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Found via @Tony and his bitcoin calendar.
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.
This gawker article was how I found out about BTC. Good times.
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"untraceable digital currency".. oh well, that's your average journalist. I had an account on the silk road but never ordered anything. The tech was pretty cool, silk road did stuff like embed images base64 encoded into the html directly so it didn't load external images. Not sure if that was done for performance or security.
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I would guess performance. At least at the time, I believe browsers/http were pretty bad at parallel requests. I suspect Tor exacerbated the issue too.
Today, image websites (like google image search) still do this for UX reasons - no layout shift and all the images load deterministically.
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Nice find!
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I should have been selling drugs back then...
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