Bitcoins and onion browsing...

[borgs8472]

So surfing wikipedia recently, I was driven to reading about the bitcoin p2p money transfer system, as well as how it's used with the silk road for purchasing drugs on it's .onion site

I did a bit of .onion surfing using the the tor browser bundle to see what is there. Answer? A lot of very unreliable connectivity stuff in the areas of illegal porn, anarchy, drugs, (black hat) hacking based off very light weight websites running message boards and simple interactive sites. Also a fair few take down notices from law enforcement organisations.

So my first impressions of this area of the deep net? They can keep it, I don't want it.

It's a testimate IMO to the mainstream use of file sharing that it exists primarily on the public internet, with the exception of the scene of course.

I mean I remember browsing warez sites in the early 2000's, scams, link farms, fake content were the norm and they were simply unusable. Then the rise of the P2P networks started to turn this around into the fairly mature peer rated torrent site systems we have today.

Why is this relevant to pirates? Well if there ever is a successful crack down on sites indexing pirate content, many will be pushed 'underground' in this fashion, with much other undesirable content.

So what I'm saying I suppose is with P2P sites fairly mainstream and user friendly these days, can we play the consumer protection card in ensuring they continue to operate in the fashion they do?

[DanFoxDavies]

Sounds good to me. Careful wording required, mind.

[borgs8472]

Ha, Anonymouse pwned Freedom hosting who I encountered on my travels
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/24 ... e_network/

[MeesterWolf]

YouTube taught me enough about Bitcoins that I know not to step anywhere near Bitcoin mining, let alone the payments.

I think the fad had its day when it was rumoured (no idea if it was actually true) that the Bitcoin creator actually owned over 25% of all Bitcoins in circulation.