Topic: Alphabay dark market accepts ethereum (Read 2226 times)

You dont need to be any expert to pay with Monero. I newer used any other operation system then Windows in my past.  For those that know how to pay with Bitcoin Monero is super easy to learn since is almost identical except Monero GUI is way better. Monero is also fast (transaction happen in 10 minutes) and transactions fees are low ($0.07) 
Traders on AlphaBay choose Bitcoin simply because they are used to and will change only when getting forced. They think Bitcoin is anonymous enough. Once regulations will get more restrict they will rapidly change to Monero.  Currently if you send your BTC from Coinbase to Alphabay valet your Coinbase account gets closed. But if you sent them to some other valet and from there to Alphabay valet noone check that.  Once this will start getting checked everyone will use only Monero.

1st May is approaching fast and I am happy to see Dark markets adopt more currencies. Even ETH this time.

There is only Bitcoin and Monero now as options, and only high liquidity coins and tokens make any sense to use. Bitcoin is very slow and no substantial updates are coming soon. The design by Satoshi is change resistant, and even UASF may or may not happen. Segwit and LN, not even a chance. So it cannot scale or be substantially updated, even if it was, that might even make it less desirable for pseudo-anonymous usage.  Monero, that is really only for experts or people that know what they are doing. It is used some, but has not really caught on, mostly because of the difficulty to use, not everyone is a tech, most people just run Windows. Ethereum is easy and fast, anyone can use it that can use Bitcoin, and a lot of people might just be interested in medical cannabis that should be legal anyway. Now, if someone is hyper paranoid perhaps XMR might be a better choice if they feel they trust it more, that is a personal choice. Regardless May 1st there will be 3 choices, I for one am holding some Ethereum, purely for speculative reasons, but they have been winning and there is no objective way to deny that. Better to be on the boat than miss it.

I agree with you that protocol decentralization (like all of decentralisation) is just a TOOL to obtain desired properties:
- immutability
- permissionlessness

As long as Core was de facto guaranteing immutability (of the important part) of protocol, the centralisation in their hands was not a problem.  Now that they want to actively use their power, the decentralization works, in the following sense:
with all these struggles NO protocol change will actually happen.  That was the goal.  Bitcoin's protocol became truly immutable because of decentralisation.  The fight between BU and Segwit is just this immutability dynamics at work.


Amen.  But as it should be.  A crypto should not change.  Just rise and die.

Most of the deals in the dark net, seems to be carried out with bitcoin lets wait some time before we make such statements, since we don’t know how much of acceptance ETH will have with the anonymous conscious users on that part of the internet.

Details please? I think you are referring not to the LN clone aspect but the proposed use of zk-snarks over the raiden network to attain anonymity (thus unrelated to the instant txns LN features)?

mining1 says ?

Bullfuckingshit !

It got it's current level of adoption because people want to profit from it.
There is no mass fear of the man keeping us down.. that is fucking stupid.  

Oh and by the way no one posted a shred of proof still.. i call bullshit.

The ability of miners to 51% attack the protocol is not decentralization. To paraphase Benjamin Franklin in our context, those who would trade a huge loss of decentralization in the functioning of the protocol for a tiny morsel of decentralization attacking the protocol immutability, deserve neither decentralization nor protocol adaptability.

The root problem is that Satoshi's design isn't sufficiently adaptable without centralized control.

I don't know why you hate eth inri666. You got scammed into buying etc by scammers barry and chandler, you should be mad at them.

Febo, ofc it is not bullshit. Alphabay mod said it on their own reddit, nobody actually asked them. Also listen to my advice febo, ignore spoetnik. I promise you that you will not lose anything, his posts are as meaningless as is his life.

Story is not bullshit. But yes could something happen till May.1.  Maybe even Alphabay might even stop exist till then.

Bitcoin has decentralized aspects, but I don't know how long this will still last.  Of course, there was a strong centralization in the protocol, by Core.  But for a long time Core respected essentially the immutability apart from technical issues that don't matter much: bitcoin was *economically* working like it was lined out in Satoshi's paper, and Core hardly changed anything to that.

You have to distinguish the *software* written by Core and the protocol adhered to by that software.  The protocol has only undergone small changes that were of very technical nature, and didn't actually impact anybody at the moment of the modifications ; in other words, those aspects of the protocol were essentially unrealized and hence open to modification.

So, in as much as there was "leadership", that leadership didn't modify the protocol in essential ways, and was hence equivalent to its absence.

In functioning, bitcoin went from highly centralized (Satoshi and a few guys), to very decentralized, to back rather centralized with 5 or 10 or 14 mining pools.  On the other hand, Core, trying to impose its leadership, actually lost it and now on the protocol side, bitcoin is in fact more decentralized (over 5, 10 or 14 pools) than when Core had de facto leadership.

Is a group of 5, 10 or 14 antagonists decentralized or not ?  In as much as they don't collude, in fact, yes.

You can have a decentralized system from the moment that you have 3 antagonists that can't come to an agreement.  But it is fragile, and you never know if there is collusion or not.

So, bitcoin is still somewhat decentralized in as much as these 5 - 10 - 14 entities do not collude, which nobody really knows.  On the protocol side, bitcoin got just more decentralized with the fight between classic, Core and BU, because it wasn't and there was leadership, but there isn't much any more, which is good.

You contradicted yourself, you said a project with leadership can't be decentralized yet you say bitcoin is decentralized . Because bitcoin is not today virgin like satoshi left it. So make up your mind.

Do you believe that actually monero only have 0 transactions on darknet marketplaces? I don't think so, monero provide more privacy than bitcoin which is perfect for darkweb vendors. ETH on other side doesn't provide even enough anonymity like bitcoin, so we can expect almost 0 ETH transactions 

Ok, let's not waste your time (mine can be wasted ).  But I just want to say that I am closer to your position than you think, and that I don't think that crypto is ONLY for dark markets, but for those places where centralized systems cannot go, or became too corrupt to be efficient.  Your belief in the corruption of these systems is maybe different from mine.  I think they are corrupt, but not to the point where they have lost so much efficiency that decentralized systems can compete, except in niche applications.  Of course, the day that they break down, decentralized systems will have a large ecological niche to take, but today, that is not the case yet.

The idea that bitcoin, or whatever decentralized system AS OF TODAY will compete to death fiat currency without major crisis, is ridiculous.  Of course, you can count on the big crash coming.  Sure.  But your experiment will not give any results of significance before.

Bitcoin hasn't managed to gain mainstream adoption, not even close. Sure, alot of people know it exist, atleast those that know how to properly use a computer. But, it's 8 years since launch, the adoption is arguably doing much worse than bitcoiners anticipated. And it reached the curent adoption it has nowadays not because people looked at it and saw an alternative currency because they felt so opressed by their government, but because the hype was so huge they thought they'd become rich, and the wildest dreams were like this: i buy several btcs now and in 10-20 years i'll be able to retire.
And this sentiment kept going on. However, culminating with this civil war in the community, some investors are starting to lose confidence. And, the more confidence you lose in the brand, the more you will be interested in the technological aspects, development, research and adoption (by people who actually matter).

Because of this, i do not think public cryptos that aim to be just payment systems will succeed. Sure, they'll cover a niche, what bitcoin does today, but never payment systems. Even if bitcoin had a respected leadership to further develop and actually make it work, the concentration of money in a few hands would be too big to make it work as a mainstream currency anyway. Even though there are many smaller or bigger places that accepts btc, very few people are actually paying with it. As an example; as i recall, somehow steam had it's bitcoin stolen. 20 bitcoins after 1 year of accepting it, something like that.

So, in conclusion, i think bitcoin will only be used as a niche currency but mostly speculation. This would have worked great, but unfortunately for bitcoiners it's POW system is the most primitive and can't work long term.

@dinofelis, I don't want to get into another debate with you right now, but I intend to prove with a real project that you are conflating a BDFL with decentralization of the four classes of actors. You are stuck on this theme that decentralization is only useful for dark markets and I intend to prove that the mainstream of society needs decentralization. The Internet is decentralization. I posit that Google and Facebook are about to be disrupted. Expending too much time and effort on words isn't as useful as working to make a real experiment. Btw, I do agree the ideal is that influence/power of the BDFL should wane and the paradigm should run decentralized autonomously and I think this may be possible. But all the scaling issues have to be worked out. Satoshi added the 1MB limit after he had already released Bitcoin. He hadn't worked out of all the scaling issues. His work was incomplete.

Hey, I'm not saying that no crypto system can be developed if it has leadership.  But if it has leadership, it is centralized, period.  Now, for FAR MOST applications, centralization is beneficial, because decentralized systems cannot beat centralized systems in efficiency.  However, in the long run, all centralized systems become corrupt and make a balance between getting out of the market what the market can bear as advantages for the "leadership".  It is only when this corruption is so strong that it kills its own efficiency, and that decentralized systems start becoming competitive.  But new systems with fresh, competent leadership make centralized systems that outcompete all decentralized peers.  Because decentralisation is, in most markets, a huge burden that centralized systems don't have to face.

Facebook and google are great.  No decentralized system can compete with that.  They are not yet corrupt enough for any decentralized system to be able to take their place.  Fiat systems, although heavily corrupt, are STILL way way more efficient for legal and normal payments than bitcoin or whatever clunky crypto payment system.  Yes, there are niches.


1,2,3,3: facebook, google, Apple....

4: because Satoshi had the stupid idea of proof of work. (not stupid for burning seigniorage, but utterly stupid as a decision mechanism).

So, yes.  You can invent another facebook.  You can sell it as fake decentralization.  Like DASH and ethereum, and up to a certain point, bitcoin.  Ebay or OpenBazaar ?  VISA/paypal or bitcoin ?   Skype or jitsi ?   DNS or onion ?  

Decentralized is useful only in those cases where centralized systems cannot go, for legal reasons, because they became too corrupt or other.  So if you want to be successful, yes, make a centralized system.  Much more customers.  If you can sell it and hype it as (fake) decentralized, get in the gullible's money.  That's what gullible money is for.

I understand. I somehow under-valuated the apps that work on ETH platform. That is the missing part in my logic.
But I also see that you don't believe "blindly" in ETH, which is reassuring in the way that my logic is not that bad.

Believe me, I am really curious on how your "project" is going to look like, good luck with it!
And thank you for the detailed and fair answer.

I am shilling for ETH a bit (so factor that in), but I'll try to be objective.

I studied the DAO bug but I haven't studied Ethereum code nor its smart contract language (virtual machine) closely.

I know there is research into proving more invariants, but the fact is that it is impossible to prove all the invariants. This is why Bitcoin is very, very cautious about adding new opcodes because as Craig Wright pointed out (which both Gmaxwell and Nick Szabo didn't understand) that even Bitcoin's scripting is Turing complete because the looping (unbounded recursion) can occur in the composition of invocations of transactions, i.e. the blockchain is the unbounded tape (memory).

So the point is that smart contracts opens up a hornet's nest of potential vulnerabilities.

So as I said, if i see a huge (e.g. $100 million) amount of ETH value in one smart contract again, I will sell ETH. But as long as they keep the risk spread out over many different contracts, then the hacking of any one contract is not likely to have a very great impact (although it would probably scare n00b speculators and cause a temporary selloff).

I do expect Ethereum's code is much less polished than Bitcoin. But that is risk we pay for being able to move very quickly forward on experimentation. And the experimentation which may end up producing a killer app for blockchains. We don't know when another DAO-like mania might kick on.

If not for the Bitcoin Unlimited attack on BTC, I would not have diversified into ETH, but now it looks like Bitcoin is stalled and in uncertainty, so as a diversification token the only choices with sufficient liquidity are ETH, LTC, and XMR. It is alleged that DASH is a pyramid with fake liquidity (and although Ethereum may also have a R3 agent market manipulator, the market for ETH tokens appears to be more diversified/aggregate than for EvanIncCoin).

I don't think Ethereum has the best possible design we can do for apps and smart contracts. I say that because I am biased and am working on my own project. But comparing someone's ideas for vaporware to the available projects you can invest in now, is not very useful. As of right now, it seems Ethereum has the most new apps and ICOs being created on its platform. Most of us believe these apps are just gimicks to take ICO money from speculators. But maybe that is the killer app (gambling)? Any way, we can't predict the future. The creativity of humans is basically unpredictable. There is a lot of experimentation going on. I can't even keep track of all of it. I can't be in Slack all day monitoring dozens of decentralized app projects.

Note I haven't studied Ethereum closely at all. I don't have sufficient time to do that. It might even be that the clients and wallets suck so bad that I am really mistaken. But one thing I do know, they seem to have academics in their back pocket (e.g. hackingdistributed website) and they can generate a lot of promotion when they decide to announce a new release. Also their community is very enthusiastic. There is  lot of energy still in that community, although it is a bit drained or subdued from the DAO attack. But perhaps that more reserved "wall of worry" is the what we should see early in another nascent pump.

I could be mistaken about ETH. I was pressured to diversify because of the Bitcoin Unlimited attack on BTC. Also because I've seen a lot of money moving into the Top 5 or so altcoins since Bitcoin made this ATH. I would have preferred to stay 100% in BTC, because I don't have sufficient funds at risk and time to justify doing detailed research on altcoins. Because I want my head in the sand focused on my own project and programming work. Basically I see my project as a competitor on the concept of blockchain apps, so I want to diversify my funds into holding my competitors in case they beat me to the market. Thus I hold some ETH and STEEM. For ETH I expect it to outperform BTC near-term. With STEEM I hold a small marketcap, just in case the dice happens to land on snake eyes.

Edit: currency has value because of confidence, so in that respect BTC being more polished and reliable would be the wisest choice. But I don't think blockchains are going to be about only currency. Ethereum's community also thinks this way.

Edit#2: Evidence that the community is more cautious: http://www.coindesk.com/bug-discoveries-hinder-launch-of-new-ethereum-domain-app/

This is an interesting view.
Since you know programming, is Ethereum code as bad as some say? Did you look into it?
I somehow live with the idea Ethereum is too big, too buggy to hold for a long time. The bold area can be interpreted in so many ways..


Many coins deserve that, although your list and mine may differ.
Compared with many other coins, Ethereum came with something new, which should be either replaced by something better, either improved to become really good.
Unfortunately I don't see any of the two happen...