Analyzing Silk Road 2.0 68
An anonymous reader writes: After a recent article about breaking the CAPTCHA on the latest incarnation of Silk Road (the darknet-enabled drug market place), Darryl Lau decided to investigate exactly what narcotics people were buying and selling online. He found roughly 13,000 separate listings. Some sellers identify the country they're in, and the top six are the U.S., Australia, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, and Canada. The site also has a bunch of product reviews. If you assume that each review comes from a sale, and multiply that by the listed prices, reviewed items alone represent $20 million worth of business. Lau also has some interesting charts, graphs, and assorted stats. MDMA is the most listed and reviewed drug, and sellers are offering it in quantities of up to a kilogram at a time. The average price for the top 1000 items is $236. Prescription drugs represent a huge portion of the total listings, though no individual prescription drugs have high volume on their own.
mmmm drugs (Score:3, Funny)
nm, i'm stoo stoned to remember what I was going to post.
Re: (Score:3)
They say my chocolate chip cookies are addictive.
Who will bit $10 a dozen?
Come on man, you know you want them.
I can hook you up.
Average price? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, one visit there should have my Chrome browser sending me "High Times" and bong ads for the foreseeable future.....
Re: (Score:2)
There's is a bit on information to extract from that:
"The system isn't being used to only do major, hundreds of dollars, deals."
And also:
"On average, buyers are way past the free shipping minimum amount".
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd suggest that the order size is determined by to competing factors:
a) Reduce the risk of being caught by making fewer large orders
b) Reduce the loss when a delivery goes astray by making smaller orders
Which leads to the unexpected conclusion that when the police get better at intercepting orders and the drug dealers become more reliable the size of the orders increases.
Re: (Score:2)
236 dollars buys you what?
Around 3 to 3.5 grams of MDMA crystals/powder. The therapeutic dosage of MDMA is 125mg.
Re: (Score:1)
Errr, go look for yourself. Are you a FBI agent trying to encourage someone to break the law?
Re: (Score:2)
If you come over to The Netherlands you can buy 'em right in the city center - leaves and everything on 'm. You can draw thea from the plant and use that. And due to all that nice agricultural expertise we even managed to increase the THC count to the level of a harddrug, so I'm pretty sure you're not going to have to concentrate it - it's going to be pretty dangerous if you do that to plants with 18 to 20% THC in the tips already.
Re:Spawn of Satan! (Score:5, Interesting)
Drugs are an evil scourge upon humanity!
Drugs are destroying the moral fiber of our citizens!
Yeah right.. I've been hooked on opiates for 15 years now. I work 65 hours a week, I pay my taxes, I keep to myself, and my morals are still intact last time I checked. I do it legally by going to my local Methadone clinic. You see, I love pain killers and I don't want or need help and nobody is going to stop me from taking them.
I don't blame you for your opinion. You just like many others are the result of years of drugs are evil propaganda spread by the cartels. They do this because legal drugs are bad for business.
Re:Spawn of Satan! (Score:5, Insightful)
These two things don't go together. You may want to re-evaluate. Get real help and free yourself.
Different person here. This is in line with my own personal morality and absolutely correct. My life is mine to do with as I please. I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, provided that the consequences are SOLELY confined to consenting adults (generally that would be just me).
Anything else is an evil desire to control other people, with the approval you get from your own conscience, by convincing yourself it's for their own good, so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like a good person. The typical lack of reasoning ability, wisdom or long-term thinking in most people today and the general shallow thinking of the popular culture sadly promotes and legitimizes this inability to be satisfied with one's own life while respecting that others will live theirs as they please and realizing that telling people how they should live has never worked in the first place (c.f. Prohibition) so there should not even be a debate about this.
Someone who cannot responsibly use things (usually due to either a lack of personal maturity and self-knowledge, and/or an inability to deal with one's own life that causes them to reach for drugs as a quick-fix "remedy") has a problem. There are many others who use drugs the same way you might come home from work and drink a beer and stay home. Like Bill Hicks pointed out, it sure is strange the way you never hear about responsible drug users on the news or see them portrayed on shows. That would contradict all the fear propaganda and think-of-the-children rhetoric. Pay attention and you'll notice that the major mass media outlets will generally never contradict either: each other, or anything that faciltiates control. Adult people who are expected to make their own decisions about their own lives in a responsible manner, without being told how to live, absolutely does not facilitate control. Qui bono?
Bullshit ... (Score:2)
Simplistic answers to complex problems set off the trip (love the play) wires.
You left out a whole set of parameters both known, and suspected, as contributors of drug addiction/use.
As one obvious example: Some people are wired for addictive/obsessive/compulsive behavior.
Sadly, that omission trashed out your whole post.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Spawn of Satan! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It rather depends on what you get hooked on. If you get hooked on heroine or morphine (which is worse, I've understood), you're only going for the fix after a while, so unless you have a trust fund you will run out of cash due to lack of income.
Let's talk methodology (Score:1)
In order for this research to be of any use we need peer reviews as well.
Can they please go into some detail as to the methodology used to connect to Silk Road 2.0, how they purchased things anonymously and how to tell teh real thing from fakes?
Also, if they have any idea of how to hide a kilo of say uhm, feathers from the authorities in terms of shipment, delivery and pickup that would be great for uhm, scientific purposes.
Re: (Score:3)
All he did was use a web scraper with some code to handle captchas and to create a new user account when he was logged out by the site. Yes, a complete methodology would be better but it still is interesting to read what he did. I wouldn't quote his research in anything serious, but it is still interesting. Looks like he will be posting the code for is scraper to github, without the SilkRoad parts which I don't really understand why. Take it for what it is I guess, a good collection of observations for
Re: Let's talk methodology (Score:1)
No it isn't. It's a perfectly fine assumption.
Maybe you're the only ass that reviews products he didn't buy?
Re: (Score:2)
Given the nature of the site, it's a bit risky to assume the sellers are fine, upstanding businessmen who would never ever dream of helping their reviews a bit...
Re: (Score:2)
You're the reason we can't have nice articles.
Re: (Score:3)
And then?
Re: (Score:2)
It's the United Kingdom, or Great Britain if that pleases you. But it's not England. It's like calling all Americans Texans.
Dollars mean nothing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"No legal supply raises price of goods."
I don't think that gonna make the news at 11.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Dollars mean nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
Aspirin still costs money, even in generic store brands.
My understanding is that total synthesis of opiates is possible but remains complicated and low yield, so you still need to obtain raw opium for it to be cost effective to produce opiate derivitives like morphine. Factor in a global supply chain, FDA-certified production and the price you pay at the pharmacy for generic oxycodone is probably priced accurately.
If it was available retail I would probably expect raw material excise taxes and consumption taxes to double the current pharmacy pricing.
In theory pot should be cheap like most agricultural commodities if produced at industrial scale but AFAIK in Colorado it remains curiously expensive. Not sure if this is due to taxes, the legal-but-not-federally legal status that results in all kinds of extra transaction costs for businesses involved in its production and sale or due to the demand and associated costs with producing many varities of a premium product through "artisinal" production methods.
Re: (Score:2)
I see what you did there.
Re: (Score:2)
It wouldn't surprise me if the regulations were somehow structured to hinder the introduction of a marijuana equivalent of Budweiser, some kind of acceptable but middling quality product that could be sold cheaply in mass quantities.
I'd guess that there's probably not any active collusion on prices, but some kind of pricing structure that more or less represents production costs and producers and consumers accept as a price floor.
Black market prices also play a role -- you can charge a legal retail price th
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I had orthopedic surgery last winter and I was paying like $13 for forty 5 mg oxycodone pills. It's hard to see that price getting too much lower regardless of who counts them.
Think about it -- generic oxycodone is made where? India? There's probably zero intellectual property licensing involved, labor costs are low and regulation probably at the minimum required to import it. It's geographically close to the raw materials. High health care costs in the US mean that marketing for a generic, common medi
Re: (Score:2)
I had orthopedic surgery last winter and I was paying like $13 for forty 5 mg oxycodone pills.
That's not the same as saying that 40 5mg pills cost $13 though, that's just the cost to you. The manufacturer's price is higher, and they're getting paid by your insurance company. Sadly, I haven't found any insurance company that will go in with me on Silk Road purchases.
Re: (Score:2)
No, that was not the insurance co-pay, that was the cash price. Most pharmacies I've ever used charge the cash price if it is lower than the co-pay.
Re: (Score:3)
I think it's the latter. While marijuana production and even growing your own is legal under state law, it's still heavily regulated -- but much less so than it was before legalization.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the usable yield is too low for individuals to get much out of it. The numbers vary, but on the low end it's something like 2.4 kg prepared opium per acre of poppies.
It seems like a lot until you do the math and realize its nearly 20 sq ft. per mg. of prepared opium. My average-sized yard is about 4000 square feet and filling it completely with poppies might yield a quarter kilo of prepared opium. I'm sure someone in a rural area might get away with an acre of it, but even then the labor involve
What I've learned: 90% captcha solved (Score:2)
Are the captcha so ineffective?
He uses OpenCV for pre-process and Tesseract for OCR, and has >90% success for captchas...
That's great but how do sites counter bots nowdays?
Re: (Score:1)
The captcha generator they used is really old and has been solved for ages. It's not called simple_captcha for nothing. Here's another solution explained in detail: mieko/sr-captcha [github.com] It's really trivial, you don't need any math or AI to figure it out.
The short answer is: SR and SR2 captchas aren't alike, but SR2 is just as trivial. SR2 is also probably fully solvable (99%+) without machine learning, as all of its operations are reversible.
(my emphasis) WTF
Re: (Score:2)
That's great but how do sites counter bots nowdays?
Bots are like any other parasite. If you have something they need, they arrive, and you have to figure out how to control them. And like controlling parasites, the most effective means is to take away their food source. So sites reduce the value of their site to spammers, black-hat SEOs, etc., by measures such as adding nofollow tags, preventing CSRF, restricting and filtering user uploaded content, and vigilant policing. And CAPTCHAs still help a lot, but as the sophistication of the bot tools is expan
Re: (Score:2)
Why would Silk Road want to censor Viagra offers?
Slashvertisement (Score:3)
MDMA Demand (Score:3)
It's also purportedly good for therapy too. I plan to get some for my parents on their 50th anniversary.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
http://www.amadeal.co.uk/acatalog/AMAG200%20Heavy%20Duty%20Bench%20Grinder.jpg
Re: (Score:2)
It seems that this is pretty good proof that there is a demand for reputable MDMA.
The SR vendor you're looking for is Geoffrey Giraffe.
If the dosage was known steps could be taken to provide the most fun for the least amount of harm (it sure as hell isn't harmless).
The therapeutic dose is 125mg, with an optional 62.5mg an hour or so in. Note that the additional dose doesn't typically cause any increase in intensity, it just makes it last a little longer. The first dose usually determines the intensity.
Honey Pot. (Score:3)
Of course it is a Honey Pot people .
Re: (Score:3)
It just attracts idiots. Silk Road is, purportedly, viable now because you can buy things anonymously--over Tor, with Bitcoin.
And have them shipped to a physical address.
Re: (Score:1)
yea but when it comes to trusting that mr mailman wont come with mr swat team in tow is the real issue. its hard to trust 2.0 when 1.0 was obviously fubar
soome buublle (Score:1)