After years of sailing the murky waters of the Dark Web, smuggling all manner of nefarious goods from retailers to consumers, Dread Pirate Roberts – former captain of the original Silk Road which was the first major Dark Web marketplace – has finally walked the plank.
I promise that the entire first paragraph contains all the pirate related phrases in this article.
Now for those of you who don’t know who Dread Pirate Roberts is, what Silk Road is or have not heard of the Dark Web in general, the following is dedicated to you:
The Dark Web is best described metaphorically as all the water in the ocean not on the surface. The average internet user never comes in contact with the Dark Web but rather browses through all the “surface” websites, such as Facebook, Google and the like (hence the term “surfing the web”). The reason the normal internet user never comes in contact with the Dark Net (as it is sometimes called) is because it can’t be accessed by your run-of-the-mill browser, i.e Chrome, Firefox and so on; the only way one could access the Dark Web is through a Tor browser. As a result, the anonymity provided by using a Tor browser and surfing the Dark Web is unparalleled, putting most proxy sites to shame. Therefore the Dark Web is a hotspot for informers and political dissidents wishing to escape reprisals from their governments.
However, the other side of the coin paints a much darker picture. Due to the high level of anonymity, the Dark Web is also a hub for illegal and atrocious activities. Silk Road was the first of its kind – an online marketplace for drugs – providing untold levels of anonymity and safety from both scams and law enforcement authorities. Prices were provided in Bitcoin, further cementing the security of users. Distasteful though it was, Silk Road did operate with a sliver of moral codes; paid-for assassinations for instance were banned, though they were available on other obscure sites.
The creator of Silk Road was a man named Ross Ulbricht who went by the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts”. On Friday, nearly two years after his apprehension and Silk Road’s subsequent shut down by the FBI , he was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole. While this is a step forward in the right direction, the authorities may as well be trying to dam a river one brick at a time. Rather than deter people from using the Dark Net marketplaces, the closure of Silk Road fractured the market into many competing sites. Silk Road 2.0 was up and run by former administrators of the original Silk Road a month after the closure of its predecessor. It was subsequently shut down a year later but Silk Road 3.0 sprung up after its fall.
And these are not the only such marketplaces that have sprung up after the original Silk Road was shut down. Rather than dampen the market, its closure has instead kickstarted an exponential growth of different markets. As a result, the daily turnover of the biggest of these markets is more than a million dollars a day – an estimation provided by the creator of DeepDotWeb, a website dedicated to monitoring the status of Dark Net marketplaces.
As one user on the subreddit for Dark Net markets stated: “It’s like the mythical hydra – you cut off one head, and more of them grow”. I guess all we need is a modern day Hercules, which should be easy enough to find on some obscure Dark Net market catering to Greek mythology.
Despite the lack of modern day heroic figures, the authorities still try to keep tabs on Dark Web markets that spring up and subsequently try to close them down. However in my eyes, it seems futile. Short of figuring a way to prevent users from accessing the Dark Web, I highly doubt the Dark Web would be cleansed of such sites, for it is from them that it gets its titular name. Unfortunately the advance of technology has also given criminals the ability to refine their methods, so even if for a brief moment all Dark Web markets were shut down, they’d just reappear in another form. After all, the days of peddling drugs at the street corner are long gone for the modern day drug vendor.
