Issues in this two page market state of affairs should be published by subjects that catch attention. It is unclear to the writer if these issues are or have been discussed on reddit or forums.
Market behaviour, exchange of information and possible improvements.
When through luck, bad stealth or scamming packaging go missing, what exactly is the modus operandi of the darknetmarkets. Do vendors become 'all powerful' if they become larger, some vendors have profiles that indicate that they do.
An example of market undermining terms and conditions. Feedback and vendor's policies.
Conditions including...
- order AT YOUR OWN RISK, so no negative/neutral feedback if it not arrives.
- Buyers outside EU will get no refund/reship
- Buyers outside EU are not allowed to dispute the order.
- You agree to leave a POSITIVE FEEDBACK after I'm done with your order.
And having 'penalties' for violating these out of market rules...
- doing otherwise (negative feedback) will close any further demand on your part
- will also get you blacklisted from my service
- I won't recommend you to other vendors if they ask about you and
- i will report this to ADMIN!
"...We are both equally taking a risk here, so if you're not eligible for compensation (according to my policy), you still agree to leave positive feedback. Remember that when you decide to place your order you agree to this policy; as a reminder, never order more than you're willing to lose..."
This interpretation of feedback basically precludes it of being an indicator of packages successfully received to serviced countries, which be it through scamming, luck or bad work(stealth), although the additional demands are not enforcable per se or are more in the area of threats like reporting you to the Administrator (who is involved in a dispute anyways). But also in the nature of smearing 'won't recommend' customers on inquiry and 'blacklist' from the service. A customer with which you had a dispute that needed arbitration, i.e. a decision from the market to resolve, will rarely be a viable business contact in the future, so blacklisting is an idle threat. A strong indication for strong talk is the fact that blacklisting is effectively a repetition of the earlier 'close any further demand', which means the same - i.e. not being in business anymore.
The clear answer should be is that the market provides a proactive role in regulating behavior of both vendor and consumer by protecting the complete freedom of feedback - possibly anonymizing feedback completely so the vendor has difficulty finding out the consumer that is extra vulnerable in this situation because the vendor has the location of the consumer. This combined with the size of the vendor, the market should arbitrate such profiles and not be afraid to scare vendors away. The largest markets have this responsibility, but i have no high hopes of them becoming more involved and also transparent about their exact regulation of the market and the protection of the consumer, as well as the vendor.
The vendor states that the 'order risk' lies solely with the customer, but than the market does not need to act as an escrow agent. In this case this concerns a market that only allows escrow, hansa. The escrow and feedback system are proof of the fact that the vendor cannot put the order risk completely with the customer. The customer is generally prepared to leave good feedback and any market does rely on trust, so it would be good practice for vendors to let feedback be an actual indication of delivery success rate, although flawed because it can be padded (feedback created by orders done to themselves thus looking larger) and it can be false (by competing vendors wanting to smear competitors by ordering and leaving bad feedback).
Basically the vendor is trying to use its prominence to shut down the effectiveness of the feedback system by basically, making a lot of noise. Although it seems to work in this case, on 800 orders a shipping profile of worldwide shipping (except USA) should have a market calculable nr of packages intercepted, taking that stealth does not have that much impact if standard requirements are met.
The unsaid market stealth requirements (open to suggestions - seperate post).
Minimum stealth is : printed labels with proper formatting usage of vacuum seals and/or mylar seals
Alternatives of improving the effectiveness of the feedback system is to 'monitor' feedback, provide a questionairre to the customer or awarding incentives for people who leave balanced feedback, perhaps by 'recruiting' recurring buyers that have cross vendor market experience to make comparisons.
Now markets want to communicate that they are solid and safe areas, but really in the case you actually need the market for if something happens they still deliver the same reliability or less than the original Silk Road.
For instance, the case of Delivery Success Rate. In the top performing countries, the national mail service has a delivery failure rate of say around 98%. These orders not delivered must result in minimally16 neutral feedback on an amount of 800 total orders. Vendors do not show this.
Then there are dark numbers, the number of successful intercepts of letters or mail packages stratified by 'source to destination'. For example sending from the Netherlands to the USA (NL->USA) results in 10% of the packages being intercepted. It is unknown what destinations are serviced by the vendor reliably and forum and reddit posts are although possibly unreliable, the only indicators. These statistics should be made available by the market by encrypted, anonymized processing of market data so that it can inform vendors and customers about risk and come to a more reasonable assessment of exact expectation. Forums are a good indicator of real life consequences of getting caught as a customer, and the news about what happens to vendors. But its hard to make good assessments of more generalized information like danger of having something shipped from a certain country.
What is vital data is the statistics that define which quantity (packages or consumer retail amounts (up to 4 to 10 personal doses depending on the substance), and if larger packages are disproportionatelly removed. The role of the markets in this case would be to process and make this data available to its members, customers and vendors. Currently there has not been such a proposal of a call to markets to deliver market statistics, of a semi and under regulated industry.
Darknetmarkets also suffer from the unwillingness to discuss stealth practices, as if Law Enforcement not certainly knows every type of stealth in the book and does share this among countries in closed network information exchanges. The going reasoning is that revealing stealth is dangerous as your packages are of more danger being intercepted, which is probably not true and the fact that stealth is a vendor's corporate secret that gives competitive advantage. Also not true, because competing vendors can simply order some products or get information through trusted customers. But if there would be an open exchange of discussion of stealth techniques, it would give the consumers more insight into the risks and their ability to weigh the risks is considerably improved.
An open call on documenting and sharing stealth packaging methods is on the stealth wiki. Onion: The content of the wiki will be backed up daily to mirrors.
Vendors should not reveal their personal stealth methods for obvious reasons, but anonymously can improve the methods of darknet vendors as a whole, to improve the situation for everybody.
Regulation through dessimination and exchange of information is achieved through the minimization of risk and improvement of the ability to assess outcomes by all parties. It's a fallacy to belief the counter arguments, keeping information from LE, it is clear from all indications and reports that LE has a very thorough and complete understanding of all statistics that are available to them, that is also packages intercepted versus orders placed as they surely spider the markets and use the aggregate data to see their effectiveness.
Now its time we see the effectiveness. I don't expect markets to implement these features, as they benefit generally of the status quo, succesful markets have even less incentive as they are probably dealing with a heavy workload (for which they cannot easily hire staff). These principles need to be applied though in the next generation of the next form of (less) decentralized markets, and are a part of their design.
Vendors should not be allowed to dictate or imply threats when it comes to feedback. Feedback is not a word that should be mentioned on a vendor's profile page. It is probably an adjustment from the behavioural freedoms some people in the business exhibit as they are real criminals not synthetic criminals.
(The notion of synthetic criminals is that the dissemination, production of drugs is a victimless crime, in that it involves willing parties and is made 'criminal' artificially and arbitrarily (alcohol is legal) by the state. Real criminals could be considered people who are at the base not interested in mutual interest or have very little capacity to anticipate it (ie are stupid.)
The darknet should ultimately be no place for real criminals or bullies. The silk road separated its weapons trade after a debate in the community. Weapons are to harm people, and it was a moral issue of moral actors, equally moral as the leaders of state and prominent members of the non-dark world, by example, and a living testament to the veracity of the cause. That drugs should be legalized, or distributed in a controlled manner to every adult that wishes to use them. The debate and the problem with weapons trade by a community that according to the pro-drugwar lobbyists arguably is responsible for killing people and destroying lives of people using the drugs should appear as a travesty for proponents of current drug policies but the discussion was not a travesty at all. And investigation and research in the market shows that darkmarkets reduce violence and increase awareness, health situations. (give samples of papers) And for people who still think drugs should be illegal, the cost in relation to the simple given fact - in our modern society (and not so modern ones) everyone that wants to will use drugs, must sway every rational actor. It's just a matter of time. The fact that there is a realistic existing nuance on the darkweb is in the case of child pornography, which can exist, but is universally rejected and fought.
Am i talking bullshit, please tell me, and i am asking for a reasonable debate not the trolling that can plague our communities. The principle should be that we should know about ourselves as much as LE knows.
Let us exchange thoughts and information and do this thing!
Yours,
scarlet
LE : Law Enforcement. Stealth: the measure of how the package can pass not being identified as a illicit shipment. Packaging. Feedback: A score left by consumers (and vendors) about how satisfied they were about the transaction, taking into account previous reasonable expectations and ideally being honest.
That meth tho