How Online Black Markets Have Evolved Since Silk Road’s Downfall

Yarek Waszul

When the FBI tore down the billion-dollar drugs-and-contraband website Silk Road last October, its death made room for a new generation of black-market bazaars—many with better defenses against the Feds. Nearly a year later, more drugs are sold online than when the Silk Road ruled the dark web, according to a study by the Digital Citizens Alliance last April. Here’s how the world of anonymous ecommerce has mutated and evolved over the last year.

Silk Road 2.0

A month after the FBI arrested 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, the alleged Silk Road creator known as Dread Pirate Roberts, someone else using the same pseudonym launched Silk Road 2.0. This defiant clone of the original claimed that its source code was backed up to 500 locations in 17 countries, so if authorities shut it down, administrators can rebuild in 15 minutes flat. “If Silk Road was taken down we could have it up and running again within 15 minutes,” wrote the new DPR. “Hydra effect on a massive scale.”

Evolution

In February, Silk Road 2.0 said it had been hacked, losing $2.7 million in users’ bitcoins. Tired of seeing their coins stolen or seized by the cops, savvy users migrated to sites like Evolution, Cloud Nine, and the Marketplace, which allow multisignature transactions—bitcoins are held in escrow at an address agreed on by buyer, seller, and the site. To move them, two out of three parties must sign off on a deal.

OpenBazaar

A Virginia coder named Brian Hoffman created this open source project to be a fully peer-to-peer uncensorable marketplace: Product listings are hosted on the computers of anonymous users, and freelance arbiters settle disputes for a fee. Hoffman says he’s not inviting in drug dealers, but that he can’t stop them from crashing the party. And with potentially thousands of different computers hosting the network and no central target for the Feds, it could be nearly impossible to shut them down.