Topic: Silk Road: anonymous marketplace. Feedback requested :) - page 16. (Read 152817 times)

Why's it gotta be "black"?

I think that will a little bit of due diligence, you know, reading up on Bitcoin some more, reading the thread, perusing Silk Road, you'll find yourself in a better position to contribute to the thread with useful suggestions and debate. I write this entirely without snark in the hopes of driving the point that the people running Silk Road have no power to exclude anyone. Its operators can try to ban certain products, but they will just show up under different names. As we know (and for those who hadn't, you're welcome), in the absence of an adult services section, you need to proof-read for accidental innuendos in your Craigslist post, lest you encounter a large woman with a strap-on instead of the pegboard you expected. Furthermore, the folks at Silk Road can't stop those running a Silk Road clone from catering to people wishing to trade in whatever products the original had banned.

Let's just assume that it's not a hoax.

Everyone, raise your hand if you broke the law today. Working within the bounds of the law will only get us so far, so fast. Is the thought of breaking the system, or letting it break itself, so bad? Se cayó.

Oh, crap!  Betrayed by my own subconscious, again.

We've got ourselves one hell of a cease-fire.

Until then, cork it.

We don't have the numbers to force a military action.  They'll label us criminals, round us up for fraud, counterfeiting and what have you, and any of us dumb enough to take up arms will be labeled terrorists on fox news and, if they manage to evade being killed outright, they'll be imprisoned too.  All they'd need to use is the DEA's current infrastructure to serve up warrants for raids, and local enforcement would handle it from there.

And where would we get revolutionary numbers, when the John Q Public has either yet to hear of bitcoins, or he has heard bad things?

I have introduced the topic of revolution in some of these discussions to point out the depressing impossibility of defiant use of bitcoins in this country, at this time.  Not as a serious idea.

Vaster and far better armed than the bitcoin movement, my friend. 

Vaster and far better armed than the bitcoin movement, my friend.  And it'll stay that way without the people on our side.  How are we to leverage public opinion in the defense of bitcoins?

What you are speaking of will require violent revolution to bring about, without the cooperation of my government.  If that is the way of things, so be it.  I got this from the very beginning.  What I don't get is the people here who believe that bitcoins can exist in the defiance of a power structure that has every reason to stop bitcoins.

Bring it. The govt. and banksters have put them out of work and on the scrap heap so they have nothing to lose.

I think you are starting to "get it". The free market will not be denied what it needs. Right now it needs the bitcoin monetary product more than any other technology or product out there. The current monetary products are busted, legal, moral, ethical, rubber-stamped ivy-league lauded or otherwise. Or have you been off the grid for the last 10 years?

Go against the free market at your absolute peril.

Worse still is the sheer number of users in the relatively tech-savvy USA who stand to lose a great deal when the hammer finally falls.

...black transactions ... black market...

Because I'm not sure what's really going on here I don't think I'm in any position to judge what is or isn't "feasible."

If it's a hoax, it's beautiful.  On the other hand if it is not a hoax...

...then I believe it becomes part of the problem. Certainly nothing like cartels and gangs, yet still operating as if it, Silk Road, were above the law.  My aim has always been to change the law and make things better for everybody, except of course those who get fat off the way the law is today.

You are in a dream world. This is why your country, any many others like it, are damned. Welcome to an earthquake technology.

Now, this is interesting!  Firstly, any hypotheticals I put forward here are hinged on an indefensible and indeed unlikely premise, and another one that defies one of the most obvious design goals of bitcoin - that the federal government could be tempted to abandon the banking establishments with the lure of how easy it would be for a governing body to track and control the movement of bitcoins for the purposes of maintaining a healthy and stable government, were they to be centralized.  

The next thing I lay down is that, the currency of a country's populace must be taxable for that country to survive.  Period.  We, the people, must be taxed, or we can have no government.  "Hooray!",  say the Anarchists, until their murder and pillage by some stronger and better armed Anarchists.  We need our government to be capable of protecting us from harm and to safeguard our well being.

That established, all that would be required for the taxation and regulation of bitcoin usage is to do the unthinkable and centralize it, requiring communication with federal servers to track and verify bitcoin exchanges.  What if the miners connected to these servers in one massive, publicly driven pool?  This would afford Bitcoins all of the benefits of Bitcoin usage except for the purchasing of illegal goods and services.  Banking establishments - the real enemy, here - would simply be written out of the picture, as safeguarding one's life savings is as easy as stashing an encrypted CD containing one's bitcoin wallet, freeing my country from the shackles of bondage that is rapidly annihilating our middle-class.  Inflation, thanks to the powerfully designed preventative measures inherent in Bitcoin's structure, might well still become a thing of the past under such a scenario, although some unconscious part of me suspects that the deflationary measures are in a twisted way hinged on their exchangeability with the inflating USD.  I can't put that worry to words just yet, so don't ask.

Finally, the decentralization of how bitcoins are "printed", coupled with the grotesque difficulty involved in counterfeiting, would revolutionize the stability of what I'll now call the "US-B".  Really, this situation contains all the benefits of the Bitcoin except the inherently anarchistic ones - most notably the traits that the folks I've argued with all afternoon in this thread value the most.


And that ends that fantasy.  The more I think about this, the more damned Bitcoin seems in my country.  That scenario can't happen - power structures loathe change as buildings loathe earthquakes.  The banks have my country by the balls, and Bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity can't stop it.