Silk Road (marketplace)
Silk Road is an online marketplace that its operators run as a Tor hidden service. As such, visitors must use Tor to access the marketplace. While the majority of products that sellers list on Silk Road qualify as contraband, the site's operators prohibit goods or services intended to harm others.[2][3] NPR has referred to the site as the "Amazon.com of illegal drugs."[4]
Description
Buyers and sellers conduct all transactions with bitcoins, a crypto-currency that allows for strong anonymity. Although bitcoin's exchange rate may fluctuate greatly in short periods of time, all the prices on SilkRoad marketplace are bound to United States dollar to prevent too drastic inflation or deflation. Buyers can register on Silk Road for free, but sellers must purchase new accounts through auctions to mitigate the possibility of malicious individuals distributing tainted goods.[5][6] The website launched in February 2011 with development having begun three months prior.[7][8] Sellers mostly operate out of the US and Britain and offer products such as heroin, DMT, LSD, and marijuana.[7][9]
Notoriety
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.[2][10][11] 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.[12]
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 [sic]. 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.[13]
After this attention, traffic to the website increased dramatically and the bitcoin saw a corresponding rise in value.[7]
The site was also used during the markup hearing for the 2011 Stop Online Piracy Act as an exemplar 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.[14]
See also
References
- ^ Formerly http://ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion/; SR announced a move on 1 December 2011
- ^ a b Adrian Chen (1 June 2011). "The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable". Gawker. http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
- ^ "Restricted Items". Sellers Guide, Silk Road. http://ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion/index.php/silkroad/sellers_guide. Retrieved 23 October 2011. "Please do not list anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction (chemical/bio weaponry, nukes, and anything used to make them). ..."
- ^ NPR Staff (12 June 2011). "Silk Road: Not Your Father's Amazon.com" (Broadcast radio segment). All Things Considered. NPR. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/12/137138008/silk-road-not-your-fathers-amazon-com. Retrieved 5 November 2011. "The e-commerce website Silk Road is being called the Amazon.com of illegal drugs."
- ^ "...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. " http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=360.msg3574#msg3574
- ^ a b c Justin Norrie; Asher Moses (12 June 2011). "Drugs bought with virtual cash". The Sydney Morning Herald. Fairfax Media. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/drugs-bought-with-virtual-cash-20110611-1fy0a.html. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
- ^ Public statement from a Silk Road spokesperson 1 March 2011.
- ^ Davis, Joshua (10 October 2011). "The Crypto-Currency". The New Yorker. Condé Nast: p. 62. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_davis. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
- ^ Whippman, Ruth (12 June 2011). "Bitcoin: the hacker currency that's taking over the web". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/bitcoin-online-currency-us-government. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
- ^ Charles E. Schumer; Joe Manchin (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. http://manchin.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2011/6/manchin-urges-federal-law-enforcement-to-shut-down-online-black-market-for-illegal-drugs. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
- ^ "Schumer Pushes to Shut Down Online Drug Marketplace". Associated Press (NBC New York). 5 June 2011. http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/123187958.html. 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.
External links