Quote from: bitcoinmuseum on November 16, 2014, 02:48:42 PM

Obviously I know that silk road was very illegal and hidden on the dark web. But how hard is it to create an encrypted website that no one can access aside from admin? an encrypted craigslist essentially i guess...

Also, who should I look for to develop a a computer powered and programmed device...like the lammassu knows how to perform the exchange capabilities. What kind of person would be able to program that...electrical engineer, computer engineer...might not be as easy as a tablet. Might just be a small computer board situation...so would that be a computer programmer?

Thanks

Probably off-topic for this section...

It is extremely difficult to do it properly. There are numerous attacks on TOR - one study de-anonymized 81% of users (1) for example, there are many more examples such as ddos. Some of these are not problems with TOR, just problems that TOR does not protect against (e.g. a state sponsor who controls many routers on all sides of TOR. Then you have to worry about other security holes in the software (e.g. php, mysql, apache, your own software etc). Then you have to worry about misconfiguration of your software. Then you have to worry about whomever you hire to do the work for you - are they going to blackmail you later, are they working for a government etc. Then you have to worry about the legal jurisdiction you are working from and the consequences of that.

It is easy to give a glib answer and say you can do it easily, but that is untrue. It is very, very, very hard to do it correctly, and even if you think you have covered everything it only takes one screw-up for as long as you run the web site and you will be done. There have been a large number of discussions as to what SR, SR2 etc all did to get caught, some believe NSA and then they used parallel construction ("legal perjury by the government"), others just believe mistakes. Probably some combination of all of the above for various web sites.

So, you'd want someone (a computer programmer, engineer or the like) who has done this before and is knowledgable. Even then someone will probably make a mistake or a well-funded government will use their resources to figure out who is running the site. Right now unless you are working for Putin in Russia (Castro in Cuba, any intelligence agency anywhere, as an example) where you have protection in your own jurisdiction it would be extremely unwise to trust the anonymity tools currently available.

1, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/17/deanonymization_techniques_for_tor_and_bitcoin/