Drugs on the Silk Road

Scott Adams puts this disclaimer at the top of some of his blogs:
“This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another.”
Consider the same to be applicable to this blog before you read on…

The Internet currency, Bitcoins, that I wrote about a couple of months back, was the currency of choice on The Silk Road: a black market web site for “illegal narcotics, fake documents, hackers-for-hire and other illicit goods”.

So how did it work? Like eBay! Users logged in, searched a catalog, checked out the ratings by previous buyers, paid in Bitcoins and the stuff would get mailed to their address while the money was held in an escrow account.  The FBI recently shut down the site and arrested its mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht.

Which should be a good thing, right? Except you should check out Conor Friedersdorf’s question as to whether such an Internet based black market may be the lesser evil compared to its physical world counterpart, at least in case of drugs. Like take this point:
“The purchase could be made without ever …going to see him in some potentially dangerous location, or inviting him over.”
Isn’t it better worse for drug users to not risk physical injury while buying?

Or how about the chance to evaluate a dealer for product quality, an eternal risk with drugs on the street:
“User reviews meant the product was a known quantity.”

Consider the full implication of this statement in the FBI complaint sheet:
“Based on the postal markings on the packages in which the drugs arrived, these purchases appear to have been filled by vendors located in over ten different countries...”
If you didn’t get it (I certainly didn’t), let Friedersdorf elaborate. Think of the list of people in the equivalent physical world supply chain:
“Armed truck drivers, bribed customs agents, desperate drug mules, thuggish regional distributors, and street level drug dealers who used guns to defend their territory”
Did the site reduce the number of people involved in illegal activities?!

Note that Friedersdorf is only asking these questions in the drugs context. He does not advocate this view for any and all illegal goods and services that were traded on The Silk Road. If people will take drugs anyway (and they will), was this a better system (for everyone involved, including bystanders who might get killed in related gang wars) than the physical world system?

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