This is the curious story of how a robot armed with a weekly budget of $100 in bitcoin managed to buy Ecstasy, a Hungarian passport and a baseball cap with a built-in camera—before getting arrested.(Tweet this) The "automated online shopping bot" was set up in October last year by Swiss art group, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, as an art installation to explore the "dark web"—the hidden, un-indexed part of the Internet.Each week, the robot was given $100 worth of Bitcoin— the major hard-to-trace cryptocurrency—and programmed to randomly purchase one item from Agora, an online marketplace on the dark web where shoppers can buy drugs and other illegal items.The items were automatically delivered to a Swiss art gallery called Kunst Halle St Gallen to form an exhibition.The robot was christened "Random Darknet Shopper" and its purchases included a Hungarian passport, Ecstasy pills, fake Diesel jeans, a Sprite can with a hole cut out in order to stash cash, Nike trainers, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, cigarettes and the "Lord of the Rings" e-book collection.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the robot and his artistic creators had a run in with the law.In January 2015, the Swiss police confiscated the robot and its illegal purchases.However, three months later, the Random Darknet Shopper was returned to the artists, along with all its purchases except the Ecstasy (also known as MDMA) tablets, which were destroyed by the Swiss authorities.The artists behind the robot escaped without any charges."This is a great day for the 'bot, for us and for freedom of art!"!Mediengruppe Bitnik said in a blog post last week."In the order for withdrawal of prosecution, the public prosecutor states that the possession of Ecstasy was indeed a reasonable means for the purpose of sparking public debate about questions related to the exhibition."Read MoreGoogle, governments team up to fight paedophiles The Swiss authorities confirmed that the artists and the robot would not be charged."We decided the Ecstasy that is in this presentation was safe and nobody could take it away.

Bitnik never intended to sell it or consume it so we didn't punish them," Thomas Hansjakob, a spokesperson for the Swiss St Gallen police, told CNBC on Tuesday.He added that the artists had not informed the police before undertaking this project and that the authorities had heard about it from the media.!Mediengruppe Bitnik said that all the items except the Ecstasy had been returned to them.Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks.Buying cocaine can get you shot.What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs?Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.About three weeks ago, the U.S.Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark's door.Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD."If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn't have even noticed," Mark told us in a phone interview.Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road.He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit "check out."

He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins—untraceable digital currency—worth around $150.Four days later the drugs, sent from Canada, arrived at his house."Itkind of felt like I was in the future," Mark said.Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users' purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel.bitcoin-days-destroyed-min-yearThrough a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics—and seemingly as safe.bitcoin nyu polyIt's Amazon—if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of "sour 13" weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin.bitcoin casino free faucet

A listing for "Avatar" LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it.The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S.and Canada.But even Silk Road has limits: You won't find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example.Its terms of service ban the sale of "anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction."Gettingfake bitcoin pillsto Silk Road is tricky.bitcoin cpu miner linuxThe URL seems made to be forgotten.bitcoin forum nederlandBut don't point your browser there yet.It's only accessible through the anonymizing network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.Once you're there, it's hard to believe that Silk Road isn't simply a scam.

Such brazenness is usually displayed only by those fake "online pharmacies" that dupe the dumb and flaccid.There's no sly, Craigslist-style code names here.But while scammers do use the site, most of the listings are legit.Mark's acid worked as advertised."It was quite enjoyable, to be honest," he said.We spoke to one Connecticut engineer who enjoyed sampling some "silver haze" pot purchased off Silk Road."It was legit," he said."It was better than anything I've seen."SilkRoad cuts down on scams with a reputation-based trading system familiar to anyone who's used Amazon or eBay.The user Bloomingcolor appears to be an especially trusted vendor, specializing in psychedelics.One happy customer wrote on his profile: "Excellent quality.Arrived exactly as described."They gave the transaction five points out of five."Ourcommunity is amazing," Silk Road's anonymous administrator, known on forums as "Silk Road," told us in an email."They are generally bright, honest and fair people, very understanding, and willing to cooperate with each other."Sellers

feel comfortable openly trading hardcore drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured.If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road's users with computer forensics, they'd have nowhere to look.TOR masks a user's tracks on the site.The site urges sellers to "creatively disguise" their shipments and vacuum seal any drugs that could be detected through smell.As for transactions, Silk Road doesn't accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked.The only money good here is Bitcoins.Bitcoins have been called a "crypto-currency," the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash.Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders' computers.(The name "Bitcoin" is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.)They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt.

Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs.One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day.Right now you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins.That's probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience.Since it launched this February, Silk Road has represented the most complete implementation of the Bitcoin vision.Many of its users come from Bitcoin's utopian geek community and see Silk Road as more than just a place to buy drugs.Silk Road's administrator cites the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of Agorism."The state is the primary source of violence, oppression, theft and all forms of coercion," Silk Road wrote to us."Stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market."Mark,the LSD buyer, had similar views."I'm a libertarian anarchist and I believe that anything that's not violent should not be criminalized," he said.But not all Bitcoin enthusiasts embrace Silk Road.

Some think the association with drugs will tarnish the young technology, or might draw the attention of federal authorities."The real story with Silk Road is the quantity of people anxious to escape a centralized currency and trade," a longtime bitcoin user named Maiya told us in a chat."Some of us view Bitcoin as a real currency, not drug barter tokens."SilkRoad and Bitcoins could herald a black market eCommerce revolution.But anonymity cuts both ways.How long until a DEA agent sets up a fake Silk Road account and starts sending SWAT teams instead of LSD to the addresses she gets?As Silk Road inevitably spills out of the bitcoin bubble, its drug-swapping utopians will meet a harsh reality no anonymizing network can blur.Update: Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe.He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin users."Attempting