Yes, the effect would be negligible, though I think the greater good was to make the first move. This was like Napster, which will now inevitably lead to the BitTorrent analogue. Here is an article that somewhat agrees with this perspective:

http://www.zdnet.com/silk-road-and-the-potential-to-disrupt-a-truly-evil-industry-7000021498/

I don't think there is a need to reconcile, as they are not polar opposites. First is a reference to your proposal, that DPR's action was a proof that the utopia failed, and second is a challenge.

If you want, I can propose this errata: Assuming you have come up with a heuristic, you can, depending on your values, evaluate whether there has been an improvement. In this case, we have the allegation of conspiracy to murder as one factor. If you can undertake the second challenge and argue that what Silk Road was doing is bad (according to your values, or mutual ones if we can agree on them), then I'd be happy to withdraw my second statement.

He didn't become a target by hiring someone for murder. As far as I can tell, they were already targeting him, caught one of his associates (an admin), blackmailed him pretending to be the admin, and suggested murdering the admin as a seller identity they created, who supposedly knew the admin.

They were trying to make sure that they would be able to lock him up when they catch him, and he fell for it.

You can never attain utopia. In all stages, you are only working towards it. I don't think anyone thought they created a utopia by creating/helping Silk Road, but they thought they were taking a giant step. (I coincidentally agree, but that's a bit off-topic here.)

Anyway, since you are never in utopia, you can only test whether there has been any improvement. You can't test whether the conditions fit a utopia, and if not, declare that those who have created the movement are dangerous, because the conditions will never fit (aside from the fact that the claim is preposterous). This approach will always lead you to despise people who attempt at creating a better society, especially because there will be fluctuations, mishaps and morally gray situations on the way to any sort of change.

The gist of the matter is, we can't quantify the difference between status quo, and "what if". We can't even measure the amount of good SR has caused. There are only two outcomes: Either the ones attempting the change succeed and create a perspective where all else past and future is bad, or the status quo survives and paints the revolutionaries as nasty idiots.

That's the nastiest sort of generalization.

Come on guy. Knowledge is not bestowed upon you by a holy power, just because you attended to some classes and had the privilege of shaking hands with famous "scientists". Anyone who wants to know about scientific process already knows about scientific process.

Furthermore, while scientists (or at least those who are labelled so) may be trained to adhere to the scientific method, with your logic, they can't know what it really is, since the nature and meaning of scientific method is not the subject of science.

True, but trading on exchanges is not anonymous anyway, since NSA and other agencies already have access to all the personal data of customers' fiat money transfers. Not only that, but we should assume that they have access to all delivery information on all businesses, and all e-mail communication, etc.

I'm rather interested in creating enough disconnects to make profiling ordinary citizens practically impossible. Sure, they may be able to track transactions to determine with 35% probability that you bought a pair of shoes with the bitcoins you've bought from exchange X and automatically associate it with your Skype conversation about shoe sizes. But if you don't let information leak between your identities, it won't be possible for them to associate your ID number with the VPN account you purchased with the money that was donated to your anti-government blog. That's why I think a user-friendly but identity-aware system can help.

Speaking about honeypots, similar to what you said, it is possible to run underground businesses yourself and collect information about clients. At that point, it's obviously the responsibility of the user to reason about the risks. If I'm a dissident, I may not want to donate to whistle blowers the money that can be traced back to me through the banking system, but I may be OK with redirecting the money I got from a face to face anonymous transaction, or an anonymous investment.

We are talking about monetary transactions here, but such an OS can help with privacy and privacy awareness in general.

Bitcoin, by itself, allows freedom of transaction, but not necessarily privacy. It is attainable, but not in a fool-proof way.

We need to get used to separating our different trading identities, just like we do for communicating identities. We also need to get used to obfuscating our location, either constantly, or again by exiting from different IP's for different identities.

All this is easily attainable with a few scripts on modern operating systems, Bitcoin, TOR and maybe some VPN accounts. What we don't have is systems that do this out of the box, so that we have different GPG keys, Bitcoin wallets, IP's, e-mail accounts, etc. for our different identities as a basic operating principle. I would love to see such a system implemented; it should be fairly straightforward to do as a Linux distro.

Which in turn makes it a reasonable explanation...

An intentionally flawed random generator is one thing; detecting and reverse engineering kernel code on the fly is another. What makes you think this sort of CPU doesn't actually run the whole system in this mode and report every suspicious activity steganographically through the system's network devices?

This is why he is calling people ignorant.

If you want to debate this, address the responses he's made. Why do you think the random pool doesn't automatically destroy any potential back-doors?

We are not talking about nuclear weapons here. Manufacturing chemical weapons from scratch isn't hard. This move is more or less symbolic.

In all likelihood, the allies saw that this would turn into a huge disaster and decided to step back. Asking Syria to hand over the weapons and making them comply will make them look successful and mature, Russia's involvement as the "facilitator" puts it in a very advantageous position, while Assad establishes the right to continue doing what he was doing. All players are happy, rest is clueless.

This is exactly the intended result of terrorist acts, and you are falling for it. In a sense, if people didn't think the way you think, terrorism wouldn't even exist.

Bitcoin is perfectly pseudonymous and traceable. Which means, if you don't mix transactions between your different identities, you can preserve your anonymity.

Say, you made some coins by selling your coding skills (or naked pictures) online, without revealing any personal information (IP and personal e-mail addresses included). Then you went and spent those coins to pay someone to build your anonymous identity a website. This is perfectly doable.

However, if you then go and order some pizza to your home address with the rest of those coins, it is possible in theory for an entity with reach to associate your code (or naked pictures) to your home address.

It also works the other way. If you buy some coins with a bank transfer, it's possible that they can associate your expenditures with your ID. There is plausible deniability of course, but that won't prevent them from breaking into and searching your house when you are away. If you are perfectly sure that the people you are transacting with are not agents, you are likely safe.

Luckily, since there is very limited friction, it's fairly easy to figure out how to cover your tracks. Required learning is similar to what you have to do for WWW or e-mail (which everyone needs to know at this point anyway). If you are familiar with the innards of historical digital currencies, you already know.

10 years ago, I would have agreed with you. But looking back, I feel that you are being a bit naive.

If you were a detective wanting to solve a crime, the first question you'd ask would be "Who benefited?".

I agree that terror has been used plenty of times recently, that the elected governments never had a hand in it, and that there are organized groups around the world who have been hurt by the U.S. and want to take revenge at all cost. However, whenever I try to look from the perspective where "they got extremely lucky once", the picture begins to turn into a caricature of reality, like a badly written Hollywood movie.

We will never know why things happened how they happened, but trying to make sense of it the way we are supposed to doesn't work anymore. How long would Saddam's nuclear weapons remain a plausible threat if the citizen had no way of knowing about the evidence?

You already summarized the scheme. It's a general scheme that's been going on throughout the world.

What I am pondering about is how to react to these facts as a free person. Should we focus on our responsibilities to our community and use "democratic methods" to voice our concerns, maybe initiate protests and establish political groups? Should we focus on our responsibilities to our own family, move to the safest place we can find on Earth and then worry about when it will finally hit us? Should we adapt and do our best to educate our kids on how words change meaning over time?