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DarkMarket, the Decentralized Answer To Silk Road, Is About More Than Just Drugs 251

Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket', a new system being touted as a Silk Road the FBI could never seize. Although running in a similar fashion on the face of things — some users buy drugs, other sell them — DarkMarket works in a fundamentally different way to Silk Road or any other online marketplace. Instead of being hosted off a server like a normal website, it runs in a decentralized manner: Users download a piece of software onto their device, which allows them to access the DarkMarket site. The really clever part is how the system incorporates data with the blockchain, the part of Bitcoin that everybody can see. Rather than just carrying the currency from buyer to seller, data such as user names are added to the blockchain by including it in very small transactions, meaning that its impossible to impersonate someone else because their pseudonymous identity is preserved in the ledger. Andy Greenberg has a good explanation of how it works over at Wired. The prototype includes nearly everything needed for a working marketplace: private communications between buyers and sellers, Bitcoin transfers to make purchases, and an escrow system that protects the cash until it is confirmed that the buyer has received their product. Theoretically, being a decentralized and thus autonomous network, it would still run without any assistance from site administrators, and would certainly make seizing a central server, as was the case with the original Silk Road, impossible."

Comment Challenge accepted (Score 1) 245

Digial, analog, trinary, HIKE! You won't safe them without MIKE!

In other words children it's all the humans who're messing up your security chain.

You need better, faster, stronger, smarter people who have a driving need to make your security better from the floor sweep to the ablative meat.

Without it you're just asking for an ass raping.

Comment Authenticate commentors with some physical media. (Score 1) 293

Like a letter and a phone call. They send you a self addressed stamped envelope. You send one half of the code via mail and call them with the other half.
Accounts deactivate at a regular interval and need a reactivation code gets mailed. I'm sure someone can game this but it slows them down.

Comment Those who can't do the job will rule the job. (Score 1) 312

Pournelle's Iron Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy

I'm fairly sure that is a facet of that law. You have a less than stellar engineer who goes into management to cover his sins with real engineers flesh. They do tend to keep an organization alive. It would be helpful if there were a clandestine organization that assasinated upper level beurocrats in both government and quazi government entities but that's never going to happen.

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