Drug Sales Online Continue to Rise After Silk Road Shutdown
Online drug sales, just like over-the-counter drug sales, have been on the rise for the past several years, worldwide. Law enforcement crackdowns like the closure of the "Silk Road" website found in the "Deep Web" or "Dark Net" in October of 2013 was supposed to curb this phenomenon. The latest information found by Australia's Sydney Morning Herald shows that sales have continued to explode unabated worldwide. Also, there is information showing that many new online drug-selling websites have not only replaced "Silk Road" online, but have grown far larger and more numerous in its place.....
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According to research done by the Digital Citizen’s Alliance, The shutdown of the Silk Road marketplace only temporarily reduced online drug sales. When the Silk Road was shutdown in October of 2013, it looked like a crushing blow against online drug-dealing. At the time, Silk Road accounted for more than 70% of the online drug market, giving users access to basically any illegal items, such ash drugs, weapons, and fake documents. Within months of the Silk Road’s closure, Silk Road 2.0 popped up and was subsequently busted. Two smaller sites — Evolution and Agora — then took up the slack....
The ending of the Silk Road trial, last month has many in the Bitcoin community in a state of outrage over the decision and the extent of the sentence handed down against creator Ross Ulbricht. The U. S. Federal Judge who presided over the case in New York was Katherine Forrest, who handed down a life sentence, and a "forfeiture" of over $183 million dollars by Ulbricht. Members of the frustrated Bitcoin community have taken to online forums to commiserate, vent and chat about the outcome. What can you say, freely, online and about whom? The rancor and conjecture have reached a fever pitch....
Two years after the FBI shut down Silk Road, online drug markets are alive and growing, thanks to the Tor browser and virtual currency, reports US News & World Report. Darknet markets offer greater product reliability and less risk of violence than physical encounters with drug dealers. Darknets average $300,000 to $500,000 in sales per day according to one study. Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Matthew Green says Silk Road provided a proof of concept for darknet markets. He says it's an idea that someone doesn't think about until it happens. Some Silk Road successors....
Wired reports that the shutdown of Silk Road 2 was shut down by FBI's and Europol's Operation Onymous, earlier this month, scattered the Dark Web's drug dealers. But one new and improved crypto market is welcoming and profiting from those refugees: an appropriately named website called Evolution. Evolution, a Tor hidden service only accessible using Tor (like Silk Road and most online drug marketplaces), has more than tripled its rate of growth in new product listings, according to data collected by the non-profit Digital Citizens Alliance, since the demise of Silk Road 2. That's helped....
The Silk Road revolution will not be centralized. Photo via lakpuratravels. Ars Technica recently published an interview with the Dread Pirate Roberts of "Silk Road 2.0", and one of the main points DPR 2.0 made at the end of the interview was that this underground marketplace is a small part of an overall revolution in decentralization. I recently wrote about the ideas of decentralized marketplaces and how they could affect eBay and Amazon, but these marketplaces also play a role when it comes to advancing the philosophy behind Silk Road. It's just a matter of time before this new version....