“Silk Road was founded on libertarian principles and continues to be operated on them. It is a great idea and a great practical system…It is not a utopia. It is regulated by market forces, not a central power (even I am subject to market forces by my competition. No one is forced to be here). The same principles that have allowed Silk Road to flourish can and do work anywhere human beings come together. The only difference is that the State is unable to get its thieving murderous mitts on it.”

On a site like Silk Road, where, as shown above, most of the goods sold are illicit, one would expect a certain amount of deception to occur. Indeed, a buyer choosing, for instance, to purchase heroin from an anonymous seller would have very little recourse if the goods promised are not delivered. Surprisingly, though, most transactions on Silk Road seem to generate excellent feedback from buyers...from 187,825 feedback instances we collected. 97.8% of feedback posted was positive. In contrast, only 1.4% of feedback was negative. - Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon

[caption id="attachment_1313" align="alignright" width="300"]The usual suspects- sex, drugs, and violence- leave little room in the media for the economics of Silk Road.[/caption] Although the Silk Road administrator Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) made little effort to disguise his site's usefulness for global drug markets (including, according to the complaint filed against him in New York, orchestrating drug deals himself), the mainstream media and analysts from virtually all spaces of intellectual thought have overlooked one key aspect of the Silk Road “experiment” in favor of this dark storyline of drug trafficking and headhunting. Dread Pirate Roberts has himself often referred to Silk Road as an “experiment.” This means, basically, that Silk Road had at its core one question: “What happens when you bring together anonymous buyers-and-sellers in an online environment?” The answer to this pondering is that, with the proper escrow system and buyer-generated ratings in place, this anonymous environment can work smoothly. In fact, even better than eBay. Much emphasis was put on drugs when it came to the Silk Road. With so much focus put on this aspect of SR, the main point was missed: what DPR had created was a free-market. Virtually every good which was transacted on the website was an illegal good, if only because of supposed tax avoidance native to each individual transaction on SR. People touted SR as an “anonymous” marketplace, and Dread Pirate Roberts used a libertarian's rhetoric in interviews.Was Silk Road really the free market Dread Pirate Roberts touted it as? A free market is not controlled by a designated nor centralized authority. A free market is the opposite of a regulated market, in which the most brazen of governments control prices of goods and services. The brand of market Silk Road brought the table was neither anarchist nor Communist. Instead, it operated on minarchist principles. That these minarchist principles were severely tainted by outside forces, beyond Silk Road's under-web borders, there can be no doubt. For instance, the need for secrecy in the first place. In a society in which non-initiation of force was a prevalent value, the need for secrecy would not be as emphasized in an overt free market, according to much of the theory from such schools of thought. This outside force, of the threat of force, which went a long way towards attitudinizing SR, made SR shadier than it would have been if it were truly a free-market. But, all the objects and beings in the world, it is important to remember, are like emeralds in a field, reflecting the environment around them. SR took on the broader aspects of the culture in which it was bore. While SR had above average customer satisfaction, dispute mediation was needed, and DPR kept a small staff for this. Silk Road had a rating system, and research found that the site's sellers had great customer satisfaction.In this case, the “small government” of SR administration was rarely needed. To be certain, it's head, DPR, did have the makings of a traditional benign dictator. As has been plenty reported, that so much of the site had to be kept anonymous led DPR to think he had to have blood on his hands. Were his customers identities not so sacred, then this would have never come into question. DPR wouldn't have had to develop the psychological disposition of a Walter White, driven to the extremes of human behavior by the gray market. Essentially, DPR, became a slave to the institution of the drug underworld, and he was influenced by the industry's shadiest aspects. SR arose out of a demand for increased privacy in the face of ubiquitous regulation. It is an extreme posited opposite another extreme, bore out of the latter, a lack of privacy in the modern world. SR was a symptom of a non-free market, not a free market in-and-of itself. While SR might not have been a truly free market, it is an example itself that anonymity does not de facto lead to mass deviant behavior from the cultures' traditional value-system and morals; that is, theft and fraud. Instead, with key trustless checks-and-balances (involving no human decision-making), individuals can work together without knowing one another's identity with few problems.

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