A friend of our hackerspace had something interesting to say about criminals (he's a former narcotics cop).

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?