Free Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby Page B

little packages of white powder inside, which they sensibly handed over to police. Addressees apparently received a frightening visit from law enforcement officers, but there were no reported arrests made.

    Vendors had their own secret section of the forums. To access the Vendors’ Roundtable, a seller had to have proven sales credentials over a certain amount of time and for a certain amount of money. In that forum, sellers could report suspicious buyers to each other and discuss suggestions for improvements or to otherwise make life easier for vendors. They would let each other know when they had ‘bad LEO vibes’, meaning they believed certain members were law enforcement officers nosing around, and warn each other about buyers who threatened to blackmail them with bad feedback. Just as some sellers would scam buyers by not sending out their drugs, some buyers would attempt to scam sellers by claiming their drugs never arrived and demanding a resend or refund. Certain usernames would be blacklisted and those buyers might never know why sellers wouldn’t do business with them.
    Buyers had an incentive not to scam sellers because some of the best sellers had the luxury of refusing to do business with anyone who did not have ‘good stats’. When a buyer placed an order, vendors could see how much the buyer had spent in the past, how much they had had refunded and what percentage of their sales had been auto-finalised (i.e. where the buyer had not bothered to finalise the transaction and release the funds, it would auto-finalise after a long delay if the buyer had not disputed the sale). Auto-finalisation meant vendors could not access funds for at least thirty days.
    Even if a seller agreed to deal with a buyer with no or bad stats, they might insist that they finalise early. Good buyer statistics put the member in a position of power. In fact, many buyers would finalise even when they did not receive their package if it was for a small amount so they would not ruin their buyer stats. Vendors who were also buyers would have different accounts for buying and selling, but occasionally would mess up by ordering from their vendor account. This, of course, meant somebody – the other seller – would have that vendor’s address. But the general consensus was that an environment where dealers and users never had to meet face-to-face was beneficial to all.
    Online drug marketplaces might claim to provide a safer environment for buyers and sellers, but they do not eradicate problems associated with the drug trade. In particular, the drugs have to come from somewhere. Despite Silk Road cutting out the middlemen involved in drug dealing and eliminating the violence that is always a potential in face-to-face transactions, millions of people are still harmed by the illicit drug trade. The purchase of the drugs contributes to the slaughter of thousands of people at the source, particularly in Central and South America, as drug barons fight to be the sole suppliers of the world’s trade. Among other tragedies, the well-intentioned measures of the Afghanistan government, supported by NATO, to eradicate poppy fields led to farmers selling their children into sex slavery to ‘compensate’ traffickers or repay loans.
    But such atrocities were something Silk Road users preferred not to think about. In early 2012, thousands of transactions were taking place over Silk Road every day. Much of the money within the site was simply recirculated as members bought bulk amounts from cheaper suppliers, then broke it up into smaller amounts to resell to local buyers at a marked-up price. These small-time sellers simply wanted to make enough money to cover their own drug purchases. Top vendors, however, were turning over tens – even hundreds – of thousands of dollars in bitcoin a month.
    Unfortunately, bitcoin was worthless unless it could be converted into real money. Just as anonymity was lost for purchasers once they had to supply a