Home Pop Culture The Underground Website where you can buy any drug imaginable is finally...

The Underground Website where you can buy any drug imaginable is finally here.

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Red Star microdots. (Likely acid.) Price: 7.75 bitcoins ($67) for five. (All photos from Silk Road sellers.)

utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road’s users with computer forensics, they’d have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user’s tracks on the site. The site urges sellers to “creatively disguise” their shipments and vacuum seal any drugs that could be detected through smell. As for transactions, Silk Road doesn’t accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins.

Bitcoins? Sounds a tad too underground. Or just the future of commerce. What do you think. Once again the wonderful Gawker explains:

To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day. Right now you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. That’s probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience.

Yes- who wouldn’t mind paying for the convenience? But then again if you’re a seasoned user that’s going to add up and cut into all the yummy stuff. So perhaps you’d be less tempted to go through Silk Road. But let’s be realistic- the premium exists because you don’t get the nasty action being traced back to you. Which raises the ultimate question- how lockproof is all this information, and can you one morning expect to find authorities knocking on your door?

Update: Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin users.

“Attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb,” he says.

So maybe it’s better to risk getting shot at next time you need to go to the hood to get the good shit. Or just sitting there mopping why it’s taking Jake the dealer an extra hour to knock on your door? But isn’t that part of the appeal of getting high? Never knowing if the good shit will safely make it in your hands? Then again there’s another option too- JUST DON’T DO DRUGS.

Not that you care what I think…

1UP of Canada is offering 1/8 oz of "the infamous Jack Herer." He writes: "This is just classic stuff, well grown, well cured, well smoked." Price: 7.42 bitcoins ($64)
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