After recently hearing about AlphaBay and Hanna I was interested to see the discussion taking place on reddit. The posts and theories I saw can only be described as mass hysteria and panic so here are a few facts and ideas that may put you at ease.
As it's now been more than a week, hopefully many of you are begining to realise if you ordered personal amounts, or amounts for you and a few friends, that even if you didn't use encryption or used auto encryption (which in itself is astounding considering the number of markets that have been seized) YOU'LL BE FINE and here's why:
When Silk Road was taken down encryption was the exception, not the norm. The police recieved thousands of addresses in plain text and how many buyers were arrested? Effectively none! How many Vendors? Very few... Most buyers simply jumped to the next market, the only difference being that encryption became the norm.
So why were no buyers arrested when people get charged with possession for the tiniest amounts all the time? If you are charged with possession it means they've found evidence of drugs on you. As far as evidence goes thats rock solid, and the cost to prosecute is basically limited to the amount of time it takes to write up a police report and for the judge to sentence you. For this reason they'll prosecute every gram of weed or pill of MDMA. But what about having your name and address associated with an order?
This is way WAY harder. If you denied any knowledge of the package and had a clean house (which is probably overkill, but for not encrypting some punishment should be in order, and a full house clean seems appropriate) they still need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you ordered those drugs. Even if you were the laziest person on the planet in terms of ospec so long as they cannot prove you had physical access to the account used to make that purchase even an obvious lie like "I got bitcoins for a friend, I don't know why drugs were sent to me" could be enough to push you just under the threshold of reasonable doubt.
This brings me to my second and more important point. If they were planning on mass arrests why would they announce it first? As I just mentioned, this is a difficult thing to prove. By far the best way of doing this would be to get a couple of cops to rock up to every address (SWAT teams for those ordering commercial quantities) without warning to ask questions and poke around. Better yet, rock up and say they're here specifically because your name and address have been identified as being associated with criminal activities, and watch as people freak out and give themselves away. They couldn't handicap themselves anymore than by announcing they're coming.
And ironically if they did go down the path of mass arrests this could backfire on them in a really bad way. If they arrested every contributing citizen, many of whom without a prior criminal record and charged them all it's likely that someone would eventually ask "if all these people are contributing members of society who live normal lives and their only crime was ordering personal amounts of drugs, is this really a crime? Why are we labelling them as criminals? If so many people are using drugs without severe consequence are they really as bad as you say?". These are not questions they want in the minds of the public.
So why not shut down the market immediately? Because the longer they remain in control of the market the more time there is for vendors and buyers of large/commerical quantities to make mistakes and give themselves away. These are the people they are after and this is the most effective way to go after them.
Finally, why would they make public statements about the operation, in particular about how they have buyers addresses if they're not going to do anything? To create mass hysteria, why? Because every person they scare into not using the darknet markets is one less person contributing to the darknet market economy; if they scare enough people away it will simply fall apart, and this is by far the easiest way to eliminate them. But based on many comments in many of the threads about the seizures didn't this work like a charm?
Yes, that's exactly correct. There's no money in going after small time buyers.
In fact, the main thing is this: Why does LE wage a drug war at all? It's because they get to
seizesteal all the money that they find. None but the most delusional law enforcement officers do what they do to get the drugs--they do it to get the money. That's why they will never prioritize buyers--because even if they felt confident that they had pc, there would be little money toseizesteal from a small time buyer. No money=no incentive.In addition, this is why they don't even really care that much about vendors in this scene. Sure, they'll bust a few, but who has even more money then vendors? The centralized markets themselves. That's why there is considerably less heat on all but the largest vendors than there is on markets. Why bust a vendor to get a few hundred k's when they could get the market and make tens of millions? It's all about the money, man. This is not a pursuit of righteousness, it is one of greed.
Which is why we desperately need to make it impossible for LE to steal any more money from market seizures, and it matters not if we achieve this through decentralization, a more secure cryptocurrency, or what have you.