Well, here we are again friends. Another major market is gone and millions worth of coins are in the wallets of criminals or LE, although the boundary between the two is often hazy. Once again centralized escrow and lazy opsec are ruining peoples lives and causing pointless anxiety. Once again people are drawing a line in the sand and saying "no more centralized escrow! We demand multi-sig!". And once again the greater population of rubes is complaining about having to learn multi-sig, and whining about doing their own PGP encryption.
None of this is new. If you've been around since SR1, then you know that time is a fucking wheel. We've been fighting these same battles since that first seizure. We fought it again when SR2 was hacked, and then again after Onymous, and again after Evo. Check my post history and you'll see that I've been advocating for a better way for years now, and it never happens. Everyone waxes poetic about how great AB was, but they were shit. Nothing innovative in their design or function. They were a tragedy waiting to happen. Every single market with centralized escrow is a tragedy waiting to happen. Time is a wheel.
Whether or not AB was taken down or exit scammed, the flood of users to a new market is an opsec nightmare. I can promise you that LE is analyzing TOR traffic patterns and doing their best to unmask Dream. If I were running that market, I would be moving my servers regularly. Remember how often Agora used to be down? There was a reason for that.
Fent is bringing the angry fist of god down onto the markets, and rightfully so. As a community, we need to put fent in the same category as kiddie porn. If you're a junkie, I feel for you. But dope addicts have existed for a hundred years without Fent and they got high just fine. As long as Fent is allowed on the DNM, it's going to continue making headlines and it's going to continue bringing heat.
Be safe out there, people. Maybe take a little vacation from the scene. My spidey senses tell me that there are more dark times ahead. USPS is stepping up their game, and the new US government is going to pour money into a newly focused war on drugs. Jeff Sessions isn't fucking around and he's going to change the rules of the game. Time is a wheel.
Fuck fent, fuck weapons and fuck the feds.