For the record, I haven't, nor do write anything related to physical marketplaces.
This being said, I wonder why Ross got time in prison, while open, uncontrolled, decentralized marketplaces using Bitcoin exist today. Is it because Nostr is too small? Will this be an issue? Does it depend what is being sold there? What if people start selling illegal shit? That's basically why I'm asking.
That's the kind of questions that are important.
I wrote about it here.
I suspect if it got big enough and widely used, it might start getting this sort of attention :/
Probably on what’s being sold and lack of control. The narrative was drugs, guns, murder, exchanged for a dodgy “anonymous” cryptocurrency. “Illegal stuff bought with illegal tender”.
The main reason was probably because of the volume the Silk Road was handling. Millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of untaxed transactions were flowing over the site, which I'm sure was meaningful to the federal government. The main issue for the government was that it posed a threat to their control of commerce over the internet, and the drugs probably just made it easier to target and gave them a "moral" backing.
