Counter Economics

[wkmac]

Underground Website Lets You Buy Any Drug Imaginable

Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.
About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark’s door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. “If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t have even noticed,” Mark told us in a phone interview.
Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit “check out.” He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins — untraceable digital currency — worth around $150. Four days later, the drugs (sent from Canada) arrived at his house.
“It kind of felt like I was in the future,” Mark said.

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics — and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon — if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

 

[wkmac]

And since bitcoins have come up, just found this piece of interest. Here's a preview.

Commerce is the lifeblood of a nation. Without the free flow of trade, without financial adaptability, without intuitive markets driven by the natural currents of supply, demand, and innovation, cultures stagnate, countries whither, and one generation after the next finds itself deeper in the somber doldrums of economic disintegration. In an environment of transparency, honesty, and the absence of monopoly (government or corporate), on the rare occasions in history that these conditions are actually present in one place at one time, we often see an explosion of prosperity and true wealth creation. When local, decentralized markets are given precedence over subversive elitist leviathans like mercantilism or globalism, a wellspring of abundance bursts forward. Free people, building true free markets that serve the specific needs of individual communities and insulating the overall economy from systemic collapse; this has always been the wave of the future. Not “integration”, “harmonization”, or some fantastical nonsensical “global village” administrated by a faceless unaccountable transnational entity like the IMF, infested with sociopathic maid-raping euro-trolls.
Unfortunately, average Americans today have grown far too accustomed to having their commerce, and thus their livelihoods, micromanaged for them. Most cities and states in this country today are entirely dependent on corporate infrastructure or federal funding for ready employment and steady incomes. Most people have never even considered life without the Dollar; a highly flawed and unstable fiat currency. They exist enslaved, without any means to carry on even the most remedial exchanges in the event that the worthless paper notes finally hyperinflate into oblivion. Most Americans have never even imagined where they might obtain food or other goods if grocery chains were to shut down for more than a week; a very likely scenario considering the extent to which such businesses are indebted, not to mention the effects of destructive price increases due to inflation in commodities and freight rates. The bottom line is, if the daily fiscal life of the average American were to deviate from today’s norm even slightly, the results would be devastating. There is no flexibility in our current system. All is rigid and fragile. There is no backup plan.

 

[Babagounj]

WOW

 

[wkmac]

Looks like we'll need to add Elderberry Wine to the products list as well.

 

[moreluck]

O.T.

My grandmother used to make elderberry pie................delicious!!! And grandfather made elderberry wine.