"the largest market" always reminds me of "Bin Ladens right hand". Obviously the next one becomes the largest, but nevertheless it's like they kill at least one of those markets a month.<p>Probably legalizing weed would stop most of that more effectively than all those police operations after month of preparation.
Anyone suspect this weeks major disruption to the tor network was related to this? 4 days ago: "All v3 Onion addresses unavailable": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25714424" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25714424</a><p>This article says that police called their operation "Operation DisrupTor" in 2019....<p>edits: <a href="https://matt.traudt.xyz/posts/tracking-tors-network-wide-v3-onion-service-outages/" rel="nofollow">https://matt.traudt.xyz/posts/tracking-tors-network-wide-v3-...</a> suggests that it wasnt an attack although was written before the news.
As more of the "largest darknet marketplace"s are taken down, it kinda becomes less and less impressive whenever some law enforcement agency does it.<p>This one seems to have decent volume by BTC and other crypto, but it's not really anything earth-shattering.<p>In the scheme of things, I don't see there being any major ground made in preventing people from selling dope online. It's nearly trivial to ship it anonymously and it's nearly trivial to package it and sanitize it and aside from taking the time to scan and inspect every single piece of mail, people are going to continue to want to buy drugs online.
Glad to see more XMR usage in these. For every market you take down, two more shall pop up. You cannot fix a demand-side problem by restricting supply. Economically, the pricing will always rise to meet the increased risk of supplying. This war cannot be won. So please just give up.
> A total of at least 320,000 transactions were carried out via the marketplace<p>That's the total from 1-2 years (I can't find when in 2019 did they start). If that's the biggest right now, I'm surprised how small the markets are.
I get how these market places are used for digital goods (malware, credit cards), but I don’t understand how people can trade physical goods on those. If they have to exchange products, they must either meet in person or use the mail, either is trackable by the authorities. I see how the seller can protect himself for local transactions. He could leave the goods hidden somewhere and tell the buyer where to go. But the buyer has to be exposed 100% of the time.
In theory it is possible to run a bitcoin tor marketplace anonymously, but in practice, given a long enough timeline, mistakes will happen and chances of getting caught approach 100%. I wonder what mistakes were made here.
No matter what anyone says, I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime. Free people choose to purchase and consume drugs to their own detriment (benefit). All violence related to the sale of drugs is ancillary to the fact some drugs (but not others - alcohol, marijuana, caffeine for starters) are illegal.<p><a href="https://freeross.org/" rel="nofollow">https://freeross.org/</a>
> anonymous SIM cards<p>Are anonymous SIM cards illegal in Germany? There are definitely some EU countries where you can buy a prepaid SIM card in a newspaper stand without presenting any ID and it is 100% legal.
It is very easy for the buyer to get caught:<p>- Buy BTC from an exchange with KYC and then send it to the seller (police)<p>- Receive the product by post or collect it at a pick-up point where the seller (police) knows the address.<p>What strategies can the buyer follow to protect his privacy and trust the seller?
I wonder if the current bull run of crypto prices gave the founder of the market a touch of FOMO and perhaps sold some of his earnings without covering his tracks properly?
Url changed from <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/worlds-largest-darknet-marketplace-has-been-shut-down" rel="nofollow">https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/worlds-largest-darknet-...</a>, which points to this.<p>"<i>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.</i>"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>