without worrying about being attacked by gun-toting men in uniforms and thrown in a cage or worry about being ripped off by their trading partner.
I am proud to say we have been successful in achieving these goals up to this point. The site remains up and functioning (despite a few screw-ups on our part, like not having a full capacity backup server ready to go when a live server went down, and a poorly executed url switch, just to name a few). And, over 99% of all transactions conducted within the escrow system are completed to the satisfaction of both buyer and seller, or a mutually agreed upon resolution is found.
This success has in no way made us complacent, however.
New members are still being lured into trading outside of escrow by scammers and getting ripped off, and ‘finalizing early’, effectively cutting out the escrow process, is common practice. Still, I believe we can mitigate these risks and take our market to the next level in security, reliability, performance, and convenience for everyone involved.
First we must deal with trading out of escrow. Up to this point we have charged a flat 6.23% commission on all trades. This is much too high for transactions in the $300 and over range, making trading out of escrow for large transactions much more attractive than staying within the system. Now, instead of charging a flat commission, we will charge a higher amount for low priced items and a lower amount for high priced items, similar to how eBay does it.
We’ve worked hard to come up with a commission schedule that should work for everyone and will give scammers no excuse to make people send money outside of escrow.
. . .
With this change, there are no phoney excuses whatsoever for vendors to ask for out of escrow [OOE] payment. Any request should be interpreted as a scam attempt and reported to the Silk Road support team via the ‘contact us’ link on the main site. We are looking at several mechanisms for enforcing the ban on OOE transactions, from self-policing to bounties on offenders.
Together, we can beat the scammers and make the Silk Road market a place where you can buy with confidence and peace of mind. If we stay true to our principles of integrity, virtue, mutual respect and camaraderie that have guided us to this point, I believe our future is bright and this revolutionary experiment will be a success!
– Silk Road announcement, 9 January 2012
Enter Dread Pirate Roberts
T here were black markets before Silk Road, and virtually identical online drug bazaars have popped up since. Yet none has achieved the notoriety or success of ‘the Road’, and this can almost certainly be attributed to the loquacious, enigmatic founder of the business.
If bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto was intriguing, Silk Road’s founder blew him out of the water as the quintessential pseudo nymous outlaw. He was prone to penning rousing epistles about life, liberty and his favourite philosophy, agorism. At first, he was simply known online by the name of his business, ‘silkroad’ – this was the username of the Bitcointalk forum member who announced he had started an anonymous online marketplace to sell drugs. As the site and its forums grew in popularity, the site’s owner continued to call himself silkroad.
But as his legend grew, silkroad realised he needed an identity separate from that of the site. Or perhaps the site had become an enterprise run by a company of people and it needed a public face for the forum, which by this time was quite separate from the marketplace. In any event, rather than simply announcing a change of name, the founder made it into a game.
Who is Silk Road? Some call me SR, SR admin or just Silk Road. But isn’t that confusing? I am Silk Road, the market, the person, the enterprise, everything. But Silk Road has matured and I need an identity separate from the site and the enterprise of which I am now only a part. I need a name. Actually, I already have a name picked out. It is
I am proud to say we have been successful in achieving these goals up to this point. The site remains up and functioning (despite a few screw-ups on our part, like not having a full capacity backup server ready to go when a live server went down, and a poorly executed url switch, just to name a few). And, over 99% of all transactions conducted within the escrow system are completed to the satisfaction of both buyer and seller, or a mutually agreed upon resolution is found.
This success has in no way made us complacent, however.
New members are still being lured into trading outside of escrow by scammers and getting ripped off, and ‘finalizing early’, effectively cutting out the escrow process, is common practice. Still, I believe we can mitigate these risks and take our market to the next level in security, reliability, performance, and convenience for everyone involved.
First we must deal with trading out of escrow. Up to this point we have charged a flat 6.23% commission on all trades. This is much too high for transactions in the $300 and over range, making trading out of escrow for large transactions much more attractive than staying within the system. Now, instead of charging a flat commission, we will charge a higher amount for low priced items and a lower amount for high priced items, similar to how eBay does it.
We’ve worked hard to come up with a commission schedule that should work for everyone and will give scammers no excuse to make people send money outside of escrow.
. . .
With this change, there are no phoney excuses whatsoever for vendors to ask for out of escrow [OOE] payment. Any request should be interpreted as a scam attempt and reported to the Silk Road support team via the ‘contact us’ link on the main site. We are looking at several mechanisms for enforcing the ban on OOE transactions, from self-policing to bounties on offenders.
Together, we can beat the scammers and make the Silk Road market a place where you can buy with confidence and peace of mind. If we stay true to our principles of integrity, virtue, mutual respect and camaraderie that have guided us to this point, I believe our future is bright and this revolutionary experiment will be a success!
– Silk Road announcement, 9 January 2012
Enter Dread Pirate Roberts
T here were black markets before Silk Road, and virtually identical online drug bazaars have popped up since. Yet none has achieved the notoriety or success of ‘the Road’, and this can almost certainly be attributed to the loquacious, enigmatic founder of the business.
If bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto was intriguing, Silk Road’s founder blew him out of the water as the quintessential pseudo nymous outlaw. He was prone to penning rousing epistles about life, liberty and his favourite philosophy, agorism. At first, he was simply known online by the name of his business, ‘silkroad’ – this was the username of the Bitcointalk forum member who announced he had started an anonymous online marketplace to sell drugs. As the site and its forums grew in popularity, the site’s owner continued to call himself silkroad.
But as his legend grew, silkroad realised he needed an identity separate from that of the site. Or perhaps the site had become an enterprise run by a company of people and it needed a public face for the forum, which by this time was quite separate from the marketplace. In any event, rather than simply announcing a change of name, the founder made it into a game.
Who is Silk Road? Some call me SR, SR admin or just Silk Road. But isn’t that confusing? I am Silk Road, the market, the person, the enterprise, everything. But Silk Road has matured and I need an identity separate from the site and the enterprise of which I am now only a part. I need a name. Actually, I already have a name picked out. It is
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