How is this a good rule of thumb?
A small fraction of the population are assholes who are constantly thinking "if I robbed this person right now would anything bad happen to me? On balance, would it be profitable?"If you don't want to be robbed, you've got to make sure any assholes who consider robbing you are going to decide not to because you can make bad things happen to them. One way of making bad things happen to assholes who try to rob you is calling the cops, but you won't want to do that if you'll get arrested too. There are other ways, of course. Depending on the market that may be chargebacks, marketplace reputation, the loss of future trade worth more than the profit from the robbery, tipping off the cops anonymously, pulling a gun and shooting the guy, killing their prized racehorse, whatever. It's a good rule of thumb to keep the call-the-cops option open, especially if you don't have access to alternative means of dispute resolution. Seems to me if you're a customer of bitcoin drugs marketplaces, you don't really have any options to make bad things happen to assholes. So that customers got robbed is unfortunate, but not surprising. |