I know most people here, including me, believe that LE will leave small time buyers alone. But I've always thought that the DEA might pull a big one-time operation that arrests a lot of buyers, then release a big press release about it, like Operations Web Tryp and Log Jam. Playing Devil's Advocate from the DEA's point of view, look at it this way: a lot of users of the DNM are "respectable" professionals with kids and good jobs, people that would never venture in to the badlands of Baltimore or Newark to try heroin. A big wave of arrests of buyers would have a lot of people think twice about using the DNM's, and greatly cut down on traffic.
Now, my question is, how would they do that? Do you think they'd arrest a few vendors, seize their customer lists, and pay visits to a hundred or so people on the lists who've ordered a few times? Or could this never happen, due to plausible deniability?
Thoughts?
Plausible deniability would kill the chances of arrests based solely from customer lists. As it is repeated around here all the time, anyone can order drugs to anyone else's house under their name. There has to be some other evidence to accompany the list, such as a CD or possibly a trail connecting your money to the BTC used to make the purchase. Fortunately, both of these other forms of evidence have lots of escape routes.
CD: Should almost always be obvious. Look at the package and if it's not anything else that you have bought legally, like shit from Amazon or whatnot, you should know it's from the DarkNet vendor and you shouldn't sign for it. No signature, no arrest.
Money trail: This one is even harder. LE would have to follow the blockchain to the source of the BTC purchases, which becomes extremely complicated when you add in the tumbling systems, anonymous ways of buying BTC, etc. Not easy at all and I don't believe there has been a precedent for this being used yet.