He and his coauthor, Kyle Soska, recently scraped data (pdf) on transactions and prices from 35 different drug bazaars between 2013 to 2015, in order to see how the market had evolved post-Silk Road. Purchasing meth from a dealer in the Netherlands feels as familiar and mundane as buying sheets from Macy’s.Ĭhristin estimates there are about 9,300 different vendors on the dark web. Some even post their refund and exchange policies. The websites are clean, well organized, and easy to navigate there are icons for online support, shopping carts, and order status. The bitcoin/dollar/euro exchange rate is often featured on a banner, much like a price ticker on a finance website. There’s information on where vendors are located and where they’ll ship to. Users leave detailed reviews on the quality of a vendor’s product, speed of delivery, and how secure the shipping method was.

And most of the sites conduct business in bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that allows for anonymous online payments.Īnd aside from their wares, these marketplaces look remarkably similar to their counterparts on the “clearnet”, or regular internet. For many dark-web sites, that software is Tor, originally developed by the US government to protect intelligence information. You need special software that will obscure the site’s location on the internet (its IP address) and, generally, yours too.

These sites don’t show up in search engines and can’t be visited with a regular web browser. According to the 2015 Global Drug Survey, about 10%-15% of drug users in the UK, US, and Australia have bought drugs off the net. Marketplaces for contraband have existed for only about four years on the dark web, but they’ve made inroads fast. But in Paul’s model, the biggest risk-taker was the facilitator, and he was getting the biggest share of the profits, just as economic theory said he should. If what Paul told me was true, I wondered, could the dark web be creating a better functioning and more efficient drug market? What is the dark web and how does it work? Street dealers, who face the most risk of violence and arrest, aren’t compensated for it.

After all, the market for drugs is notoriously inefficient. For taking on the most risk, the facilitator gets 60% of Paul’s profits. He collects the package from there, splits it into smaller portions, and passes those on to street dealers for sale. The student then takes it to a second location, often a convenience store where the facilitator has a relationship with the owner. The facilitator rents a carefully vetted Airbnb and arranges for a naive student to be there to sign for the package. Middle Earth Direct delivery? Have it your way.

Best tor websites 2015