It is a tor-based market protocol and software for selling secret information in exchange for (anonymous) bitcoins.
Just to give you an example as to how far this can go. Imagine you work in a military camp and you can see which platoons are going where. In that case, you can sell their whereabouts and assignment details to the enemy in real time. Everything being anonymous, there would be no simple way to detect this, short of a relatively complex correlation attack in which counter-intelligence already suspects who exactly is doing this. It would indeed make things insanely treacherous. There is obviously an enormous amount of money in this.
On the one side, it looks immoral to do that. On the other side, however, it could make oppression of civilian populations several orders of magnitude more difficult than before.
Many people who work in an oppression mechanism, actually hate their jobs. They just don't know what to do about it. They only work there because it allows them to collect a salary. This type of markets would allow them find a buyer, make extra money, stab their oppressive employer in the back, and still collect their salaries. Entire oppression mechanisms would collapse, if people who work in them, could conveniently get paid good money to supply their potential victims with critical information.
In terms of [creating/destroying] something [good/bad], morality says that creating something good should have priority, but destroying something bad should be morally commendable too?
It is also obvious that you can make very good money with this kind of tools; and by organizing this kind of markets. It pretty much amounts to setting up a privatized secret service. In fact, this kind of tools would not help governments much, because they already have all of this. It would rather level the playing field for non-state actors. The internet itself obviously does exactly that on a massive scale.
Anything that can be used for furthering good things, can obviously also be used for furthering bad things. The slur.io people give the example in which they would encourage people to rat on tax evaders. In my book, that is not a good but rather a bad thing, because it would help furthering the despicable statist goal of sucking people dry.
Of course, the tor network and bitcoin are more than just my hobby. It is also my job. So, I may be a bit biased. I can see quite a bit of questionable -- but often still understandable -- behaviour on the tor network, but I sometimes also run into the opposite extreme. As you probably know, the ideology of the technology clan, especially on the tor network, is hardcore libertarian, and has a deep resentment for national states and state power. On the other hand, I do not really "trust" the morality of libertarianism, since it does not really have rules. Therefore, I personally believe that axiomatically reasoning from the Quranic text is a substantially more reliable method. Morality is a serious issue, because I would not want my own anti-statist instincts to become a tool for evil.
What do you think about something like slur.io in terms of what is halal and haram?
Re: Moral implications of a secret information market
I try to keep things simple.
Intention is the key to our purpose. Wrong intention even if the action is good results in nothing. Same action with the right intention gets the rewards..
On 'exchange' and trade, what is haraam is the charging of interest. If the money system had no interest, I cannot see the system as being haraam. BitCoin? I don't know enough to comment.
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