'the farmers market' has been around for 11yrs almost and is 'the ebay of drug selling' but they're more discreet about it since they use traceable payments through Pecunix and have PayPal cashiers.
there's around a dozen forums like p1ponline that are full of vendors. most of the hacker forums have drug sellers in europe, this is nothing new just Gawker made it sensationaltastic and buddy needs votes i guess.
lol @ 'seize the silk road domain' deerp tor
really all they can do is pose as sellers selling enormous amounts of drugs and hope to snare somebody. or attempt to trace a large bitcoin payment into cash that makes it's way back to the vendor.... would be very difficult in court for any lawyer to prove the coins that went through escrow and a half dozen other addresses were all headed to you specifically for drugs. much easier to get the low hanging fruit like all those illegal epharma websites making multi millions a year
It is actually kind of annoying that SR gets all the advertisement from the media and credit for being the first drug site to operate in this way...because they just fell out of no where a few months ago when there are other forums with memberships strecthing back ten years not to mention a few other public drug forums that are even more established (
http://g7pz322wcy6jnn4r.onion/opensource/ovdb/ac/index.php) ... thanks for giving the noobs all the credit for being the pioneers though Gawker etc....
SR is awesome and we all wish them well though. Bitcoin was the magic word that got them attention, the other drug sites mostly accept Liberty Reserve and Pecunix although a lot have started to transition to Bitcoin recently SR was the first that used it as the standard payment. I can't deny being annoyed that they are getting all this free advertising though.