What percentage of criminals are dumb enough to get noticed and/or caught? Well, we don't know how many don't get noticed, so let's call it zero. Bam, 100% get noticed/caught!
Drug cartels as currently realized have some serious downsides. Like physical safety. Or to put it another way, in exchange for crazy wealth, you've eroded the base of your Maslow pyramid and polluted virtually all of your interpersonal relationships.
SR sidestepped most of the physical jeopardy, but didn't manage to sidestep the legal jeopardy and the overhead of paranoia this entails.
If someone really smart goes about building the next SR, then it may involve a clever way to sidestep the legal jeopardy as well.
As for the ATM magstripe stealer, a guy here ripped it off a machine and 2 thugs KOd him and took it back. They are usually watching next time you should just walk away from the ATM and see if there's 2 guys sitting in a car watching you.
There has been cases of hackers building empires, Max Vision was one of them. He met his crew in prison. Where I live there is also a software engineer police say went to prison as a white collar criminal and came out a memeber of a crew and is actively gangstering up the streets, and breaks into competitors phones to spy on them. He fled the country after a second arrest for engineering a pretty impressive fraud scheme where they managed to somehow switch the POS terminals at the local airport with their own and for a few years, stole countless cards. Passengers have to pay a 'departure fee' and since all the victims were heading out of the country it was a good scam and went unnoticed. He also survived a shooting at a nightclub where 3 rivals tried to kill him because of spying and being a "manager" for whatever criminal operation he was in charge of. So there is so-called nerds out there who went fully to the dark side. His first mugshot he is Mr. White Collar, second mugshot he is juiced/roided out with classic gangster Christian Audigier shirt and covered in crew tattoos.
The second thing to keep in mind is that the drug trade is inherently tied to the physical manufacturing and trading of product. DPR built something which he could almost completely trade his physical risk, but none of the actual vendors were able to do so. Everyone of them, barring some tiny personal labs, were involved in the exact same physical drug trade on a procurement basis that every other drug merchent is involved in.
Breaking Bad?
I remember finding a card skimmer once. It was attached to an ATM at my local bank (at the branch!). I yanked it off of the machine (I've made a habit of pulling on the reader before I stick my card in; you should too.), and tried calling the bank.
No answer. It was a Sunday, they were closed.
I couldn't really just leave it there...I kindof wanted to keep it and take it apart, but I'm sure that would be a crime.
So I called the local cops.
In the ~30 minutes it took them to get to the bank, I spent some time examining the device.
Whoever built this thing was...an idiot. This was the dumbest possible way I could think of for storing CC information. It just read the tracks and dumped them into a flash drive. The criminal stealing cards had to physically /come back/ to the ATM to retrieve them.
No GSM modem, no bluetooth, no wifi...nothing. No way of getting data out of the thing without placing yourself back at the scene of the crime.
Honestly, I was a little bit offended. If you're going to steal my ATM card, at least be GOOD at it! C'mon, criminals! You can do better than this, can't you?
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I struck up a conversation with my law enforcement friend about this. Why are criminals so terrible at being criminals? I mean...I hear about drug runners getting busted and put in jail it seems like every day. Have seriously none of them heard of ardupilot? Have they not put the pieces together on this one?
It's because they're lazy.
Most criminals have spent their lives taking short cuts. These are the people that didn't want to put the time into saving up to buy a cellphone, they just stole one. Or the people that didn't want to put the time into saving for a new car, or going to a job every day, or whatever. They just took every shortcut they could.
So the reason that they suck so badly at stealing my ATM card number is that doing it badly is easier. It's the shortcut, and shortcuts are what criminals are all about.
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Well what does this have to do with silk road?
I'm not really sure what to make of the people behind SR [in whatever form it takes in the future]. Ross Ulbricht got caught because he made some really stupid mistakes.
But he's...definitely not an idiot. And if you read about his history, it doesn't sound like he's lazy.
I think that the drug war has created itself a really dangerous problem. The nerds have mostly stayed out of crime because it's not worth it to us. Yeah, sure, we could build drones to fly drugs across the border, but we don't, because we don't want to go to jail.
But I think that the drug war has created such a large incentive for people to get into crime, that some of them aren't going to be able to resist it.
DRP made absurd amounts of money. Drug Cartel levels of money.
And he was a nerd sitting in an apartment in Austin, then SF. SR was an interesting experiment in libertarianism to him, not a drug empire.
What happens when the nerd who realizes the absurd amount of money that they can make approaches it like a drug empire? Or rather, what happens when an engineer starts trying to engineer themselves an anonymous drug empire? Not a political experiment, but a true-blue drug cartel?
That's what the next [or maybe the next after that] SR is going to look like.
Remember napster? Remember suprnova? What happened when those things, which seemed to start more as side projects to their founders, were snuffed out?