Gwern: Archives of ALL Dark Net Market Released
Posted by: DeepDotWeb
July 16, 2015
Another important contribution from Gwern, and this time the full archives of all Dark Net Markets – From 2011 until 2015. Links to the archives are available at:
Please consider donating to Gwern at this address:
1GWERNi49LgEb5LpvxxGFSuVYo2K3BDRdo</textarea></div>
From the writeup:
Dark Net Markets (DNM) are online markets typically hosted as Tor hidden services providing escrow services between buyers & sellers transacting in Bitcoin or other cryptocoins, usually for drugs or other illegal/regulated goods; the most famous DNM was Silk Road 1, which pioneered the business model in 2011. From 2013-2015, I scraped/mirrored on a weekly or daily basis all existing English-language DNMs as part of my research into their usage, lifetimes/characteristics, & legal riskiness; these scrapes covered vendor pages, feedback, images, etc. In addition, I made or obtained copies of as many other datasets & documents related to the DNMs as I could. This uniquely comprehensive collection is now publicly released as a 52GB (~1.6TB) collection covering 89 DNMs & 37+ related forums, representing <4,438 mirrors, and is available for any research. This page documents the download, contents, interpretation, and technical methods behind the scrapes.
The archive contains the following markets (integrity check method is available here):
- Markets:
- 1776, Abraxas, Agape, Agora, Alpaca, AlphaBay, Amazon Dark, Anarchia, Andromeda, Area51, Armory, Atlantis
- BlackBank Market, Black Goblin, BlackMarket Reloaded, Black Services Market, Bloomsfield, Blue Sky Market, Breaking Bad, bungee54, BuyItNow
- Cannabis Road 1, Cannabis Road 2, Cannabis Road 3, Cantina, Cloud9, Crypto Market / Diabolus,
- DarkBay, Darklist, Darknet Heroes, DBay, Deepzon, Doge Road, Dream Market, Drugslist
- East India Company, Evolution, FreeBay, Freedom Marketplace, Free Market, GreyRoad, Havana/Absolem, Haven, Horizon, Hydra
- Ironclad, Kiss, Middle Earth, Mr Nice guy 2, Nucleus, Onionshop, Outlaw Market, Oxygen
- Panacea, Pandora, Pigeon, Pirate Market, Poseidon, Project Black Flag
- Sheep, Silk Road 1, Silk Road 2, Silk Road Reloaded (I2P), Silkstreet, Simply Bear
- The BlackBox Market, The Majestic Garden, The Marketplace, The RealDeal, Tochka, TOM, Topix 2, TorBay, TorBazaar, TorEscrow, TorMarket, Tortuga 2
- Underground Market, Utopia, Vault43, White Rabbit, Zanzibar Spice
- Forums:
- Abraxas, Agora, Andromeda, Black Market Reloaded, BlackBank Market, bungee54, Cannabis Road 2, Cannabis Road 3
- DarkBay, Darknet heroes, Diabolus, Doge Road, Evolution, Gobotal, GreyRoad, Havana/Absolem, Hydra, Kingdom, Kiss
- Mr Nice Guy 1, Nucleus, Outlaw Market, Panacea, Pandora, Pigeon, Project Black Flag, Revolver
- Silk Road 1, Silk Road 2
- TOM, The Cave, The Hub, The Majestic Garden, The RealDeal, TorEscrow, TorBazaar, Tortuga 1
- Underground Market, Unitech, Utopia Miscellaneous:
- Assassination Market
- Cryuserv
- DNM-related documents (primarily the Ross Ulbricht trial evidence exhibits)
- DNStats
- Grams
- Pedofunding
- SR2doug’s leaks
At the same time of releasing the scrapes, Gwern, who is also /r/darknetmarkets mod and probably the most respected & dedicated researcher that the Dark Net Market world has known for the past few years, announced his stepping down from modding the darknetmarkets sub Reddit, and detailed his reasons on this thread:
In other news, I am stepping down on /r/DarkNetMarkets mod. I have been planning to do so since the beginning of the year, but I wanted to finish up some big DNM projects before I cut more ties: the first was my arrests/bust compilation and the second is this, releasing the full scrape archive which I’ve been working on for years.
I’m no longer as interested in the DNMs as I used to be. I was originally lured in by the fascination of watching a small cryptopunk revolution, and I was hopeful that it would go beyond the SR1 model into multisig and beyond. But we have seen little multisig usage, and that augurs ill for the distributed marketplaces. (What if someone built a trustless distributed blackmarket and no one wanted to use it?) Instead, the SR1 business model has proven remarkably durable despite the constant wearying turmoil of exit-scams and hacks and as I write this in mid-July 2015, there seems to be little chance that things will change substantially soon. (If Tor hidden services are cracked, the DNMs will simply move to I2P or Freenet; if Bitcoin starts getting too easily tracked, transactions will be settled in Monero or another cryptocoin with better anonymity properties, etc.) So I’d like to stop investing so much energy into monitoring DNMs, which includes stopping my scrapes and stepping down as moderator.
The exact timing owes something to the LE attention on me; as unpleasant as the ICE subpoena was, I was almost as disturbed by the subsequent Coinbase persecution of people who had done little but donate some Bitcoin to me. (And more recently, an order of some electronics from China arrived with the box open and the packaging so loosely taped one could get one’s finger inside it; this could have simply been lazy packing or caused by squishing en route, but on the other hand, international packages at the border have few or no protections so it would be easy to flag a particular name for closer inspection…) I would have liked to finish up earlier, actually, but it’s taken a lot of effort to get the archive into a releasable state (just uploading the 52GB to the IA took ~3 days on my connection).
I did not do much in the way of day to day moderation on /r/DNM, so there will be little observable change; the current mod team minus me will be pretty much the same as it was before. I also will probably continue to comment, offer advice, or post from time to time when something interesting comes up; at some point, I would like to finish my overview of proposed distributed market systems from a DNM perspective, and try correlating DNM downtime against the Bitcoin exchange rate.
But otherwise, I am mostly done.
Posting this archive will be my last action as DNM moderator.
It’s a good archive, I think. Sorting through it, I refound a lot of things I’d forgotten: the BMR mods chatting on Pastebin about one of them being arrested, unaware that Dutch police were watching them and tapping all their phones and they would be going to jail for years in weeks/months, taking down Utopia with them; Backopy bristling at my criticisms of BMR security while preparing to take down BMR for being insecure; Ross and Rene at StoryTime, totally high, talking about Julia (possibly neither of them will ever see Ross again as he’s sent to prison in Virginia for life) and Ross’s twitter making an attempt at technical analysis of Bitcoin exchange rates (he sounds competent, but it’s rather undermined by how the Mtgox leaks showed he sold off a huge amount of bitcoins not long before Bitcoin made some of its biggest gains ever) and his drawings (totally psychedelic); my crawls of The Marketplace, which never got the credit it deserved for pioneering multisig and tends to be left out of the post-SR1 story; the evidence that Sheep was run by Tomas Jirikovský, which I got so much shit for releasing; all the markets with funny themes like Area51 and Absolem and – of course! – Breaking Bad; even the worst markets like Black Goblin are still amusing to think back on; the Ulbricht trial exhibits where they forgot to redact both copies of information and so wound up leaking information about Force/Bridges and enabling some journalists to ransack DPR’s email accounts (they never did release all of what they found, the greedy bastards); and photos of drugs, of every sort, from every market and vendor, drugs you didn’t know existed or were still made, etc etc…
All these and more I give you.
I give you back your memories.
On the behalf of DeepDotWeb, i want to thank Gwern for everything that he have done for this community.
Please consider Donating to Gwern at:
1GWERNi49LgEb5LpvxxGFSuVYo2K3BDRdo</textarea></div>
Updated: 2015-07-16