https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/07/daily-chart-13


ON JULY 20th law-enforcement agencies across the world announced that they had taken down two “dark-web” marketplaces, AlphaBay and Hansa. These websites, accessible only via a browser that ensures anonymity, are used to peddle drugs, guns, hacking services and countless other illicit products. But despite this sizeable setback for the dark web, recent history suggests that successor sites will take their place.

Dark-web markets get their name from their creators’ dogged efforts to avoid the police; the operation to bring the two sites down was correspondingly impressive. It involved two parallel operations, one led by America’s FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency and the other run by the Dutch police with support from Europol. Eight other law-enforcement agencies aided the investigation, providing intelligence briefings and arresting site administrators. The shuttered sites were among the biggest on the dark web: over $1bn worth of goods and services have changed hands on AlphaBay since it launched in 2014.

These joint operations were clever as well as ambitious. Dutch police had seized Hansa's servers and arrested two administrators in June. But rather than shutting down the site immediately, they then continued to run it for a month, all the while collecting information about vendors and customers. When AlphaBay was closed down in early July, buyers flocked to Hansa, unaware that this site had also been compromised and that they were outing themselves to law-enforcement authorities, who obtained the postal addresses of roughly 10,000 dark-web users as a result.

But governments’ drug tsars are unlikely to be celebrating for long. Numerous dark-web markets have fallen prey to the police before the latest two. And each time, as shown in a paper by two cyber-security experts, Nicolas Christin and Kyle Soska, new sites have popped up to fill the void. The authors scraped data from the largest dark-web sites between May 2013 and January 2015 to shed light on this shadowy market. During that period, Silk Road, once the largest market on the dark web, was raided and closed by the FBI. Within months, it was replaced by the less-than-imaginatively named Silk Road 2. In late 2014 this successor site met its demise as well, in another law-enforcement sting called Operation Onymous, at which point Evolution and Agora took up the baton. And after they closed down, customers moved to AlphaBay instead. This most recent pair of closures may end up as another mighty thump in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

I'm not a techie. But I like economics .

Can someone explain to me the future.,,

It seems like thisnet neutrality bullshit is big money corralling the cattle? But in this instance the cattle will act just like when music tried to stop file sharing eh? You can't put the fat back in the bag. So the real internet will be squeezed while the dark net, firesticks, etc will explode?

Fuck auto correct

I am just going to say this... I remember the early 2012-2013, been there.. seen all the shit you would not believe. Been there through SR, SR2, etc. I was shocked when the first SR guy was arrested. Never thought they could trace him. I guess you get careless after you make a couple of millions though.