Blockchain Bites: Bitcoin at $15K, $1B Silk Road Bust

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....

In what may be facetiously called the surprise of the century, a new version of the now-famed 'Silk Road' deep web narcotics exchange emerged Wednesday, dubbed aptly as 'Silk Road 2.0.'. The site, accessible via Tor, is reported to sport the familiar interface that the first iteration of Silk Road had before it was shut down in a major bust by the U. S. government. "This hidden site has risen again," it declares boldly on the home page, seemingly poking fun at the Federal notice (seen in the screen shot above obtained by Forbes. According to CoinDesk, "the 'profile' page has been updated,....

Three years ago, New York Senator Chuck Schumer held a press conference to pressure federal law enforcement to crack down on Silk Road, the anonymous online drug market that had only just come to light. The crack down took eventually place in October 2013, and it's evident that it didn't do much good. Only a month after the Silk Road 1.0 bust, a new Silk Road 2.0 launched to replace the original site. Now there are around 30 copycat marketplaces, including Hydra, Pandora, Outlaw Market, Agora, 1776 Market Place, and Evolution, and most of them are doing a decent trade. Agora, now offers....

The latest reincarnation of the deep web marketplace, in the form of Silk Road 3.0 is started by the people behind Crypto Market. Will they be able to live up to the expectations? Silk Road is reincarnated for the fourth time. The deep web marketplace is back online after its predecessors were forcibly shut down by the law enforcement agencies resulting in the creator’s arrest and incarceration. Silk Road used to be a network of trade routes traversing through the whole of Asian continent to connect with the Mediterranean Sea. It originally got its name for being the route taken by the....

The FBI shut down black marketplace Silk Road a year ago. This hidden website was used for the sale and purchase of items and services such as drugs, weapons, fake passports and other forged documents. To refresh your memory of the full Silk Road story, check out our interactive timeline below: This article is part of CoinDesk's Silk Road: One Year On series. Keep checking back for new additions to the series. Road. Silk RoadTimelines