Cloakers

If the purpose of the Dark Web was just the sharing of information for free – information that perhaps is illegal in the real world – then it would probably do okay. I’m sure there are existing hidden networks that operate purely to share illegal images. Everyone is on the same side, and they want to help each other out.

But once you create a lawless community, there will immediately be some that wish to profit from it, or . A fine example is Second Life, which started out as a multi-player MineCraft and ended up being full of porn shops and anarchists bent on destruction.

So it was that Silk Road ended up being policed, even so far as people being threatened with physical harm if they did wrong. The problem, of course, is that it is hard to trust a crook:

Game theory suggests that without the possibility of retaliation, no buyers will enter into business in the first place, since they have every expectation that they will be cheated. There will, in short, be no market. Sellers will have no-one to sell to, and everyone will be worse off.

…This creates a market niche for intermediaries, who can become entrepreneurs of trust, supporting relationships between buyers and sellers who otherwise would not trust each other. Again, the Sicilian Mafia provides a precedent. Gambetta finds that they began as brokers of trust between buyers and sellers in a rural society without effective laws. The Mafia made money by guaranteeing transactions, threatening cheaters, and sometimes cultivating a general atmosphere of paranoia in order to ensure demand for their services. In other words, it built an informal order of its own, inimical to conventional laws, that gradually began to supplant the traditional state.

The above is from a great article at Aeon on the same topic. Libertarianism is fine ideal, as long as you understand that it is different from anarchy. There has to be a basic framework of control from authorities, so that freedom (and illegal activities) can flourish.

There will be a Dark Web one day, where you can trust the bad guys. It will be just like the Dark Web of today, except there will be an admission fee or a tax involved, and for that you get protection. The degrees of oversight required will mean those in charge will be vulnerable to being caught by real world authorities. So I don’t expect any too last more than a year or two.

Ultimately I expect that black market trade will primarily exist in the real world, not virtual. People will use the web for encrypted contact, and even payment and delivery, but there will be real world connections, so that retaliation is possible if need be.

It looks like the awesome anonymity of TOR meant that router operators were lax about general security. Well, however it happened, the authorities have hacked their way into the DarkNet and pulled the plug on a number of blackmarket sites, including Silk Road 2.0:

The list of dark markets seized by law enforcement includes Alpaca, Black Market, Blue Sky, Bungee 54, CannabisUK, Cloud Nine, Dedope, Fake Real Plastic, FakeID, Farmer1, Fast Cash!, Flugsvamp, Golden Nugget, Hydra, Pablo Escobar Drugstore, Pandora, Pay Pal Center, Real Cards, Silk Road 2.0, Smokeables, Sol’s Unified USD Counterfeit’s, Super Note Counter, Tor Bazaar, Topix, The Green Machine, The Hidden Market and Zero Squad.

Source: h+ Magazine

When Silk Road – the online bazaar for drugs, weapons and more – was taken down by US authorities, aficionados wondered how long it would take for replacements to arrive, if they would be better or worse.

Based on the number of listings (incredibly tiny compared to the legit world) it would seem that several replacements are in place and doing healthy business, although of some concern is that any morals that Silk Road had are evaporating away.

Evolution – launched in early 2014, after 5 months of operation has 15,000 listings. Mostly drugs, but also (never allowed on Silk Road) weapons,  stolen credit card numbers and credentials for hacked online accounts (source: Wired). In the long-term, additional security measures could see Evolution winning the Dark Web bazaar wars:

Evolution accepts only bitcoins and runs on the anonymity software Tor to prevent its users or itself from being tracked by law enforcement. But it also implements a bitcoin feature called “multi-signature transactions.” When users make a purchase on Evolution, they can place their bitcoins in an escrow account created by the site. Control of that account is shared by the site’s administrators, the buyer, and the seller; two out of three of those parties must sign off on the deal before the coins can be moved again. That makes it far more difficult for buyers and sellers to scam each another, and prevents coins from being stolen by the site’s operators or seized by law enforcement.

It also has two-factor authentication. However, being in part a marketplace for hackers (the company is connected to a well-known carding forum TCF) might scare away users who only want drugs, and they also charge a 4% commission.

Silk Road 2.0 – lost $2.7 million of BitCoins that belonged to users, so reputation is suffering. Unless it upgrades security by copying Evolution’s system, the “goodwill” of the brand could be a millstone.

OpenBazaar – peer-to-peer, which means the authorities might not be able to shut it down. However, it still needs to be managed by people, and people can be arrested.

Agora – also allows weapons that Silk Road doesn’t.  16,000 listings makes it the co-leader in this space. You need an invite code, but these are easily found in places as accessible as Reddit.