FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests owner

Wait, wasn't 1 bitcoin worth around 100 USD 2 months ago? And now its pushing $1,000+...I really fucked up not buying some.
 
Heh, I stopped mining them when the difficulty became ridiculous mid october, I thought my mere 0,72 btc were not gonna be useful. I can't use them to buy much out there, not that i'd want to, but if I can get registered on mtgox I'll cash in my almost 700 dollars, when I stopped mining they were at 127 just getting better from the silk road plunge where they dropped to 90.
 
I can't believe at one point I had 20 bitcoins I bought at $8 each... I thought that was pricey at the time too. There is no way that $1000+ can be sustainable though. I think bitcoins are simply in the news so much that a bunch of people have jumped on the bandwagon. Once they realize that there isn't much use for them, cause currency speculation with bitcoins is ridiculous, the price will tank.
 
Fuck though, If you spent 1000$ in october on them you could sell them for 10k now. That's just insane. Where's a time machine when you need one right?

And would DPR's estimated $80 million of bitcoins now be worth $800 million?
 
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liftedgift said:
Fuck though, If you spent 1000$ in october on them you could sell them for 10k now. That's just insane. Where's a time machine when you need one right?

And would DPR's estimated $80 million of bitcoins now be worth $800 million?
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Old numbers bro, now it's 12k and $1 billion =D

DPR will likely die in prison a trillionaire/quadrillionaire. It'll actually pose a real security issue later down the line. How many guards do you think wouldn't be willing to help him escape for a few billion dollars in bitcoins in return?

Also sheepmarketplace looks like a scam, apparently they are not letting people withdraw funds.
 
bennyZA said:
I can't believe at one point I had 20 bitcoins I bought at $8 each... I thought that was pricey at the time too. There is no way that $1000+ can be sustainable though. I think bitcoins are simply in the news so much that a bunch of people have jumped on the bandwagon. Once they realize that there isn't much use for them, cause currency speculation with bitcoins is ridiculous, the price will tank.
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of course, like any speculative bubble, bitcoin is just waiting to pop

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the dunning-kruger effect perfectly illustrated
 
Dumbest thing I have read all day, though it is still early here. The reason the price has risen the way it has is the same reason it crashed in May or whenever it was it went from $300 to $80 and bounced back to $120ish. That reason is that it is a market without regulation completely open to manipulation via collusion between major stakeholders. Absolutely nothing to do with the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" a more apt example of this effect is the idea that when you survey a large sample of motor vehicle drivers a vast majority will rate themselves at at least better than average, statistically impossible. Bitcoin is being traded by experienced currency traders who understand Mathematics far better than most, and are using that knowledge in a highly lucrative environment where they are free from regulation. The next time it does crash it will be because less than a dozen guys decided to cash out, lower exchange rates and jump back in, probably all within 24-48 hours.
 
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Cheers man, but it isn't really about luck. As long as you keep your auto buys and sells set at reasonable levels, an eye on the global economic situation and don't get hacked (air gapping is always a good idea) it is pretty hard to go wrong. Picking up 100 btc @ 4.50 USD each always helps too (lol). If you can manage to recover more than your initial "investment" early on (often considered a win) then it is pretty much money for old rope from then on out. I'm sure none of that in news to a financial guru such as yourself though. On that note I was wondering if you saw any connection between the US Senate Committee announcing btc was okay by them, the subsequent rise in value and the announcement by China that “It’s no longer in China’s favour to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves”. It is probably nothing, you should almost certainly go back to giving ill-informed ad hoc opinions on the internet.
 
like i said, good luck with that shit

i on the other hand will invest according to the advice of my financial advisor like an adult
 
Oh shit man, sorry, didn't realise you had abdicated your financial responsibility to a third party who doesn't give a fuck about you. I suppose that is what made your country fucked so yeah lets see how that works out for you. You like camping? And yeah nice, one pulling the whole age card, don't think that really gets you anywhere till you are like AARP age, but seeing how disconnected from current events, and crotchety, you are maybe you are nearly there.
 
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I thought the reason the bitcoin price is so high is because people can't easily cash out on Mt. Gox. People with balances have no choice but to buy bitcoins, driving up the demand.

In order to sell these bitcoins for actual cash, people have to rely on individual purchasers, if what I've read is true.

It might cost $1000 for a bitcoin, but who knows what someone could actually sell one for.
 
We'll see how this turns out, but the very fact that something like this existed for so long shows that it's capable of happening, and it will absolutely, without a doubt, happen again. So let the feds pat themselves on the back for now, we'll get more than our fill of laughs in a year or two when people are right back at it and the guy they tried so hard to bring down doesn't mean a damn thing anymore. If this required that many resources and was hard for them to manage, which it sure sounds like it was, this is purely a symbolic victory. We all know they aren't going to be able to keep doing this when replacements pop up, they simply don't have the time or resources.

The only question in my mind is how far they'll be willing to go to try to stop it, and how far people will be willing to let them go. Obviously law enforcement would be happy if they owned people's lives and people didn't have any rights whatsoever, so I'm sure in their minds the answer is to completely eliminate internet anonymity. Hell, I know for a fact that they'd be more than happy to see the internet go away entirely; think of what a pain in the ass freedom of information is. Think of how much easier it would be to spread misinformation and to get away with anything they pleased if people couldn't communicate through the internet, if places like BL didn't exist so that drug users, for example, didn't understand their rights, or if normal people didn't have such an easy way to tell the world about LEO misconduct. I know a lot of bad people who thrive on pulling the wool over people's eyes would be overjoyed to see the internet destroyed.
That's what I think this could turn into; law enforcement will get frustrated that keeping the internet clean isn't as easy as raiding a street corner and will somehow seek to compromise internet anonymity, which will obviously not be cool with most people who understand how bad that would be, which will turn into a big ol' messy civil rights issue.

Maybe not, idk, but what I do know is that it won't take long for another silk road type service to pop up, and I know that the feds are never going to take something like that lying down. Basically no matter what I think this will be interesting, but as I said, all we can do is wait and see how everything turns out.
 
@pazuzu the "price" that is so often quoted is the average of buys/sells over a period of time according to Mt. Got. This is proof in and of itself that by are not hard to sell, unless of course Mt. Got is down for whatever reason, but then there are always other exchanges or people wanting to buy back outside of exchanges. The importance of Mt. Gox is one of the main weaknesses of the system though, Gox is down and the system losses robustness, or even worse info from Gox is hacked/people with access give up info, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

@bennyZA obviously you can lose money, buy high sell low, but then most people try to avoid this. Unless of course you have so rate info which may trigger automatic events which you can turn to your advantage. The basic problem with an unregulated, decentralised market that in reality does rely on a central entity to set "prices".
 
Looks like the price dropped to around 660$ yesterday...it's back up to 740$. Shit is just funny to see raise and fall a couple of dollars every second.

Do you think vendors on sites such as silk road exchange their BTC almost every day? Seems like it would be so risky to stockpile them. Although it would have been smart the last 2 months.
 
Man I remember when 1btc was around 6 bucks USD. Crazy how high its at now.

Lets just hope that its status as a virtual currency isn't nullified by (for example) some UN sanctioned international treaty sooner or later.
 
Mendo_K said:
According to the complaint, Silk Road was a massive business, doing in total $1.2 billion in sales and leading to $80 million in commissions. Ulbricht has been hit with conspiracy charges related to possession with intent to distribute drugs, hacking and money laundering.

These are the official papers with the full list of his charges, I read in there something along the lines of soliciting murder of another user? :S Anyway its a long list..
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....Yep, it says that DPR solicited another SR user to murder another SR member who was threatening to release the identities of hundreds(or thousands) of SR members... Considering the seriousness and legitimacy of the site itself, I would be taking something like that VERY serious, considering the types of people who probably are involved with SR, ranging through the whole spectrum from your normal junkie, to drug kingpin... I would imagine it would be fairly easy to contract a hit on someone else using SR... And that would most definitely stick out as something meriting a formal charge from the authorities..
 
S.J.B. said:
That's probably the scariest thing I have ever heard.
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... And least likely to be true. That shit doesn't ever happen. Not only does it never happen, it's illegal (at least in the US) This story is either made up or you got lied to by ur former dealer cuz his business went under. Under cover operations involving street dealers usually last an average of 3 months. That's the time required for the police to investigate, accumulate information and evidence, and obtain a search warrant and issue secret indictments on the offending traffickers. Any type of long term shit you've seen in movies or heard or read about, happens when they are trying to bust someone who is at the top rung on the ladder. And that is only because it takes many busts and raids and flipped underlings in order to get the info required to make an arrest on someone that high up. So unless your friend was Pablo Escobar the 3rd, there's no way any narcotics agency would allow an agent/officer of theirs to marry someone in order to bust them. That would be considered too large of a risk to take. Relationships between undercover buyers with their prospective targets are superficial at best...
 
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