And it seems that I am not the only one who sees something there, as according to media reports DPR himself was extorted over the question of revealing the street addresses of users.
You're probably right that the average Joe doesn't have to worry. But for specific individuals like DPR, they should know that being involved in facilitating a large number of illegal transactions, there is much more likelihood that they specifically will be targeted by law enforcement. I would expect then that they would do more to guard access to their address.
(Even if most people are OK, that doesn't mean it's not still a weakness. In the days before SSH became common, I used to log in over telnet all the time and never once to my knowledge got compromised. I suspect many had the same experience. Does that mean I was safe? Of course not.)
I agree, it does sound absurd. And yet...
> And it seems that I am not the only one who sees something there, as according to media reports DPR himself was extorted over the question of revealing the street addresses of users.
DPR was worried (assuming, as usual, that the indictments are reasonably accurate here and their lies, omissions, and insinuations affect only other things) about the reputation of SR as a whole: SR as a viable business was being held hostage. This is not something relevant to an individual buyer being blackmailed one on one, which was the scenario you were asking about.
> But for specific individuals like DPR, they should know that being involved in facilitating a large number of illegal transactions, there is much more likelihood that they specifically will be targeted by law enforcement. I would expect then that they would do more to guard access to their address.
Yep. The ID stuff was remarkably careless. We don't know that it was fatal - I personally suspect the Australia wire transfer may have revealed everything - but it obviously could have been.
And it may seem risky, but that doesn't matter: we have the numbers. We have the statistics. The FBI has kindly told us exact numbers based on the SR database they seized. You can calculate the risk pretty easily. Take the number of sellers and/or transactions, get an estimate of number of buyers busted (for example, count instances in http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road#safe ), divide. This is like worrying that flying on an airliner might be really risky since the plane could fall out of the sky or be hijacked - certainly, but the worry is wrong, and you can go to faa.gov and look up the exact numbers and see for yourself how risky flying on an airplane is.