“Max interviews Cody Wilson about living in a trifecta of disruptive technologies as a citizen of the future in which bitcoin means a thousand silk roads and fanfare for the common man.”
“We used the deep web to find out just how easy it was to buy guns, drugs, and other contraband online.”
“Regulators in the US and possibly other countries are waiting for such a database to exist so that they can require all companies in their jurisdiction to only accept payments from customers whose identities can be fully tracked. Matt Mellon, Alex Waters, and Yifu Guo are apparently willing to build it for them. Now you know who to thank for selling out your financial privacy. Note how badly it damages the value of a Bitcoin balance. Do you currently care about the complete history of every physical currency note you carry in your wallet? What if stores would suddenly reject your cash because two years ago someone you never even met used in the commission of a crime?”
http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/11/is-it-time-to-boycott-all-us-bitcoin.html
“For those wary of Bitcoin’s pedigree, it may comfort them to know that it emerged directly from a culture of programmers who champion open-source software (also known as free software) like Sir Tim-Berners Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. The ‘shadowy hacker’ label that is sometimes ascribed to Satoshi Nakamoto is fair in some ways because that’s the way he intended it. Satoshi thus embodies all the things that the original Cypherpunks were trying so hard to impress upon us: our fundamental right to privacy. It is Bitcoin’s capacity to protect some aspects of our privacy from GCHQ and the NSA that makes it valuable – to a degree. But it’s more than that.”
http://www.cybersalon.org/cypherpunk/
“An illegal online market selling hard drugs and fake passports has reopened just six weeks after being shut down by the FBI, it can be revealed today. Silk Road 2.0 – which can only be accessed through a modified internet browser – sells items such as cocaine, ecstasy, fake utility bills and driving licences using the encrypted digital currency ‘bitcoins’. The original website, Silk Road, was closed on October 2 by the FBI, who charged Ross Ublricht, 29 with running the site – which he has denied. The charges against Ulbricht said the original Silk Road – launched in February 2011 – generated sales of more than 9.5million bitcoins – equivalent to $3.3billion or £2.1billion at today’s rates.”
“Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed talks about the project and the implications of 3D printing and cryptography on politics and the nation-state.”
“Curtis Green, the administrator of Silk Road, the online black market for drugs and other contraband, pleaded guilty to a cocaine conspiracy charge, according to federal prosecutors in Maryland. Green, 47, of Utah, helped an undercover agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration arrange the purchase of one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine for about $27,000 in the digital currency Bitcoin from a drug vendor on Silk Road, prosecutors said in papers unsealed yesterday in federal court in Baltimore. ‘People who believe they can commit crimes anonymously using the Internet should reconsider,’ Rod Rosenstein, U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, said in a statement.”
“Like the old Silk Road, which until its closure served as the Web’s most popular bazaar for anonymous narcotics sales, the new site uses the anonymity tool Tor and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to protect the identity of its users. As of Wednesday morning, it already sported close to 500 drug listings, ranging from marijuana to ecstasy to cocaine. It’s even being administered by a new manager using the handle the Dread Pirate Roberts, the same pseudonym adopted by the previous owner and manager of the Silk Road, allegedly the 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht arrested by the FBI in San Francisco on October 2nd.”
“Aaron Koenig Networks With IamSatoshi.”
“The inventor of the 3D-printed gun, Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed, is now raising money for a new crypto-anarchist venture that will help people anywhere in the world keep their wealth and finances private. The project is called Dark Wallet, an anonymous easy-to-use Bitcoin wallet. The wallet will be a discreet browser plugin for Chrome or Firefox that will make the public Bitcoin log less traceable. While names may never be a used in a Bitcoin transaction, certain metadata is traceable through an open source log which could lead to identifying the user. Dark Wallet would eliminate the reliability of the public metadata.”
http://www.activistpost.com/2013/10/cody-wilson-bitcoin-dark-wallet-defense.html