Silk Road (marketplace)
Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market.[7] It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts." As part of the dark web,[8] Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. Between February 2011 and July 2013, the site facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 Bitcoins.[9]
This article is about the online marketplace. For series of trade roads, see Silk Road. For other uses, see Silk Road (disambiguation).
Type of site
In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down the Silk Road website and arrested Ulbricht.[9][3] Silk Road 2.0 came online the next month, run by other administrators of the former site,[10] but was shut down the following year as part of Operation Onymous. In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted in federal court for multiple charges related to operating Silk Road and was given two life sentences without possibility of parole.[1][11][12]
History[edit]
Operations[edit]
The website was launched in February 2011;[13] development had begun six months prior.[14][15] The name "Silk Road" comes from a historical network of trade routes started during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) between Europe, India, China, and many other countries on the Afro-Eurasian landmass.[7] Silk Road was operated by the pseudonymous "Dread Pirate Roberts" (named after the fictional character from The Princess Bride), who was known for espousing libertarian ideals and criticizing regulation.[3][16] Two other individuals were also closely involved in the site's growth and success, known as Variety Jones and Smedley.[17]
In June 2011, Gawker published an article about the site[18] which led to an increase in notoriety and website traffic.[14] U.S. Senator Charles Schumer asked federal law enforcement authorities to shut it down, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Department of Justice.[19]
In May 2013, Silk Road was taken down for a short period of time by a sustained DDoS attack.[20] On 23 June 2013, it was first reported that the DEA seized 11.02 bitcoins, then worth a total of $814, which the media suspected was a result of a Silk Road honeypot sting.[21][22] The FBI has claimed that the real IP address of the Silk Road server was found via data leaked directly from the site's CAPTCHA and it was located in Reykjavík, Iceland. IT security experts have doubted the FBI's claims because technical evidence suggests that no misconfiguration that could cause the specific leak was present at the time.[23][24]
Henry Farrell, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, analyzed Silk Road in an essay for Aeon in 2015.[25] He noted that Ulbricht created the marketplace to function without government oversight but found it difficult to verify anonymous transactions.[25] To sustain a steady stream of revenue, he started increasing oversight to ensure low transaction costs.[25] To do this, he added measures to ensure trustworthiness with implementation of an automated escrow payment system and automated review system.[25]
Products[edit]
In March 2013, the site had 10,000 products for sale by vendors, 70% of which were drugs.[18][77] Drugs were grouped under the headings stimulants, psychedelics, prescription, precursors, other, opioids, ecstasy, dissociatives, and steroids/PEDs.[14][13][78][79] Fake driver's licenses were also offered for sale.[80] The site's terms of service prohibited the sale of certain items. When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud."[13][81] This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of any type; other darknet markets such as Black Market Reloaded gained user notoriety because they were not as restrictive on these items as the Silk Road incarnations were.[77][82] There were also legal goods and services for sale, such as apparel, art, books, cigarettes, erotica, jewellery, and writing services. A sister site, called "The Armoury," sold weapons (primarily firearms) during 2012, but was shut down, due to a lack of demand.[83]
The Silk Road offers over 24,400 products related to drugs for sale and an infrastructure to make these transactions. The official sellers guide states the prohibition of any sale of goods that are meant for harm or fraud, but allows for prescription drugs, pornography, and counterfeit documents. Only users of Tor can access the Silk Road.[84]
Buyers were able to leave reviews of sellers' products on the site and in an associated forum, where crowdsourcing provided information about the best sellers and worst scammers.[85] Most products were delivered through the mail, with the site's seller's guide instructing sellers how to vacuum-seal their products to escape detection.[86]
Similar sites[edit]
The Farmer's Market was a Tor site similar to Silk Road, but which did not use bitcoins.[95] It has been considered a 'proto-Silk Road' but the use of payment services such as PayPal and Western Union allowed law enforcement to trace payments and it was subsequently shut down by the FBI in 2012.[85][96][97] Other sites already existed when Silk Road was shut down and The Guardian predicted that these would take over the market that Silk Road previously dominated.[98][99] Atlantis was founded in March 2013 and closed six months later, while Project Black Flag closed in October 2013; both websites stole their users' bitcoins.[10] In October 2013, Black Market Reloaded closed temporarily after its source code was leaked.[10] The market shares of various Silk Road successor sites were described by The Economist in May 2015.[100]
Book club[edit]
Silk Road had a Tor-based book club that continued to operate following the initial site's closure and even following the arrest of one of its members. Reading material included conspiracy theories and computer hacking. Some of the titles included mainstream books as well as books such as The Anarchist Cookbook and Defeating Electromagnetic Door Locks. Most of the titles on this book club were pirated. This book club still exists as a private Tor-based chatroom.[101][102]
Advocates of dark web drug sales & Ulbricht[edit]
Meghan Ralston, a former harm reduction manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, was quoted as saying that the Silk Road was "a peaceable alternative to the often deadly violence so commonly associated with the global drug war, and street drug transactions, in particular." Proponents of the Silk Road and similar sites argue that buying illegal narcotics from the safety of your home is better than buying them in person from criminals on the streets.[115][116]