How to buy high quality low price cocaine with a five star review
There is only one viable and safe way; by using the darknet (also commonly referred to as the DeepWeb). This blog will not describe how to actual do this but it will describe some really interesting developments happening. The reason my attention was drawn was a really interesting TED Talk by Jamie Barlett a journalist and tech blogger for The Telegraph:
In this talk Barlett mentions a couple of really interesting innovations that were needed to build a safe marketplace to conduct illegal activities. These innovations were made to make sure that the goods that were bought were genuinely, that the purchase was made anonymously and that the buyer and seller would both hold up on their sales agreement.
To start the marketplaces on the darknet look very similar to a normal web shop, there is a search button, the price in bitcoin (to pay anonymously), a high quality picture and a button to report items if there is something missing or wrong with the product. You have a basket and the whole process is almost identical to a web shop like bol.com.
The second interesting part is that goods almost always arrive in time and are of agreed upon quality. The sellers’ uses aliases that give their (illegal) goods certainty, these names can be found as user reviews on these marketplaces or on forums on the darknet. And because the customer is well informed and the market is transparent the market follows basic economic rules; prices go down and quality of product and service go up. Drug dealers have to become customer oriented and reply in polite ways to make sure their ‘’brand’’ keeps their value.
Because these sites are continually tracked and shut down by governments they need to keep innovating to make sure that their users keep being anonymous and that they are harder to shut down. An interesting example is the way that you pay, not by conventional ways of payments with banks and credit cards which can be directly tracked back to you, but with bitcoins. Bitcoin is an encrypted currency that is easily exchanged for real world currency. But in the beginning the sellers would keep their goods and the bitcoins, the community had to find a solution. This solution was called multi signature payments, in which a third party holds the money till the buyer received the goods and gives their digital signature to confirm the receiving the goods.
But there was also a flaw within the bitcoin system, the whole system keeps a register to make sure that a bitcoins are valid. The community saw that these could also be tracked and designed a tumbling service, users put their bitcoin on a central account on which then all bitcoins are tumbled and send back and forth a couple of times, after which the register has so many transactions it will be impossible to track, a micro digital money laundering service.
This trend gives me mixed feelings, on the one hand criminality becomes more transparent, drugs will improve on quality which means less people will die from bad quality. But on the other hand drugs will become increasingly easy to procure. If this has grabbed your attention I highly recommend to watch the following documentary which explains the darknet and how the first major bust of someone operating on the network happened:
Please let me know your opinion about the dark web.
-Siebe Kylstra
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
http://www.coindesk.com/bitgo-safe-aims-secure-bitcoin-wallets-multi-signature-transactions/
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