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by scott_karana 4602 days ago
> Do you ever buy anything at grocery store, drug store, restaurant that you put in your body?

Not really a fair comparison. If a grocery store assaults or defrauds you, you have legal recourse.

There is nothing you can do if an illicit transaction fails.

The rest of what you say is true, of course.
2 comments
gwern 4602 days ago
You can leave bad feedback, and take it to the dispute center to force the seller to defend themselves to the SR admins.

This is more recourse than you have in practice against a grocery store if they refuse to give you a refund - what are you going to do, sue them?

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nerfhammer 4602 days ago
If a grocery store harms you in an illegal way you they can be punished by the force of the state in a variety of ways. The same is not true of a anonymous person on an inbound tor site.
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tedks 4602 days ago
If someone sold bad shit on the silk road, they'd lose all of their rep and stop making money.

On the original silk road, it cost a very large amount to get a vendor account. So if you decided to start selling bad shit, you'd have to play nice for a while to break even, a while longer to build trust, and then go out in a blaze of bad shit.

I don't really see why anyone would do that. If you have good enough connections to get a good rep on the Silk Road (or similar site), you have good enough connections to never need to sell bad shit. As Stringer Bell would say, it's all about the product. If you have better product than your competition, you'll win in the end.

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gwern 4602 days ago
> If a grocery store harms you in an illegal way you they can be punished by the force of the state in a variety of ways.

Hypothetically. If you have enough money. And enough evidence. Good luck with that. I'd rather take my chances in SR's dispute resolution center...

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nerfhammer 4601 days ago
You act like the health department is some kind of ivory tower
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njharman 4601 days ago
Not the grocery store, the guy at some factory somewhere that peas into the soup that eventually makes it way to your shelf.

Point is there is a huge web of people everybody trusts to not be evil. They are trusted for no good reason (other than as stated most people aren't sociopaths). But some are. Protecting against them isn't worth the tiny risk of exposure.

Likewise fretting over being "defrauded" by anonymous (but reputed) persons whom you buy illicit goods from is not worth worrying about. Same with ebay, kickstarter etc.

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