What Is The Silk Road?

The Silk Road can be described as an online market operated as Tor hidden service. This means that people can browse it securely and anonymously without any potential traffic monitoring. At first buyers were allowed to register for free as it offered a number of limited seller accounts. Later sellers are required to by an account through an auction if they want to sell their wares on the online marketplace Silk Road. To mitigate the possibility of some malicious persons distributing/selling tainted goods, a fixed fee was introduced for all the sellers that wanted to deal with the account.

History

Silk Road was developed in the month of February 2011. Development of the site had however started about 6 months earlier. The name of the site comes from historical trade routes network that started during 206 BC to 220 AD (Han Dynasty). This was between China, India, Europe and many other countries that featured on the Afro- Eurasian landmass. Dread Pirate Roberts who was names after a character from “The Princes Bride” who played the role of criticising regulation and espousing libertarian was operating The Silk Road at the time it was founded. Gawker in June 2011 published an article about the online market that created an internet buzz increasing traffic to the site.

Products

Silk Road also known as eBay for drugs or Amazon.com of illegal drugs deals with numerous products. By March 2013, the online market has over 10,000 products being sold by various vendors. 70% of these however were drugs, the reason why the site got its nicknames. Around 340 types of drugs were on sale on the site including LDS, cannabis and also heroin. The Silk Road however also has other products such as art, apparel, books, biotic material, computer equipment, collectibles and digital goodies among many others categories of merchandize that have not been mentioned. The terms of The Silk Road state that sale of anything whose purpose is to defraud orharm is prohibited such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, child pornography and weapons that can be used for mass destruction.

How it works

Users of The Silk Road do not use normal currency to purchase products. This is because developers set up a system where both sellers and buyers use bitcoins for their transactions. A person also can purchase the bitcoins using normal currencies and then use the coins on the sites. The system also plays a huge role in the concealing of location and identities of the active users.

Seizure and arrest

On October 2nd 2013, person behind the Dread Pirate Roberts on The Silk Road, Ross William Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco. This was done on suspicion of numerous crimes such as facilitating computer hacking, soliciting murder, drug trafficking and money laundering. During the arrest more than 26,000 BTC accounts were sized that were worth at least $3.6 million. By October 25th, the FBI reported that they had managed to seize around 144, 000 BTC that were worth at least $28 million which was believed to be the possession of Ulbricht who was the founder of The Silk Road. Check out this link http://silkroaddrugs.org to learn more about thisanonymous online marketplace.