Silk Road forums
Support => Feature requests => Topic started by: alvin on June 12, 2012, 02:37 pm
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Hey guys, in the past month or so i've had several letters not arrive from the netherlands (in australia) - sure enough in the news i discovered quite a substantial seize of drugs in the mail. Now im not suggesting that this has brought upon a far greater increase in scrutiny of letters coming out of that country over here (although this too may be possibly), but rather LE is ordering letters for the purposes of identifying the region from which the letter arrives or certain identifiers that can be flagged.
My thought is if sellers are willing to provide an alternative method to conceal their letters only to buyers who have registered prior to the last substantial spike in membership, possibly even send from a different location (i know some sellers do offer this, but to try get more sellers offer this - exclusively to veterans.
I believe this is in the best interests of everyone:
Sellers win because if this concept is implemented, they can prevent their locations from being flagged, or their concealing methods under the radar. Additionally, if LE are buying letters, i have no doubt they would be leaving false feedback in an attempt to discredit the seller (and thus diminish the amount of orders overall) - a separate feature that shows the length the account has been registered next to poor feedback will allow legitimate buyers determine if the seller is good.
Obviously veteran users will stand more to gain than everyone else, but they have full right to in my opinion. I have a certain respect for people who have been doing this longer than i have because they have contributed in expanding this anarchy. The gain for other users is that there is a chance for a seller to know when his sending techniques have been discovered, adding additional security to the chance of your letters arriving.
Peace
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The idea is well intended, but would likely be a nightmare to implement. What is the proposed cutoff for "veteran" buyers to be seperated from "new" buyers? For most established sellers, packaging isn't a problem, and even if 1% of packages get seized--it's not enough to build a "profile" of what packages from this specific seller look like, and then even if they did build a profile, to apply that profile *everywhere* in the world is simply not cost effective. (If a seller is poor at packaging, then thats a different story, but we wouldn't be buying from a seller like that, would we?) From what I understand, shipping to AUS is notoriously difficult, and packages coming from NL always go through additional scrutiny at customs.
As it is, every seller has access to how long buyers have been on SR and how much they have spent on SR. The sellers ratings are weighted, so that a new buyers feedback doesn't weigh as much as an established buyers feedback against the sellers rating. Same with total spent--a buyer who's spent thousands through SR will have a higher weighted feedback than a user who spent a hundred. So it seems almost pointless to make this idea of veteran vs. new a concrete feature of Silk Road, when it's such a variable, subjective idea to begin with.
I'll just say--"member since... and total spent..." is good enough. From a seller packaging perspective, if a seller is losing packages in the mail, then it's time to re-think their shipping strategy. I've purchased from dozens of vendors who each ship dozens of packages a day and lose basically none of them ever. So I have no doubt that safe, secure shipping is possible, despite what some scamm--er--buyers would have you believe.