
On the Darknet, Reputation Is Everything - rbanffy
http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/how-darknet-sellers-build-trust
======
md224
I think it's a really positive thing that people are able to leave reviews for
drug purchases. In the absence of FDA regulation, a public reputation system
incentivizes dealers to avoid harming their customers with dangerously-
adulterated products.

In the midst of an opioid crisis, with people overdosing on heroin cut with
fentanyl, having this accountability can save lives. There's a subreddit
(whose name I won't mention) that facilitates meetups between opioid sellers
and users, encouraging buyers to leave feedback once the meetup is complete.
I'm glad it exists.

~~~
ct0
Unless trying the product becomes fatal. Wouldn't this be a selection bias?

~~~
ship_it
No. Always test purity of the products before consuming.

~~~
duozerk
And if you can't test it (but you indeed really, really should - and if not
easily available to you, a lot of DNM markets also have sellers of reagent
tests), at the very least start with minute amounts - and a sitter - before
increasing it.

------
inDigiNeous
It's kinda funny to notice that in the article the writer is describing the
stereotype of a drug dealer being untrusted, yet based on my experience and
what I've seen, I would rather trust an online drug dealer than for example my
bank or the people running our government. That's kinda fucked up right there,
won't you say ?

~~~
valj
You're comparing apples with oranges. A drug dealer is a peon, someone at the
very bottom of an enormous multinational pyramid who sells a commodity product
in a market where every disgruntled customer has the ability to put them
behind bars, rather than just leave a bad review online.

This is actually the most prime example of an 'untrusted' relationship. If it
weren't for the total imbalance of power you have to bring the full force of
the government down on a drug dealer without any need for a reason, you
wouldn't do business with them at all.

If, on the other hand, you had to do business with the head of one of these
multinational drug syndicates, you would start to understand this power
dynamic more completely, as the power balance would flip. All of a sudden, the
person you are dealing with no longer fears law enforcement. They are no
longer a peon - they have bought off people in the government, acquired arms,
trained a small army of their own, and now have to power to kill you or your
associates without fear of reprisal. Would you still describe doing business
with these people as a 'trusted' transaction? Of course not. You would start
showing up to all your business dealings with your own goons, weapons, and
armored vehicles. There would be zero trust that each transaction wouldn't end
in a firefight.

Compare this to walking into your local bank branch, where with the correct
documentation a typical local branch manager can give you a loan for over $1M
without having ever done business with you before. _That_ is the definition of
a trusted transaction.

You've just become so desensitized to the marvel of it all that you might not
be aware of what the alternative looks like.

~~~
nostrademons
The local bank manager is also a peon.

If you were considering selling your company to Jamie Dimon - well, you can
probably trust that he's not going to kill you, but you _will_ show up with an
army of lawyers and investment bankers to make sure you get a fair deal.

------
chisleu
This article is total bullshit.

Reviews on SR were rarely negative because the venders didn't do "some bad
business". They did really good business, followed by really bad business and
disappeared. It was common for vendors to cash out ESPECIALLY on the 4/20
sales and various other sales. They would offer incentives to FE (finalize
early, ie release funds from the arbitrage) for months. Then, they would have
a big sale. People would FE because they had such good rep, and then the
vendors would disappear.

It was a common tactic. I'm not a DNM researcher anymore, but I'm sure it is
still a common tactic. I expect that few reliable dealers are around for more
than a year. That was certainly the case with SR, and the few that followed
quickly in their footsteps.

The new markets are based around forums instead of marketplaces because the
markets themselves were bigger targets (everyone considers the forums owned)
and the markets offered no real security for buyers or sellers. It was just a
costly place to unite the two, and often a source of theft themselves (hacks,
or corrupt admins absconding with the funds.)

Acting like it was some sort of utopia is ridiculous. I'm very much on the
liberty side of the political landscape, but we don't do anyone any favors by
sugar coating the darknet drug industry. The lack of street violence doesn't
mean that there aren't wars raging. From the sources of the heroine (mostly
from rural Afghanistan), cocaine (mostly from the jungles of South America),
and as close as Mexico thousands die at the hands of violent monsters. Go
watch some cartel videos on liveleak if you need a reminder.

We don't need to allow ourselves to be satisfied with violence as an
externality. We need to consider massive changes in drug policy and defund the
violence.

~~~
azernik
Part of why I'm so up on pot legalization - locally grown, conflict-free
drugs.

~~~
rootsudo
Conflict-free?

I never understood that. Is Sugar considered conflict-free?

~~~
azernik
The comparison being to conflict diamonds (and conflict-free diamonds) - a lot
of wars are fueled and escalated by revenues from natural resource extraction,
and a pretty simple kind of ethical consumption is to decide to not buy
diamonds from, say, the DRC. The market will adapt somewhat, especially if the
good is a commodity whose origin can be obscured in the supply chain, but
substituting a whole different good avoids that problem. Buy gems other than
diamonds, for example.

~~~
astura
>if the good is a commodity whose origin can be obscured in the supply chain

Like what happens with diamonds:
[https://www.salon.com/2013/01/07/the_myth_of_conflict_free_d...](https://www.salon.com/2013/01/07/the_myth_of_conflict_free_diamonds/)

------
TeMPOraL
> _For instance, on eBay less than 2 percent of all feedback left is negative
> or neutral. One explanation is that dissatisfied customers are substantially
> less likely to give feedback. It means the most important information, the
> negative reputation data, is not being captured._

Can negative feedback on eBay be cancelled? Because if it can be, then I'll
give you a _much more plausible_ explanation - sellers bribe customers to
revert their negative feedback. This is pretty much standard practice among
companies selling on Polish equivalent of eBay/Amazon, Allegro. The bribes are
usually heavy discounts and/or free products. Part of the reason this happens
is because for a seller, it takes only few negative reviews to lose promoted
spots in the service, which can be life-threatening for a small business.

~~~
Jemmeh
It's against the ToS, considered Feedback Extortion. Most sellers don't want
to risk their account, being totally banned is a much bigger deal than being
less promoted for a while. Messages like that are monitored, and I assume
transactions are too. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but most sellers will
just suck it up and deal with the rare negative. Further as a seller you don't
want to "just give out refunds/free stuff" every time someone throws a
negative at you because you're just inviting in all the scammers.

Also sellers cannot leave negative feedback for buyers -at all- so that also
contributes.

[https://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/feedback-
extortion.html](https://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/feedback-extortion.html)

------
scoot
For those that missed it yesterday, Nautilus is on the brink of bankruptcy
[1], yet here it is once again with an article featured on the HN frontpage.
If you appreciate the content, and are in a position to do so, please consider
subscribing.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977166)

~~~
warkdarrior
Luckily, even if Nautilus goes under, this content can be found in the
following book, [https://www.amazon.com/Who-Can-You-Trust-
Technology/dp/15417...](https://www.amazon.com/Who-Can-You-Trust-
Technology/dp/1541773675/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513711563&sr=8-1&keywords=Who+Can+You+Trust?+How+Technology+Brought+Us+Together+and+Why+It+Might+Drive+Us+Apart)
, from which this article is copied.

------
joshvm
It is somewhat amusing that the cocaine in the stock photo costs 0.13BTC at a
price of $27. I know people who have bought weed for the equivalent of
hundreds of thousands of dollars in today's bitcoin (even post crash).

The comment about eBay is interesting - that negative feedback is scarce
because people don't bother if they're unhappy. I think one aspect is that
it's more difficult to leave a negative review, and if you've ever sold on
eBay then you're probably more reluctant to neg other sellers. I'm certainly
willing to wait for a seller to sort things out rather than give them a
negative, because of the stigma not having 100% can bring you.

~~~
Xeoncross
TL;DR Seller did wrong and it cost _me_ reputation.

I left a neutral feedback one time because of a legitimate seller problem, but
otherwise things were fine. The feedback didn't affect his seller score.

The seller left negative retaliation feedback and then offered to have us both
unpublished (or something) the feedback so that it didn't affect my
reputation.

I learned you don't ever leave negative feedback on ebay.

~~~
rz2k
I wish you could have personal blacklists of sellers so they don't appear in
your own search results.

Many years ago I avoided leaving negative feedback on a seller that agreeably
accepted a return on stuff that was obviously counterfeit. A couple years
later I felt like an idiot when I received garbage again, then realized that
it was the same seller that had tried to quietly scam me before.

~~~
15155
> Many years ago I avoided leaving negative feedback on a seller that
> agreeably accepted a return on stuff that was obviously counterfeit.

I would've never sent it back. Explain this situation to your credit card
company.

If it isn't illegal by statute to send counterfeit goods, it's certainly
against policy. All financial institutions have policies against moving these
goods around if you can prove to some very low standard that the goods are
counterfeit (take a handbag to a Macy's and have the counter clerk tell you
it's counterfeit.)

~~~
stordoff
It's also against eBay policies to require the return of counterfeit items:

> If a buyer suspects that an item is counterfeit and there are strong
> indicators that the item is counterfeit, the buyer isn’t required to return
> the item to the seller. The buyer agrees to cooperate with us to ensure the
> proper disposal of the item. In such cases, we refund the buyer for the full
> cost of the item and original postage, and the seller reimburses us for the
> refund. The buyer may not sell the item on eBay or elsewhere.

[https://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/money-back-
guarantee....](https://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/money-back-
guarantee.html)

------
Posibyte
Somebody in the comments of the article brought up a good point. What happens
when the site gets shut down? As apparently is the case according to the
comment author.

I know it's a trope, a huge joke and everything, but this seems like a perfect
place to leave notes on the blockchain. It's something that can't be "cleaned"
outside of the darknet, it's permanent, and supposedly impossible to forge a
private key to manipulate one party's records. It would make it possible for
customers to look back for the records of that wallet, or some tagged
transactions to see a record of interactions to give credence to the
reputation of that user.

It's a neat idea, removing enough anonymity in a world of the anonymous to
establish trust, but not enough to establish a hard identity in order to carry
reputation across the *net.

~~~
akvadrako
There are meta sites (like Grams) that aggregate reviews from all the other
marketplaces. Sure, blockchain would be more decentralized, but in this case
what's easy is good enough.

------
ringaroundthetx
What are the latest dark net markets these days anyway and have they gone
Monero native yet?

2-of-3 multisig will at least provide software level trust of the escrow
process. The reviews on quality of goods would still be important though, but
from an enforcement side it will be exponentially more expensive to take down
one of these sites.

Prior DNM busts typically also got the warchest of everything held in escrow,
making it more worthwhile to try and nab cryptocurrency. They were also aided
by transparency blockchains to determine social graphs, which Monero makes
almost impossible.

~~~
Zak
I checked a few sites I found from the list in the sidebar of
/r/darknetmarkets. A couple of them allowed paying into their escrow service
with Monero, and for vendors to receive Monero, but it looks like they're
still fundamentally based on a multisig Bitcoin transaction.

This seems like a mistake to me; I would have expected faster Monero adoption,
especially with Bitcoin hitting performance bottlenecks.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
yeah, darknetmarkets should have dropped bitcoin completely a while ago

I'm not sure Monero's 2-of-3 multisig is actually merged into production yet,
but they have 2-of-2 so thats still a real limitation. Also Monero has and
will hit performance bottlenecks very quickly too, cryptonote coins have no
layer-2 scaling solution on the roadmap. Although they have had adaptive block
sizes from day 1, the block sizes grow very slowly compared to spikes in
traffic. The transaction fees would quickly reach unoptimal $ amounts, but the
market itself would just require larger deal flow.

------
devdad
> "One explanation is that dissatisfied customers are substantially less
> likely to give feedback"

This is given as a truth in the article but the opposite seem to be the truth
for the app stores. From a pool of around 300k app users using our apps,
organic reviews are much more likely to be negative. The explanation to this
is believed (at our company) that unhappy users want to retaliate where the
majority of users, the satisfied ones, doesn't have the energy or incentive to
leave a review. The way we develop apps nowadays always include a prompt to
rate after $conditionOnlyActiveUsersMatch is met. This skews our reviews to
the positive side, leaving us with 4.5+ ratings. If we didn't artificially
"game" the stores by asking happy users for reviews, we would be at one star
because of the organic reviews being from 0.001% angry users.

------
travis86
I've never been on the darknet. Where are all these reviews? Are there
different drug selling sites where the sites are trusted enough not to remove
negative reviews?

~~~
akvadrako
The big ones don't seem like they remove negative reviews. That would be
fairly easy to spot by the reviewer and would hurt the markets reputation,
which is worth a lot more than one dealer.

------
ikeboy
Ironic how this is being published right after nautil.us suffered a large
reputational loss after not paying their writers. I wonder whether the author
got paid for this yet or if they will get paid. Clearly, the reputational loss
wasn't enough to deter them from writing this article.

Edit: "Reproduced with permission from Hachette Book Group.". So they likely
got it for free to promote the book.

------
nofilter
Not sure if completely on topic, but I know of a few friends who every now and
then when they go to party do some Ecstacy and they told me a site like
[https://www.pillreports.net/](https://www.pillreports.net/) is invaluable to
them in that they can check the quality of the stuff before they actually buy
it, because a bad batch can actually kill you. In such a case, reviews can
actually save your life and, I guess, guarantee you a good time.

------
ninegunpi
In high risk/high volatility environments, it's either regulation or
reputation. That's why the smell of regulation is always telling: the inter-
human natural trust scheme can't cope with the risk... or someone is looking
to bend it in favor of one side.

------
hvindin
As someone who genuinely believes that providing a legitimate (or as
legitimate as possible) avenue for people to purchase drugs (I'm less sold on
arms trafficking and sale of stolen credit cards) I was surprised to find how
much a genuinely felt like I disagreed with the bulk of this articles content.

While I haven't been in the market for any drugs for a while I know enough
people who regularly frequency DNM's and I tend to check in every now and then
just because I find the whole ecosystem fascinating.

This article seems to imply that the entire dark net market thing is as simple
as ebay or airbnb, but it's actually a lot more complicated. There's a ton of
extra stuff you need to do to protect yourself not just from the vendor/buyer
but also from the market places themselves, because they are also "untrusted"
this means things like multisig transactions and the like are a must.

Additionally the view that a vendors pseudonym is important is just flat out
untrue since people realised how much money there was to be made by hacking
vendor accounts or claiming a known vendors name on a market that vendor does
not yet have a presence on. The key thing is being able to do what is
generally considered reasonably high degrees of security based validation, by
verifying an identity out of band from the market. This means using GPG keys
that you have sourced from previous interactions to communicate, double
checking with vendors over wickr or secure anonymous email services to ensure
they are the person you are dealing with on a marketplace.

Essentially once a vendor has a reputation the marketplace becomes irrelevant
entirely. If it where me, I'd rather do a direct deal using GPG encrypted
messages over wickr with a vendor I trust than buy from a vendor I don't
personally know on a market that I shouldn't trust (exit scamming must be way
to tempting).

I admit that I'm not entirely engaged with the current workings of the DNM's
at the moment, but other than being a place where new vendors can earn some
reputation, the value add isn't that high. And now that it's a mainstream
activity (relatively to buying drugs in the open before silk road) I feel like
it's only a matter of time before new vendors can earn enough reputation just
frequenting reddit boards on the topic and making sure they have good opsec.
As soon as they get one or two people happy with what they've bought, it's all
word of mouth from there. (Obviously they need to deal with security of being
on the clear Web, or just set up their own onion site)

With regards to a point that was mentioned about block chain history being
useful here, it isn't. All it does is help law enforcement, unless you mix
your coins appropriately through a trusted party in which case the history if
your transactions isn't verifiable and it's useless anyway.

What are useful are services like grams, which (at least when I last checked)
scraped reviews from market places, reddit, etc and aggregated them based on
the vendors public key.

I feel like this article was either written about 5 or so years ago, or the
information it contains simply hasn't been updated in a very very long time.

------
amelius
How do you know as a buyer/seller that you're not dealing with someone from
the NDA? Isn't it possible that accounts get seized?

~~~
hvindin
Yes, and they do. Which is why people _should_ rely on the gpg keys of vendors
as well as watching forums and other buyers to work out if things have
suddenly become suspicious.

------
hackandtrip
No one trust the reviews written on the site. They could be easily faked,
along with reputation, in most (all, in different ways) DarkNetMarkets. You
have to research on communities (on the "white" web, reddit for example) where
each sellers has feedback, and famous ones got their products verified by
indipendent company.

------
icpmacdo
Its funny seeing the HN famous Gwern in the comments of this article.

~~~
gwern
Arguably, you should phrase that as 'funny seeing the DNM famous Gwern showing
up in the HN comments of this article' :). I'm much better known for my DNM
work like my DNM archives than I am on HN, I think.

------
iamthirsty
So...just like real life drug/arms dealers? Shocking.

~~~
setheron
No.... You buy from a dealer in a club or somewhere else -- there is no
reputation. I feel like you didn't get the whole gist of the article?

Would you buy a toaster oven from someones cargo van on the side of the road
in a shady street or prefer to purchase it form Amazon?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Would you buy a toaster oven from someones cargo van on the side of the
> road in a shady street or prefer to purchase it form Amazon?_

Locals who know the owner of that cargo van will quite often prefer that
source, as evidenced at least by the very fact that the van is still there
selling toaster ovens. That's a form of reputation-based purchase, too.

~~~
nyolfen
i think the point of specifying that it's being sold from a van is that the
merchant is transient and not tied to any local reputation framework

~~~
TeMPOraL
Could be, but sadly it wasn't explicit. I interpreted it the way I did,
because plenty of semi-permanent merchants I've seen do their business from
vans, for reasons most likely involving location permits.

