The article makes a lot of good points about why there most likely won't be another silk road.
There are already several other "silk roads", ie Tor based "anonymous" black market websites.
The point of the article, is because the Feds busted the biggest one, and because they deliberately went after end buyers using a confiscated client list from one of the vendors to make a public example that nobody is safe, nobody is going to trust "silk road"-like anonymous Tor-based internet black market sites again. So there probably won't be another of these sites as BIG or FAMOUS as Silk Road.
I think there is some truth to that. Silk Road got too big for its own good, so to speak. The Fed bust will scare away a lot of people who might otherwise have used a site like this, and that was by design.
The reality is, Tor can only hide internet traffic. The weak spot in these sorts of illegal transaction was (and will always be) the end delivery site. The contraband has to arrive somewhere, and if you send a real world address to a vendor that can be tied to you, and you're at risk, period. Those with a clue know/knew this and acted accordingly. Those without. . .are probably very nervous right now!
All that said, taking down Silk Road isn't going to make black markets go away. Internet based drug sales have been around since the inception of the internet. Drugs in the mail have been sent for a long time BEFORE the internet, before Silk Road, and they'll continue to be sent for a long time to come. The only thing destroying Silk Road does is potentially decrease the volume of these types of transactions and create more caution on the part of sellers and buyers.
Anyway, back on the original question, no I've never bought nor sold a clone or anything else on Silk Road, though I did check the site out of curiosity. But to be clear, just because its a site that caters to illegal items, does NOT mean that EVERYTHING on the site or similar ones is illegal. There were plenty of grey-market and legal things for sale there, just maybe a bit "offbeat" things that might not be auctionable on Ebay or might be of interest to underground/black market types.
Along those lines, cannabis clones ARE, in fact, legal in multiple jurisdictions right now. So there isn't necessarily anything wrong with sourcing clones on that site. I don't know who is selling them, or the legitimacy of their clones, but most likely they're selling out of a legal State (eg CA) where "clone only" cuts aren't that hard to get, and if so, there actually is a reasonable chance the cuts are legit.
My issue there is simply trust. If you're after "name" clones, provenance, matters. I wouldn't buy them from anonymous vendors, UNLESS said vendors had a significant track record or feedback. You *need* to make sure the clones are legit, and if that means paying a little more for them, so be it. Bottom line, no, personally I wouldn't buy clones on a site like this from a new vendor unless/until I this person created a track record, or I had some other good reason to know the clones were legit. Not worth the effort and potentially wasted space of growing them for 3 months without being sure they're high quality.
