Bitcoin Forum

Forget South American cartels and Russian arms dealers: the black market has moved online......


Want to buy an M4A3 assault rifle, a forged UK passport or a few grams of crystal meth and have it delivered to your door? On the dark web you can find it, on sites such as BlackMarket Reloaded, where AK47s are on sale alongside Afghan heroin, or CC Paradise, selling stolen credit-card data. You can even find dubious listings for contract killers (yours for £12,500, half up front). But the biggest digital black market-place of all is called Silk Road.

Silk Road - named after the ancient trade route between Asia and Europe - opened in February 2011. The site is similar to eBay or Amazon: users can sign up and buy and sell almost whatever they please. It has a rudimentary green-and-white design, but all the functionality you'd expect from a legal online marketplace: individual seller pages, buyer feedback, even an escrow system to protect against fraudulent vendors.............

They say when you're trying to catch a criminal, follow the money - which led GQ to a blandly lit conference room at London's Royal National Hotel on a weekend last September, listening to cryptographers and laptop economists talk about a currency that doesn't really exist. Bitcoin is a digital currency established in 2009 by another pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency exists only online and transactions are encrypted, so that users can be anonymous. Rather than using named bank accounts, amounts are transferred between web-like addresses called "wallets". Coins can be traded for real-world currency at online exchanges. While the exchange rate has fluctuated wildly, at the time of writing one coin is worth about £7.50, valuing the total number of Bitcoins in circulation at around £75m.