Silk Road 2.0 Pledges To Compensate Users For Stolen Bitcoins 84
An anonymous reader writes "Online black market Silk Road 2.0 has pledged to pay back more than £1.7 million worth of bitcoins stolen from its servers during a heist last week. Speaking in a post on Reddit, Silk Road 2.0 moderator Defcon said the website would refund the more than 4,000 bitcoins stolen during the heist, and would not pay its staff until users had been reimbursed."
The brand is dead (Score:1)
At this point I think the Silk Road brand is pretty dead, especially since it's no secret that there are other similar marketplaces to be found on Tor. Not to mention that some of those are attracting a lot of former Silk Road vendors, and with the vendors come the customers.
If they make good on this. (Score:1)
If Silk Road makes good on their promises, they will have a track record of adding some guaranty to their market and that added safety will make them a better choice than the other markets.
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Yea, not paying your employees is *always* a good idea in situations like this.
Can ANYBODY else see how this might not be a good thing, nor is it a viable promise?
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He didn't say they weren't accruing money. And if it's Bitcoins, well, their appreciation is driving many legitimate businesses to accept them out of pure speculation. Want $500 now or a Bitcoin next month?
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Want $500 now or a Bitcoin next month?
$500 now, thank you
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Of course but, if you really need financial stability, I don't recommend being in on the ground floor of a startup. It is unlikely anyone involved, at this point, is putting all their eggs in one basket, and they would be crazy to do so. High risk atmospheres are not for people who need steady and dependable.
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Of course but, if you really need financial stability, I don't recommend being in on the ground floor of a startup.
Especially a completely illegal one based on experimental, buggy technology under ongoing cyberattack, selling products that ruin people's lives, are supplied by organised crime, and are actively targeted by high-level federal and international prosecutors with access to military espionage technology - and a complete dump of your predecessor's transaction databases.
There's high-risk, and then there's unethical high risk, and then there's completely stupid, unethical high risk, and then there's... whatever t
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Actually, I don't see anything the least bit unethical about selling drugs. Its the law that ruins lives and is unethical, and is the reason the drugs are supplied by organized crrime. Those international prosecutors created the problem. They put the market in the hands of organized crime, they made every situation they touched worst....and.... to top it all off, have failed to even budge the addiction rates....after trillions of dollars, millions of incarcerations, and international efforts.
And you call so
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"Internet Trolls Really Are Horrible People - Narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic, and sadistic."
Might want to get some counseling for that. Your trolling is obvious and your public display of anti-social mental traits is unbecoming.
translation: we can't even pay the staff (Score:2)
buh-bye
we know where from (Score:2)
By Buying them on MTGox
but GOK when you'll see them ... i.e. never
Stolen by the makes of SR2 IMO
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When the Mt Gox collapse(s) didn't make it to /. I thought that the flood of bitcoin stories was over, but it seems that it was only the shills who were submitting the stories and only submitting positive stories.
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And strangely enough, anyone who gets their bitcoins back will still be taking a loss on it. Since the "hack" at SR2 the price of Bitcoin dropped. So someone may have had, let's say, 1.5BTC previously valued at (I'm pulling numbers out of my butt right now, but the logic holds up nonetheless) $500/BTC, meaning you had equivalent to about $750 tied up there. Now it's roughly $300/BTC, and you get your 1.5BTC back.
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Well, according to the Visa and MasterCard contracts you sign, you, the consumer, are not liable for fraudulent or unauthorized usage of your credit card credentials. Here's Visa's statement [visa.com] and here's MasterCard's [mastercard.us]. Just for fun, here's Discover [discover.com] and American Express's [americanexpress.com], both of which promise zero liability if you act like a rational human being. And since 1998 [fdic.gov] the FDIC covers about $250,000 in losses [fdic.gov] relating to your bank account, including unauthorized use of your ATM card. So looking a
Re:Criminals with honour! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? You actually *think* SilkRoad is going to be able to not pay it's employees and stay in operation?
What if Target claimed they'd take 100% of their profits and 100% of their payroll to pay off some debt that was bigger than a year's worth of sales? Do you figure that would be a good thing too?
BTW, Target's liability for their lapses *will* be dealt with. End users will NOT be held accountable for charges they didn't authorize. One of the few protections of Credit Cards.
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Seriously? You actually *think* SilkRoad is going to be able to not pay it's employees and stay in operation?
And you actually think SilkRoad 2 is going to stay in operation?
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If they pull it off, it is a brand-building exercise like no other.
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Even thieves and con-men figure on getting paid, or they will move on to more profitable targets. Any SR employees who don't get paid, legal or not are going to leave. Now if that amounts to zero total, then the promise is worthless and the sole operator of the site will eventually get tired of working for nothing because they are WAY in the hole for a one man show.
So if they manage to build their brand though deceptions like this, so be it. "There's a sucker born every minute" as the saying goes. I'm ju
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You are making an assumption that the operators of SR2 are con men and thieves.
And Al Capone was just a misunderstood Chicago business man who was a benefactor in his community. Seriously? What Business is Silk Road in? LOL
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I think they're in it for the profit, because I highly doubt they're in it for altruistic purposes. These aren't monks sitting in a monstary, eating only food they grow themselves, running the site off donated servers and bandwidth powered by solar cells and batteries. These are people living in the industrialized world, who buy groceries and pay for electricity and hardware.
Drugs are a high-margin business. If they wanted to prove t
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I think the bulk of your argument is perfectly sound, but I think you are drawing a false dichotomy.
If they were in it purely for the money, they would walk away and never look back, like some of the other darknet markets have done. Instead they appear to be rebuilding. That doesn't really
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Because here's the trick: Bank of America has insurance [fdic.gov], and I'm willing to be that Target has some too. So they would never be put in a situation of making their employees suffer for their blunders.
In fact, people whose credit card and debit card information has been stolen likely will have a less stressful time getting their money back, because al
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I know nothing really about their operations but, little bit of thinking on it. They can't be very big, for a whole host of reasons aside from not needing to be. Their "Employees" are likely all part owners, with a stake in making it work. This would not be unusual in a company comprised of only a handful of people. It is a mistake to assume they have employees like a larger company would. They might, but, I think it is unlikely.
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Or it's one last grab to get more bitcoins before taking off with them all again.
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Don't worry. He's just not part of the audience.
In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Silk Road 2.0 employees desert after they learn they are not getting paid.
Several turn turn over information to law enforcement...
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How is that even relevant? From what I understand The Silk Road (and 2.0, and Utopia, and other like sites) was more like eBay, with various vendors hawking their wares, than the dispensaries anywhere in the US. And even if it wasn't, it's not l
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Yeah. Probably.
The government doesn't even have to actually bust that many people. It simply has to create a FUD field and the problem eventually takes care of itself.
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Doesn't even have to be. The government runs most of the large TOR nodes and is doing traffic analysis. It's been known for years that someone with deep pockets was running large TOR nodes. It was an open secret that it was the feds, now it's just a known fact.
Anybody repeatedly, regularly using TOR is the NSA's bitch.
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Nnnooooooo.... banks are typically insured for FDIC, which all deposits up to $250,000 [fdic.gov]. In the case of a credit union, NCUA also covers up to $250,000 [mycreditunion.gov]. That keeps your money safe if someone steals your debit card information, robs the bank, or if the bank collapses. It's insurance: the insurer pays out. The bank doesn't have to do a thing.
Now if you're putting more than $
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Yeah, but why would they? It's not the mechanics' fault, or the fight attendants' fault. It's not the fault of the people throwing bags into the bellies of the plane. It's not the fault of the people processing the tickets, or the engineers maintaining the website. Why would they feel like they have to suffer because of someone else's mistakes? They have to eat, they have to pay their own debts, they have to coverall their own e
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Many of the people who work in airlines do it for the money principally, just as in nearly every other industry. So you are correct, in this case. However, that is not necessarily the case for every company or group of people. SR2 is not an airline company, and its participants already undergo an extremely high level of risk. So their priorities are not going to be same as your average airline worker.
Silk road has staff? (Score:2)
What does a site on the dark web that lists contraband and exchanges bitcoins (two very automatic things) do with employees in the first place? Oh that's right, get them arrested! Enjoy your complementary paycheck furlough and visit from the FBI.
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Let's try some substitution:
If you have 1 brand new, shiny bitcoin and it's worth $370 now, but after a month of speculation, it's only wo
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Let's say you had money invested in a foreign currency.
Your broker goes down just as the value of the currency is crashing, leaving you unable to liquidate your position. You wouldn't have a civil case against the broker?
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Unless your broker was an illegal drug trading organisation, then you'll need to identify the people responsible before you sue.
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Keep pumping in the money, dum-dums. (Score:2)
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.... unless its a ponzi scheme, then the first ones to get in make a profit. Everyone else after you gets scammed.
petty cash (Score:2)
Why does the site hold Bitcoins in the first place (Score:1)
Please forgive my ignorance, as I've never had a need to buy contraband online, but why does Silk Road hold users' Bitcoins? My understanding was that the point of Bitcoin was ostensibly to enable users to send and receive money without going through a payment processing entity. I'd assume Silk Road is acting like some sort of escrow, where a buyer has to confirm that the seller made good on their end before releasing funds, but in an "anonymous" marketplace you're just as likely to be screwed by scams on
Please tell me I'm dreaming! (Score:2)