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There is no doubt that nostalgia’s business has a deep supply shock. Sometimes it is intended to be deeper than that.
Maybe you spent the first few years of Bitcoin and got a kick out of revisiting the main stories and forgotten side plots. Perhaps you missed and now live on your behalf as an early adopter through our deep dives.
Today’s throwback is more of a mourning expression than a flashback.
Lip, Bitcoin’s idealism era.
This day
Just 15 years ago, Andrew “Teppy” Tepper started what would become a thread of destiny: “Heroin Store.”
Teppy writes: “As a libertarian, what I like most about the Bitcoin project is that it can be really destructive. I think the drug ban is one of the most socially harmful things the US has ever done.
It works like this. Drug dealers set up websites that accept heroin bitcoin. The buyer will place an order, send a BTC and provide a physical address for delivery. The dealer then sends the order to the buyer – and Another order of the exact same size for the random address.
In that universe, random packages of heroin arrive at addresses all over the US on a regular basis, so it simply doesn’t seem to mean that someone at the address ordered the drug in the first place. There is a plausible negativity.
Certainly, the post office can find the package and notify the police. Police can bet your mailbox to see who is collecting mail, then get a warrant to search the house to see if the package is opened.
Teppy thought: “It is important that buyers do not open packages that they suspect may contain heroin, so they want to consume them. They are at risk of possession only between when the package is opened and when the content is consumed.”
“Can anyone see how to attack the store?” he asked.
Not everyone is interested: Shadow Economy doesn’t have to Shade.
Teppy revealed that it was all hypothetical. He was do not have We are planning to start a heroin store. It was enough cover to allow many early and well-known Bitcoin users to take part in the experiment, including Laszlo Hanices, Marti Marmi, Michael Marcat, Bruce Wagner and Mike Caldwell.
Of course, there are many obvious attack vectors in this plan. Police can return the package to a specific mailbox to catch the dealer. This is a common and effective tactic for destroying real dark web drug dealers. However, Teppy asserted that if hypothetical shops were operating in a metropolitan area like New York, that would be virtually impossible.
There is also the issue of forensics. Even in 2010, authorities were able to easily intercept and analyze packages, tracking the materials used by vendors and ultimately the dealer themselves.
Such investigations could be prioritized due to the public safety risk of mailing dangerous drugs to random addresses across the country.
The thread itself is well known for its connection to the case against Ross Ulbricht. Under Bitcointalk’s alias “Altoid”, Uibrichit had the opportunity to promote his then-branded New Silk Road Marketplace.
“What a great thread! You guys have a lot of great ideas. Have you seen the Silk Road yet? It’s like an anonymous Amazon.com. They don’t think there’s heroin there, but they sell other things… Tell us what you think,” writes Altoid.
Narrator: It didn’t take that long.
Investigators eventually linked Ulbricht to Altoid in various ways. This involves Ross using his personal email address to recruit developers to help the Silk Road under a pseudonym. Ross’s post in the thread led to BitCointalk receiving his first subpoena.
It’s always difficult to know the true intentions of people on the internet, but I don’t think Teppy has realized that his hypothetical things could one day flow into actual results.
