The Pirate Market: The Interview That Added A Multi-Sig Market!
Posted by: DeepDotWeb
May 9, 2014
Background: A couple of weeks ago we have been chatting with a Admin of The Pirate Market (Alias Mr. White) and his staff member Tone, and we thought it might be a nice idea to make this chat into an interview – as we know, its always interesting to hear the administration side of the marketplaces. When we started this article – i had some hard time figuring out what can we say about this market, as it was “just” another market with normal escrow, but after a lengthy discussion that we had about the advantages of multisig transaction in compare to the normal escrow system – including some technical explanations and example. We were so happy happy that Mr. White decided to get on it right away and implement Multisig transactions on his site, and within a matter of days he was already working on the production stage of the multisig system and within another day or so he had a functional system. We held back this article until we had the full usage tutorial of the multisig ready.
So basically, we were trying to get an interview and we ended up with presenting a new multisig market to the list – so all the relevant parts in the article discussing the escrow system had to be re written + the guide added to this interview. We also held this from being published until the Multisig guide is completed to be added to our multisig page. Marketplace will be promoted of course to the multisig section of our list.
This was the interview conducted couple of weeks ago, we have altered the parts discussing about escrow since there is also multisig available now:
DeepDotWeb: Considering what happened to Ross – aren’t you afraid running an online drugs market?
The Pirate Market: I think everyone is a little afraid.. But the chance getting caught is very low now because there are so many marketplaces coming out, Also I do everything to hide my identity And of course if the server is seized, it cannot be linked back to me – because I pay the server with bitcoins and every time I connect to the internet Im connecting to a vpn first, then I use tails or whonix.
DeepDotWeb: Tell me about your market features? what makes it unique? why should people use it and not the others?
The Pirate Market: The Pirate Market has been created to provide a place for buyers & vendors to do business without having to worry about their bitcoins or if market goes down. We wanted to create the most secure marketplace on the darknet and we will do everything to reach our goal. We also provide an external tumbler service which allow users to enter up to 5 receiving addresses to launder their bitcoins with 100% security.
DeepDotWeb: So, how are your users safe from scammers or devious admins considering the fact that you are using traditional escrow system?
{Note: Market is now offering Multisig transactions}
The Pirate Market: Yes, it’s working. Our market has gained really friendly vendors and buyers, and we enjoy supporting everyone and do our best to keep the market running. We believe in the equality, of course there are people with malicious intent, especially on the internet so we offer both FE and Escrow for our users. Should a vendor try to scam someone then we can react extremely fast. All the cash outs are done manually by us and if a vendor is new then we do our research and verify their PGP key to make sure that the vendor is trusted. If we failed in preventing a scammer from joining then we will provide a full refund from our own money, but since 11/30/13 we have only had 2-3 scam reports and I can say that our market is primarily trusted vendors. Orders getting seized by LE is infrequent but does happen however the majority of vendors on the Market are understanding and reship the order.
DeepDotWeb: And i might add that from my observations – marketplaces using easy multisig transactions are growing at a much faster rate nowadays, probably because of multisig being a current elementary demand to build trust.
{Note: Implemented already!}
The Problem with the multi-sig function is that you don’t have an overview about what’s happening. We prefer growing slowly and gaining trusted vendors. We do our best and we do as much as needed to make sure our vendors are legitimate and take business as serious as we do.</p>
DeepDotWeb: The main reason for using multisig is to create a trustworthy environment for vendor/buyers/admin altogether and not much because normal escrow is easier to manage, so why not do it now to keep up with the current demand for this much needed precaution?… (with all the scamming / hacking going around etc…..)
{Note: Implemented already!}
The Pirate Market: With multi-sig, we cant react as quick if there are scammers, all we can do is to ban the user and id rather have a small marketplace than a larger one where 50% of the users are scammers.
{At this point since it was obvious that this topic was not clear, we started a discussion about the technical aspects of multisig, how it works and implementing it – and i might add that he started working on it IMMEDIATELY – Dedicating about 15 hours work within the first day to learning about multisig and the proceeded to implementing it as we mentioned above}
DeepDotWeb: How long does your market exists?
The Pirate Market: We started to work on our market after SR1 closed, and after sheep closed we were frustrated so we published the market on 11/30/13.
DeepDotWeb: What made you want to create a marketplace? (except for money) as we know is a risky and stressing business
The Pirate Market: To be real. We don’t really give a shit about the money. All we wish for is a successfully running marketplace with happy users and vendors. Thats all we want.
DeepDotWeb: Can you share any data about the size / number of users / transaction volume / growth of the market? (its ok if you don’t want to, estimates are also interesting)
The Pirate Market: Currently we have 21000+ registered users, 400+ orders, 20+ new users per hour.
DeepDotWeb: Tell me a bit about your mixing service how does it work in compare to BTCfog and in terms of safety?
The Pirate Market: About the Tumbler Service:
– Up to 5 possible wallets, which means we can send your bitcoins to 5 different wallets
– Random transfer times. Its always random when you’ll receive the bitcoins. It can take from 10 minutes to 12 hours
– Only 3% fee.
– No Logs! Everything deleted after bitcoins has been sent out
– Very light tumbler to provide you a very fast site
How does the Tumbler work?
– You deposit Bitcoins
– Blockchain forwards the Bitcoins to one of our Wallets
– We transfer the Bitcoins from our wallet(s) to your wallet(s)
While the tumbler was on beta it was integrated into our market, but now after everything is working smoothly we decided to switch the tumbler to a new server with his own domain: http://tumbleru6a4xzfim.onion/
Im not really saying that people should use our tumbler instead btcfog, but we give them a little bit more security because we allow them to enter up to 5 receiving addresses, lets say they send 1 bitcoin and 5 addresses – then we will send the bitcoin these addresses
DeepDotWeb: What are your commission / vendor bonds / referral (if exists) schemes?
The Pirate Market: We have a 6% withdrawal fee, no listing fees, and a 0.05 vendor upgrade cost. Referees gain 1% of all withdrawals and 0.02 bitcoins if they refereed someone who upgrades to a vendor.
DeepDotWeb: Had any Ddos/ hacking attempts? how did you handle them? (obviously well if you are still around)
The Pirate Market: Luckily we haven’t had any ddos attacks so far. Hacking attempts are almost daily but I can say that the market is really well coded and secure. We already had few people who have been to great lengths to find a hole in the market but they were not successfully.
DeepDotWeb: Tell me about some precautions you are taking (without any sensitive info) – but stuff you can tell to help users feel safe in the environment as we know today,
that is being constantly compromised by LE / Hackers. What measures are you taking to make sure your users stay safe in case of “something bad”? (pgp login, encryption of pm, not keeping logs etc..)
The Pirate Market: We obviously care greatly about our users security. All data is encrypted and will be automatically deleted after a time period. We also offer a “Anonymous” function which will hide the name of the user. All bitcoins are stored on an offline cold storage wallet which only we have access to.
Also I have to say, that we have lots of ideas for the market and we are slowly adding these.
DeepDotWeb: Like what?
The Pirate Market: We are adding a discount function in the upcoming days, and following our discussion will be adding our own version of Multisig which will be more secure for vendors and easier to use for buyers. However we don’t want to disclose to much as other markets may take the ideas.
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We would like to thank Mr. White for talking to us and for the great work he demonstrated with adapting his market to the current market demands with adding features that benefit all parties involved.