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We all knew this one was going to come up eventually: someone has added detailed instructions for accessing Silk Road to this question. I'm against it for two reasons:

  1. Detailed info about specific businesses that happen to use bitcoins feels off-topic to me, and
  2. I'm not at all interested in this site becoming some kind of free-for-all, or introducing liability issues. Questionable content should be out, just as a matter of professionalism. No porn, no drugs, no inappropriate language, etc. Seems like a pretty clear way to maintain an environment appropriate for everyone.

But rather than just have this answer and/or question disappear because I flagged it, I thought we should reach a clear community consensus on it first. Feedback?

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I agree that was a bad question that should be closed -- it had very little to do with Bitcoin. But I think if someone specifically wanted to, they could legitimately have gotten the same content in just by asking a better question.

Should a better question, as far as topicality goes, come along that raises the same questionable content issues, we should defer to SE's policies on crime-facilitating speech.

Remember, not all users live in the same country and laws can be diverse. It is also not illegal to violate a contract. Some people can be very quick to jump to "that's illegal" when that's not appropriate.

Use down votes and close votes, of course. If you find it offensive or off-topic, definitely mark it as such.

See this post for more.

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In my opinion, the question is relevant and should not be deleted because many people associate bitcoins with silkroad. We shouldn't dive into too many details about silkroad, but we should clearly state that Bitcoin is simply a payment method.

As for the answer, I think that the only thing really wrong about it is the onion address for two reasons:

  • It is always changing. Probably next month it will no longer work.
  • Pointing people directly to site is a little too much (here I agree with you)

The rest of it may be seen as off-topic, but it is related to the question. So I vote to keep the answer, but edit out the address.

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    agreed on all that. Given that the Silk Road story is how many people at this point in time heard of bitcoin, I think we need to have at least one open searchable question on it. I'm agnostic about whether it should include an address or not.
    – lemonginger
    Sep 13, 2011 at 21:13

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