Markets Weekly: Bitcoin Rises Amid Dark Markets Crackdown
The bitcoin price has risen in the last seven days after two weeks of declines. It gained $25 over the week to hit a high of $351.44 on 7th November and is trading well above that level today, at a high of $365.82. The price increase has been accompanied by a rise in trading volume, which increased 32% week-on-week to 2.61 million BTC. This rise in volume was led by activity on Huobi, OKCoin and BTC-e. Although OKCoin reported this week that it would calculate its futures trading volume in a new way that would double its figures, this did not affect its volume numbers in its market for....
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Dark Net Markets (DNM) are growing bigger than ever, with the Economist reporting over $50 million USD in transactions flowing through these marketplaces. The publication used data collected from Gwern Branwen’s dark web archive and broke down quite a bit of the behavior taking place in the Dark Net Market environment. Dark Net Markets are Booming. Since....
At least 400 dark net web domains have been reported seized and 17 individuals arrested in connection with Operation Onymous, an ongoing global cybercrime crackdown. A number of high-profile dark net markets, most notably Silk Road 2.0, have been shut down by law enforcement agencies in the US and Europe over the past 24 hours. The European Union's Judicial Cooperation Unit, or Eurojust, reported on 7th November that 414 dark web domains have been seized so far as part of Operation Onymous. All of the sites in question were accessible through the Tor network, which according to those....
Paying a higher price can be annoying, but it is still worth it to the majority of deep web users. Plus, Bitcoin developers are working on adding privacy and anonymity to the protocol, which will benefit users of dark markets even more. The recent Bitcoin network congestion has been a topic of substantial debate on Reddit. But could it affect something as obscure as the dark markets? Despite the block reward halving, they should have no imminent need of switching to different forms of payments. It would be shortsighted to deny the success Bitcoin has on the deep web. Underground....
In this concluding article of our series looking at Silk Road, a year after its closure, we examine the impact the Silk Road bust had on the dark markets and their most widely used digital currency, bitcoin. The FBI may have taken down the Silk Road in spectacular fashion, slapping a seizure notice on the dark marketplace's website and executing the high-profile public arrests of Ross Ulbricht, and later, bitcoin executive Charlie Shrem and digital currency trader Robert Faiella. According to academics and researchers studying dark web markets - which transact almost exclusively in bitcoin....
The bitcoin markets were frothing last week as the price soared to a high of $458 on Thursday. Trading volumes more than doubled as markets were stimulated by the surging price. Volumes rose by 2.3 times to nearly 6m BTC traded over the last seven days, compared to a week earlier. The stage was set for a price surge a week ago, as the markets digested the news of the inter-continental dark markets bust called Operation Onymous. In the last week, prices swung a massive $97.57 from a trough on 11th November to a peak two days later. The price rose from $360.58 at the week's bottom to $458.15....