DarkMarket, the Decentralized Answer To Silk Road, Is About More Than Just Drugs 251
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you would have come across reports of 'DarkMarket', a new system being touted as a Silk Road the FBI could never seize. Although running in a similar fashion on the face of things — some users buy drugs, other sell them — DarkMarket works in a fundamentally different way to Silk Road or any other online marketplace. Instead of being hosted off a server like a normal website, it runs in a decentralized manner: Users download a piece of software onto their device, which allows them to access the DarkMarket site. The really clever part is how the system incorporates data with the blockchain, the part of Bitcoin that everybody can see. Rather than just carrying the currency from buyer to seller, data such as user names are added to the blockchain by including it in very small transactions, meaning that its impossible to impersonate someone else because their pseudonymous identity is preserved in the ledger. Andy Greenberg has a good explanation of how it works over at Wired. The prototype includes nearly everything needed for a working marketplace: private communications between buyers and sellers, Bitcoin transfers to make purchases, and an escrow system that protects the cash until it is confirmed that the buyer has received their product. Theoretically, being a decentralized and thus autonomous network, it would still run without any assistance from site administrators, and would certainly make seizing a central server, as was the case with the original Silk Road, impossible."
Re:Eeeehhhhhh (Score:3, Funny)
"Is About More Than Just Drugs"
But really...it's about drugs. You don't need to sell Beanie Babies anonymously.
I dunno..... It's probably good policy to sell most babies anonymously....
Site for illegal activities, just load this... (Score:5, Funny)
So let me get this straight:
There is this site. A site designed for illegal activities...
And all I need to do is load their software onto my computer? Gosh, where do I sign up.
I mean, I always trust software from shady characters. That sounds totally safe.
Re:reasons for anonimity are more than drugs (Score:4, Funny)
I don't want colleagues or (future) employers to know ... what kind of kinky fetishes I might have and such.
Then why put it right there in your username? ;)