Keynote

Abstract:

Founded in 2011, Silk Road was the first online anonymous marketplace, in which buyers and sellers could transact with anonymity guarantees far superior to those available in online or offline alternatives, thanks to the innovative use of cryptocurrencies and network anonymization. Business on Silk Road, primarily involving narcotics trafficking, was brisk and before long competitors appeared. After Silk Road was taken down by law enforcement, a dynamic ecosystem of online anonymous marketplaces emerged. That ecosystem is highly active, to this day, and has been surprisingly resilient to multiple law enforcement take down operations as well as “exit scams,” in which the operators of a marketplace abruptly abscond with any money left on the platform.
In this talk, I describe insights we have gained from more than twelve years of active measurements of the online anonymous market ecosystem [1,2,3,4,5,6]. I first highlight the scientific challenges in collecting such data at scale, discuss how overall revenues rapidly grew to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and describe the leading types of commerce taking place – primarily narcotics, but also cybercrime commoditization.

Second, I present several analyses of vendors, ranging from our efforts to match a priori disparate handles to unique individuals, to predicting whether a vendor will be successful in the future. Finally, I introduce some of the unique data we could access, namely backend data from police seizures, and show how we used it to validate our measurements.

While online anonymous marketplaces have recently seen their influence dip a bit – possibly due to a combination of constant infighting and relentless police activity – the insights we gained from studying them for so long help considerably demystify the “dark web,” and more generally, online crime ecosystems, which turn out to be very economically rational environments.