Party Vibe

There no longer appear to be any “easy” or “safe” ways to obtain them (if it was ever easy or safe). Although there are a small amount of legit things you can use them for; their main use is for evading various national government regulations (whether they be drugs control or taxation); greedy thieves have made them even worse for stability than normal currency and feds all over the world are monitoring whoever uses them.

Encryption isn’t as secure as folk think for stuff like drugs transactions (or buying firearms, restricted radio equipment or anything else your country says you are not supposed to have). You have to be some computer/maths genius to check all the encryption software isn’t backdoored anyway; I am not clever enough to understand the bulk of it and people who are far cleverer than myself have still been caught.

Thankfully it all appeared after I’d quit using any illegal substances so its of no appeal to me; although I’ve read up on what I can understand out of curiosity; and what I learned was these risk points:

• use of the crypto software still is obvious to anyone monitoring (they just can’t immediately see what exactly it is)
• it makes your computer use extra effort; that causes the bits of data sent across on the Internet to get more timing differences (called jitter). Although jitter is always present at some level too much of it causes stuff like VOIP phone calls, online radio to work badly, so engineers at telecom companies monitor it at various points of the network
• Unless you are a computer genius and do hard maths for fun (there are folk like that and they like drugs too…); setting up the TOR, getting bitcoins etc makes you do load of extra effort. Many people thus end up leaving the crypto switched on for other stuff (like getting free/stolen copyright material) that makes its use insecure as well as buying dealer level quantities of substances which they then often try and resell to friends who don’t use computers by the old style methods; and end up getting caught that way.
• Many TOR exit nodes are all situated in science universities in Northern Europe; the profs can pick through any data they want.
• it is still possible to work out the locations of the traffic even if they don’t decrypt it as all electronic communications travel at around the speed of light. Locating it means lots of hard maths and access to very accurate clocks; but thats exactly the sort of thing they do at those universities.

TBH I suspect those who are “getting away with it” are also students and profs at those unis and feds know exactly what they are up to; but its begrudgingly tolerated because they are either are doing something posiitve/useful for wider society or have the potential to do so; and are expected to either grow out of it or not let their involvement go above a certain level or they will get pulled up like anyone else; but that is how it always worked .

@EPICLULZ 565657 wrote:

Alien currency

@Digital Buddha 565669 wrote:

best guess would be to buy a shit ton of prepaid visas and go to a bitcoin atm.

if these are like any European ATMs they are full of cameras / CTTV. in any case aren’t most of them now in Asian countries where you can end up getting beat with sticks and/or hanged for drugs? (that said most of the time those countries no longer do any of those harsh things; but compulsory rehab isn’t fun either.)

It seems to be only Japanese, Koreans and Singaporeans who understand how to use those currencies safely (there is the other one with the Asian dog who speaks in comedy Engrish quotes (which are Singapore English)); and those dudes are the kind who would cane a half-gram of amfet but still stay in their room doing hard maths for fun (and the girls do that as well).

The only difference is they’d emerge a few hours later (to get food; once they get tolerance the Asian appetite is not that quickly dminished by stimulant use) having built some robot or a psychedelic LED display or a plan to wire up the whole family house or student shared house to smart home authomation devices; thus they aren’t judged too harshly for taking drugs.

@Digital Buddha 565712 wrote:

if you got to an atm with a hoody over your head and look down the whole time they will have trouble id’ing you. at least thats how ATMs on the side of banks in america work, perhaps they have more surviallance going on elsewhere.

sounds like USA ones have a single non PTZ camera unit; their main use being to try and deter cash robberies. In Europe there can be 2 or 3 of these, and a few more in a bank lobby.

30 years ago the Japanese, Koreans and Philips Telecommunicatie in Hilversum worked on making CCTV affordable and reliable; to the point that most small corner shops run by Asians all have decent kit as good as anything the Police or banks have. And it is not an exaggerated stereotype that Asians are fanatic about cameras of any kind :laugh_at:

Also what the Asians are doing are working out what useful bits of the cryptocurrency can be made into legitimate business transactions (i.e not drugs, guns, illegal stuff) and working with their national governments and regulators. Its similar to how in Japan they still make all sorts of bizzare gadgets you would think no one would have a real use for; but 5 years later the same technology is in your TV set or hifi system.

Although some Asians “get away” with drugs by this and other methods, what happens is they are still busted hard; get all their money confiscated but the amounts they are charged for seem to be always just miraculously below those for death penalty by 10 mg. So most of the time they get compulsory rehab and a bollocking in front of their parents (even if they are 40); the shame and hassle of all this means few repeat offenders.