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Algent01/22/20253 repliesview on HN

Wasn't silk road selling way more than just drugs ? Like, pornography and gun, worldwide. When you facilitate both sex trafficking, organized crime and potentially terrorism you can't exactly be surprised you get hit with everything.


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busymom001/22/2025

> Carnegie Mellon University's researchers did an analysis of Silk Road gathering data on a daily basis for eight months before it was shut down. Some of their findings include:

> “‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8)

> “The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12)

> In Table 1, we take a closer look at the top 20 categories per number of item offered. “Weed” (i.e., mari- juana) is the most popular item on Silk Road, followed by “Drugs,” which encompass any sort of narcotics or prescription medicine the seller did not want further classified. Prescription drugs, and “Benzos,” colloquial term for benzodiazepines, which include prescription medicines like Valium and other drugs used for insom- nia and anxiety treatment, are also highly popular. The four most popular categories are all linked to drugs; nine of the top ten, and sixteen out of the top twenty are drug-related. In other words, Silk Road is mostly a drug store, even though it also caters some other products. Finally, among narcotics, even though such a classification is somewhat arbitrary, Silk Road appears to have more inventory in “soft drugs” (e.g., weed, cannabis, hash, seeds) than “hard drugs” (e.g., opiates); this presumably simply reflects market demand.

> Silk Road places relatively few restrictions on the types of goods sellers can offer. From the Silk Road sellers’ guide [5], “Do not list anything who’s (sic) purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen items or info, stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of any kind. Do not list anything related to pedophilia.”

> Conspicuously absent from the list of prohibited items are prescription drugs and narcotics, as well as adult pornography and fake identification documents (e.g., counterfeit driver’s licenses). Weapons and am- munition used to be allowed until March 4, 2012, when they were transferred to a sister site called The Armory [1], which operated with an infrastructure similar to that of Silk Road. Interestingly, the Armory closed in August 2012 reportedly due to a lack of business [6].

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU...

diggan01/22/2025

Huge leap from "selling pornography" to "facilitate sex trafficking"... Where you get the sex trafficking part from?

eckmLJE01/22/2025

No, silk road did not sell weapons. There was legal content like pornography and other media on there, but Ulbricht was an idealist and excluded material with "intent to harm".

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