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Comment by squidsoup | Hacker News Reader

Pause for a moment and consider that one can purchase narcotics from an anonymised network using virtual money. There's no need to read speculative science fiction these days, you can just read the news.

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Those drugs still have to be shipped via a real postal system. Speculative scifi suggests that I will have a machine in my house that will produce drugs on the fly, with chemical reactions that are controlled by software.

So the drugs are 3d-printed? Maybe in pill form?

That implies one of the following:

1) The printer is capable of "printing" complex compounds using individual atoms

2) The printer is pre-loaded with cocaine, LSD, MDMA...

My point being not everything can be printed...

There's a concept floating around for something called a 'chemputer' that would effectively be a 3D printer for chemistry: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-chemputer-that-could-print-out...

Not everything can be printed today...

It actually wouldn't be much more complicated to have a machine into which you pour a bit of bakers yeast, sugar and water and out comes a highly-enriched biomolecule of your choice. Most (recreational) drugs can be created via natural biochemical pathways. Honestly, not that much more complicated than your espresso machine.

Sure, but at that point it isn't a printer, and let's not forget that while any one particular chemical may have a simple synthesis process, different chemicals don't generally have the same process, which makes synthesizing an arbitrary chemical in a printer-sized box that sits on your desk a difficult prospect.

No need to wait for 3D printing, last night I was reading a short story [1] in which the players in an ARG earned experience points via the hand delivery of items from one player to another in the real world forming an alternative delivery system from the postal carriers.

Similarly, in Daniel Suarez's Daemon [2] he describes how a series of net connected people pass around individual parts that they have no idea the purpose of until they all get delivered to one guy who assembles them into a gun.

1 - http://www.amazon.com/Metatropolis-John-Scalzi/dp/B0058M5ZJ6 - "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood"

2 - http://www.amazon.com/Daemon-ebook/dp/B003QP4NPE/

On the orig bitcointalk thread when SR first advertised there somebody suggested this kind of a network and there's 20 pages of replies why this wont work for narcotics the biggest reason being theft downline the second being arrested with a ton of drugs and authorities wont care you were in an anonymous network you are getting a major trafficking charge

Or maybe something like this drone delivery network: http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567193-...

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