

'Silk Road Reloaded' Just Launched on a Network More Secret Than Tor - digisth
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/silk-road-reloaded-i2p?utm_source=mbtwitter

======
gwern
To put this in perspective:

\- 'Silk Road Reloaded' is just one of many blackmarkets; there were something
like 50 openings in 2014 alone (see [http://www.gwern.net/Black-
market%20survival#data](http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20survival#data) &
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2r58vs/2014...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2r58vs/2014_in_dnms_by_the_numbers/)
). There is nothing new or interesting about a new blackmarket opening.

\- It's not even the first site to be called 'Silk Road Reloaded'. The name is
also a blatant effort to fool newbies and claim unearned credit.

\- Heck, it's not even the first site to be run on I2P. I believe that was
pioneered December 2013 by the late lamented The Marketplace (which also
introduced multisig escrow). A few other markets tried afterwards, but the
problem with I2P is that it's slow and doesn't seem to reliably work for users
with all sorts of configs, and they all either closed quickly or set up a Tor
hidden service. Thus far, the potential security advantage of I2P has not
justified the hassle. And it's not like blackmarkets are often busted.

\- Likewise, not a pioneer in the use of Litecoin, Dogecoin, _or_ Darkcoin.
Might be for Anoncoin, but I suspect it will find like past marketplaces that
there's just not a lot of interest in those by users. The problem for
blackmarket sellers is not 'my coin is only pseudonymous', the problem is
cashing out to fiat safely and efficiently; Bitcoin currently offers the most
scope for cashing out, and it will be a long time (if ever) for those others
to match it.

\- The admin is a raging asshole, if you check out his Reddit comments. Anyone
want to trust him with a few thousand bucks in anonymous e-cash...?

\- On top of that, he supposedly began coding the site after SR1 was busted.
How does it take over a year to set up a simple e-commerce site when almost 60
other clones were able to set up in that time? To me, that reads like it's a
hobby, at best, or that he's completely incompetent, at worse. In neither case
does one want to use his site.

~~~
smtddr
_> >\- The admin is a raging [expletive], if you check out his Reddit
comments. Anyone want to trust him with a few thousand bucks in anonymous
e-cash...?_

To add to this,
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/2rp0aw/silkroadrel...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/2rp0aw/silkroadreloaded_is_live_on_i2p/)
, Notice that all his comments are downvoted and check out what he says. Do
you agree with any of it? Here's a particularly "nice" thread:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/2rp0aw/silkroadrel...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/2rp0aw/silkroadreloaded_is_live_on_i2p/cnihlzl)

...and this..
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/2rp0aw/silkroadrel...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/2rp0aw/silkroadreloaded_is_live_on_i2p/cnign0s)

~~~
sarciszewski
> [expletive]

Is that really necessary? Profanity is part of the English language. :\

~~~
lkbm
Everything we say is part of the a language. Do you conclude that it's
appropriate to say anything on here?

~~~
sarciszewski
Yep. We're mostly adults here, right?

~~~
lkbm
And you can say any ol' thing to an adult and it's always fine, right?

You must be loads of fun to work with, live with, or otherwise interact with
in any way.

~~~
sarciszewski
> And you can say any ol' thing to an adult and it's always fine, right?

Yep.

> You must be loads of fun to work with, live with, or otherwise interact with
> in any way.

I dunno, I'm too self-centered to think about that.

------
runn1ng
This is the good place to ask

Is, in your opinion, i2p really a good alternative to tor?

What I can personally think as positives/negatives:

* Tor is trivial to install (just download the bundle)

* Tor is working on TCP-level, i2p on IP level, which allows it to be used for BitTorrent (but it's really slow for that)

* Tor is usable for "normal" web browsing, i2p not really (it has one outwards proxy that you can use but that's it)

* Nobody uses i2p so it's really slow, and I am not sure if it doesn't decreases the actual anonymity

~~~
scottpiper
An important consideration when deciding if it is a good alternative is how
good is it's security and ability to keep you anonymous? Since that's the
whole point of using it anyway.

When evaluating, it's important to look at past vulnerabilities. The following
links are to posts from Exodus Intelligence about a vuln they found in i2p in
July, 2014. \-
[http://blog.exodusintel.com/2014/07/23/silverbullets_and_fai...](http://blog.exodusintel.com/2014/07/23/silverbullets_and_fairytails/)
\- [http://blog.exodusintel.com/2014/08/25/tails-from-the-
cri2p/](http://blog.exodusintel.com/2014/08/25/tails-from-the-cri2p/)

On the one hand you could say it is more secure now because Exodus
Intelligence reviewed it, and said "I2P had many cross-site scripting
vulnerabilities" of which all were fixed. Also the way in this could be
exploited is a little unique (by using XSS to hit the internal I2P router
configuration intranet), so it's hard to fault the developers too much for
overlooking those XSS problems originally.

On the other hand, there is the view that the more vulns that are found, the
more likely it is there are more as yet undiscovered vulns.

~~~
synchronise
Disabling JS would be a good start to avoiding those issues.

------
anonbanker
There is money to be made in i2p, people. Time to start creating eepsites.

------
higherpurpose
Hopefully this ends up making i2p a stronger alternative to Tor, by having
more crypto guys taking a look at it and finding bugs or bad designs in it.

~~~
caractacus
Quite. It's been around for many years but I don't think it ever got the
crypto attention that Tor has received, mostly because it was (and is) very
little used. A few Russian sites toyed with using it when they started
blocking sites for piracy over there but it was never adopted - too slow, not
user friendlh enough.

