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.
