Silk Road (marketplace) - Misplaced Pages

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Silk Road
File:Silk Road Logo.png
Item description page
Type of site	Online black market
Available in	English
Owner	"Dread Pirate Roberts"
Revenue	1.2 million US dollars per month
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Required
Launched	February 2011
Current status	Active

Silk Road is an online black market operated as a Tor hidden service, such that online anonymity is granted to users. The website launched in February 2011 with development having begun six months prior.

Buyers can register on Silk Road for free, but sellers must purchase new accounts through auctions, a policy that was purportedly implemented to mitigate the possibility of malicious individuals distributing tainted goods.

As of 2012, monthly sales were estimated to be slightly over 1.2 million US dollars (USD), which corresponded to approximately 92,000 USD per month in commissions for the Silk Road operators.

Products

The majority of products available for purchase on Silk Road qualify as contraband in most jurisdictions. However, the site's operators prohibit the sale of goods and services whose use could harm others; specifically, stolen credit card numbers, counterfeit currency, firearms, personal information, assassinations, weapons of mass destruction, and child pornography are not permitted on the site.

Most sellers on the site are based in the United Kingdom and the United States, and offer products such as heroin, LSD, and cannabis.

There is a range of legal goods and services for sale, such as art, apparel, books, jewelry, pornography, and writing services.

Transactions

Buyers and sellers conduct all transactions with bitcoins (BTC), a crypto-currency that can provide strong anonymity. Most of the BTC prices on Silk Road are pegged to the United States dollar and fluctuate in accordance to the current BTC/USD exchange rate.

The Silk Road organization claims that, "over 99% of all transactions conducted within the escrow system are completed to the satisfaction of both buyer and seller, or a mutually agreed upon resolution is found."

Reception

Media gossip blog Gawker described Silk Road as "the underground website where you can buy any drug imaginable" in a comprehensive 2011 article about the market. NPR referred to the site as the "Amazon.com of illegal drugs," and The Economist gave a similar analogy, calling Silk Road "a sort of eBay for drugs hidden in a dark corner of the web known as Tor."

After this attention, traffic to the website increased dramatically and bitcoin, the currency used on the site, saw a corresponding rise in value.

Legal status

Australia

The Australian Federal Police has stated that "anyone engaging in illegal activity through online marketplaces such as Silk Road...will not always remain anonymous and when caught, they will be prosecuted," in a press release. In February 2013, an Australian cocaine and MDMA dealer became the first person to be convicted of crimes directly related to Silk Road.

United States

In reaction to a Gawker article on the marketplace, US Senators Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder and DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart insisting that the agency shut down the marketplace. In a press conference Schumer described Silk Road as follows:

It's a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen. It's more brazen than anything else by lightyears.
— Senator Schumer

Subsequently, Silk Road's administrators posted on the Silk Road forums the following statement:

The die have been cast and now we will see how they land. We will be diverting even more effort into countering their attacks and making the site as resilient as possible, which means we may not be as responsive to messages for a while. I'm sure this news will scare some off, but should we win the fight, a new era will be born. Even if we lose, the genie is out of the bottle and they are fighting a losing War already.
— Silk Road Administration

The site was also used during the markup hearing for the 2011 Stop Online Piracy Act as an example of the evolution of some websites to distributed networking and computer systems which by design are not blockable by domain name filtering such as proposed in SOPA.

References

^ "[1207.7139] Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace". Arxiv.org. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
^ Justin Norrie; Asher Moses (12 June 2011). "Drugs bought with virtual cash". The Sydney Morning Herald. Fairfax Media. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
Public statement from a Silk Road spokesperson 1 March 2011.
"...we shut down new seller accounts briefly, but have now opened them up again. This time, we are limiting the supply of new seller accounts and auctioning them off to the highest bidders. Our hope is that by doing this, only the most professional and committed sellers will have access to seller accounts. For the time being, we will be releasing one new seller account every 48 hours, though this is subject to change. If you want to become a seller on Silk Road, click "become a seller" at the bottom of the homepage, read the seller contract and the Seller's Guide, click "I agree" at the bottom, and then you'll be taken to the bidding page. Here, you should enter the maximum bid you are willing to make for your account upgrade. The system will automatically outbid the next highest bidder up to this amount." Silk Road admin account, http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=360.0
"We received a threat from a very disturbed individual who said they would pose as a legitimate vendor, but send carcinogenic and poisonous substances instead of real products and because seller registration is open, they would just create a new account as soon as they got bad feedback. This was shocking and horrifying to us and we immediately closed new seller registration. Of course we need new sellers, though, so we figured that charging for new seller accounts would deter this kind of behavior. "
^ Adrian Chen (1 June 2011). "The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable". Gawker. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
Anonymous (1 January 2012). "Silk Road: A Vicious Blow to the War on Drugs". The Austin Cut. Retrieved 30 October 2012.
Davis, Joshua (10 October 2011). "The Crypto-Currency". The New Yorker. Condé Nast. p. 62. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
Bitcoin Anonymity
"State of the Road Address"
NPR Staff (12 June 2011). "Silk Road: Not Your Father's Amazon.com" (Broadcast radio segment). All Things Considered. NPR. Retrieved 5 November 2011. The e-commerce website Silk Road is being called the Amazon.com of illegal drugs.
"Monetarists Anonymous". The Economist. 29 September 2012.
"Media Release: AFP and Customs warn users of Silk Road". Austrial Federal Police.
http://www.dailydot.com/news/silk-road-online-drug-marketplace-dealer-guilty/
Whippman, Ruth (12 June 2011). "Bitcoin: the hacker currency that's taking over the web". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
Charles E. Schumer (6 June 2011). "Manchin Urges Federal Law Enforcement to Shut Down Online Black Market for Illegal Drugs" (Press release). Press Releases - Newsroom - Joe Manchin, United States Senator, West Virginia. Retrieved 5 November 2011. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
"Schumer Pushes to Shut Down Online Drug Marketplace". NBC New York. Associated Press. 5 June 2011. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
http://ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion/index.php/forums/thread/894
SOPA markup hearing, 15 December 2011, official proceedings, entered into committee record at approx. 17:40 - 17:47 and 1:28:10 - 1:31:55 (video timing, not recorded time) EST.

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