about silk road. I think that delivery to real addresses is the weak point. But this is how it could be solved:

1. Bob is a computer expert and sets up a website in Tor or I2P, just like silk road.
2. Bob buys a cheap laptop and a small GPS device. He secures it(encrypting hdds, removing cd-roms, disabling usb ports, etc) and prepares it for anonymous communications with himself via (for example)I2P anonymous email. Also some automation would be required to make this laptop simple to use by less technically inclined.
3. Then Bob goes out and finds Alice, who is a drug dealer. Alice is not a street type - she is smart and has a vehicle. They never meet or even if they do Bob never reveals his cunning plan face to face. Then Bob with some determination finds out where Alice lives.
4. Bob sends the Laptop and GPS to Alice anonymously with a (carefully written)letter explaining how it would work.

In the letter, amongst other things like "this computer can not be used for any other purpose and no additional software can be installed, etc", Bob would specify hour of the day for the communication.

The transaction.
1. John comes to Bob's website and orders the desired goods. He pays with Bitcoins and the only thing he has to reveal about himself is area where he lives or is willing to travel.
2. Bob receives this and any other orders and at the end of the day, just before the specified communication time, he sends the details to Alice
3. Alice takes the goods, drops it off in the desired areas and notes GPS coordinates.
4. Alice returns home, sends Bob the GPS coordinates and Bob reveals these coordinates on his site to his customers.
5. Next day goods are retrieved by the customers.

There are some limitation to this, like small area, but I think after a period of successful partnership, it should be scalable as Alice could introduce her friends to Bob. Also, Bob could find some friends on anonymous networks, who could implement this model in other countries
This is a very paranoid version where Bob has the most anonymity, but to kick start the whole venture this could be changed and Bob and Alice could know each other or even be one person. This is a much higher risk scenario. If Alice's or Bob's side of business gets compromised the whole operation goes down. While in the paranoid version, especially after Alice introduced her friends to Bob and Bob found friends in other countries, the show would go on.

Let me know what you think

Geocaching has pretty much the same risks for a buyer regarding being vaught in flagrant(sp?) where buying drugs is illegal, the cops could pretty much just as easilly stake out on random coordinates as they can on a street corner or a landmark on a park.

Well, even if you are right, it's only safe for the seller.
It is nowhere near safe for the buyer.

The problem is, you never know if you aren't buying from a FBI/CIA agent.
GPS geocaching would be a nice way to at least partially fix this inconvenience.

Such a thing does exist, but it happens to be pretty expensive.

Not all places got those boxes

Mail is very safe. I know drug vendors who have sent mail for over ten years and are still not busted. If mail was so easy to trace the unibomber would have been arrested by being traced through the mail instead of his brother pointing in his direction. If you send mail from a post office you are an idiot. You can send mail from any of the blue drop boxes. This is more or less the same thing as a dead drop. You can also send mail from ANYONES mail box, just sneak it in their box with outgoing mail shortly before the mail man comes. It is very safe to send mail.

Absolutely.

The only viable option is GPS geocaching. Everything else is easily traceable.
Using normal mail, there is 99,9% probabilty you will be caught sooner or later.

Actually, anything physical (leaving physical traces) or involving third person is easily traceable, because you only need to find weak link in the chain to find the seller. People are usually the weakest links.

I hope silkroad realizes this, because if he doesn't switch to GPS geocaching-only, sooner or later he will be caught.

Secret mail service = instant terrorist threat = no go.

if there was a way to virtually transfer heroine it would be a pretty good idea

BitLaundry

Great insight in the previous post.

"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."

I also feel that bitcoin isn't exactly anonymous, as all the transactions could be traced from generation to any particular payment. You can mix funds etc., but still it has a lot of vulnerabilities as far as I can see. If the government decides to crack down on bitcoin, this would be a real pain.

Any working services or ideas on how to solve this?

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.

Regarding moving packages annonymouslly, ii got n idea, would work at least within a city, and perhaps more:

It involves magnetic packages. It works like this, there are pedestrians and there are vehicles.


Pedestrians would each be told to be at some location, wait for a certain vehicle to park or stop at a traffic light, then the pedestrian would discreetly grab the magnetic package out of the vehicle and then place it somewhere else, either another vehicle he was told about or if necessary some fixed place, then another pedestrain would be told to pick up the package and move it to some other place, and so on.

There would be lots of pedestrians, each receiving apparently random instructions frequently, and lots of magnetic packages being moved around between spots or carried by vehicles from one place to another. The packages would have no identifying features differentiating one from another, and they would be constantly kept in flux regardless of actually having a payload meant to go somewhere.


The vehicles would be vehicles with predictable routes, city busses, cars of people that work everyday etc.


There would be a distributed censorship resistant system (perhaps running on Freenet) that would define the instructions for the pedestrians  of when and where to pick a magpack and when where to place it, the system would make sure the average density of magpacks across the network remains constant and that all packages have a decent likellyhood of eventually reaching everywhere in the network. Someone wanting to send somthing, would file a request with the system, specifying the destination, the sender would be one of the pedestrians, one day that pedestrian receives an special instruction telliing about a free magpack that they can use that will be avaiable at some location within their area at some time in the near future, that pedestrian will have a window of time to intercept that magpack, load it up, and put it back on the network.

Pedestrian should report missing packages (packages they didn't intercept or lost before being able to forward into the network) and missed deliveries (not keeping a package 'cause they couldn't attach it to the intended vehicle), the system will indenpendently analyze the patterns of losses and estimate if a given pedestrian or vehicle/location has become less reliable and adjust the routing accordingly.

Routes would be submited to the system announymouslly, and once a given attachable location or vehicle has been confirmed by enough reports some of the many magpacks will be routed thru them to test (most likelly empty ones, but once in a while loaded ones as well, seemingly at random), strenghtening the reliability value of that route based on successes.


This would only work if it achieved a certain critical mass before authorities try to crack down a given section (from a single city block to a whole city) ; with enough chaotic annonymous agents and packages moving around it will be impossible to predict when and even where a given package will be, and even if the authorities intercept one package or pedestrian the odds are they will have an empty magpack or a pedestrian without a magpack.

Some routes would have multiple intercept points, with pedestrians instructed to transfer the magpack if they do find it there and if they can, one pedestrian can't the next ones in the route will, their reports of success of failure will be computed by the system adjusting the next instructions accordingly, keeping track of magpacks to decide what orders to send to which pedestrians to keep the package in flux to it's eventual destinations.


Lost and then found packages will not be trackable by the system, but if a pedestrian finds a lost package, he is to attach it to a route attempting to leave it set to open and loose it's content, informing to the system (the magpacks would have a timed opening mechanism for disposal of any potential lost content before the next pedestrian), this way reintroducing the magpack into the network empty but without the pedestrian actually seeing what, if anything, was inside.


Magpacks might be moved between cities if necessary, given that is a possible route, like attaching to an intercity bus, or by a pedestrian with additional skills and access to a piece of luggage or the landing gear of a plane etc, these tranfers and routes only used when extremelly necessary; routes with less likellyhood of getting intercepted by the authorities, with less risk for the pedestrian etc being preffered when avaiable even if the final path is much longer (some sort of risk/benefit/cost evaluation of different paths would be done by the system to decide which path to use)


To help with the critical mass issue, lots of empty magpacks would be intentionally lost, and lots of orders to pedestrians would secretly be meant to fail; keeping authorities in wild goose chases, constantly wasting time spying on people that endup not doing anything and finding packages that are empty. Obviouslly these intentional failures being considered different by the system to not disrupt real realiability calculations.


The distribute system itself would be a black box, even if somehow the authorities managed to read the whole system at any given time, it would be white noise, once activated no one would be able to actually see inside the system, the system would run itself, it's message to the pedestrians saying enough for their current step, no pedestrian would be aware of where their current magpack originated nor where it is destined to go, people sending things would communicate with the pedestrian intended to receive the package telling them where to expect their package by means outside the network, they wouldn't know when, but when receiving a package, the target pedestrian would have been given an order similar to when someone gets an empty package to send thing, with the window being for withdrawing the contents before forwarding the package back into the network instead of depositing somthing in it.






Given the scale and complexity of this system, i guess it would be hugelly difficult to implement it right now, it's probably somthing that would exist in books and movies, but not be real in the foreseable future, but at some point it might be.

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

People are already being paid for smoothing out the exchange rate. It's a job you can hire yourself to do at any time.

Determine the right price, bid something below it, ask something above it. You will get paid unless the price shoots away past either your bid or ask and never returns. Having extra coins and dollars on offer will slow down and dampen swings.

You'll know you are good at doing this if you make profit.

There is no reason to think that this will work better if everyone hands their coins and dollars over to some entity or committee to handle. 

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.

That sounds to me like you are suggesting a cartel to manage the value of a currency .... gee, how novel, we haven't seen that before ..... not.

Could lead to two bad outcomes (or both);

1) the cartel goes bust defending their market position when a bigger fish or the market itself turns on them

2) the economy that is based on that currency gets distorted price signals from the false values delivered by the cartel, i.e. a false economy. (E.g. unnecessarily high or low network difficulty)

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.

Price swings won't settle down until:
 1. The bitcoin economy is bigger (a "market cap" of hundreds of millions of dollars instead of just a few million dollars).
and
 2. Bitcoin is mature enough for people to really trust it.

Unless there is somebody out there with very deep pockets and a willingness to spend a lot of money smoothing out the fluctuations there's not a whole lot we can do about it besides make bitcoin better, easier to use, more secure, etc.

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.