Bitcoin Forum

Evolution -- The largest Deep Web drugs marketplace, disappeared suddenly overnight from the Internet. But unlike Silk Road, there is no indication that the law enforcement took down the Evolution marketplace.
The Darknet’s most popular markets for drugs and bespoke carjacking services is mysteriously offline Wednesday with rumours circulating over the Internet that its own administrators may have just scammed its huge user base and stole $12 Millions in Bitcoin.
The Evolution black marketplace opened in January 2014, and gained popularity after the shutdown of Silk ​Road and arrest of its unassuming founder, Ross U​lbricht, with a promise of less fraud.
Like Silk Road, Evolution also dealt in drugs, as well as illegal weapons, counterfeit goods, stolen credit cards and guides to committing fraud.
Evolution was only accessible through anonymity Tor network. At the time of its apparent vanish, Evolution was home to nearly 20,000 drug sales, far more than Silk Road or Silk Road 2.
In order to buy or sell goods, a user just need to registering an account for free. Once registered, users could browse thousands of user-submitted list of illicit goods -- from weapons like guns, tasers hidden in fake cigarette packets to plenty of other fraud material -- and buy products with digital currency Bitcoin.
Evolution was also slicker, faster and more professional than other dark web marketplaces. It also promises greater trust to its customers due to its centralized "escrow" system, the supposedly security feature that actually allowed the site’s admins to make off with its users’ Bitcoin.
Evolution holds the vendors’ Bitcoin funds in the site’s centralized "escrow" system before Evolution’s administrators and the two of the parties involved in a transaction signed off on transactions.

Read More: http://thehackernews.com/2015/03/evolution-drug-market-bitcoin.html

Yet another exit scam, the list of major heists is getting bigger and bigger and this isn't going to stop any time soon, people simply like to give money to stranger and anonymous people on the Internet.

This could be resolved with a multi sig wallet I would think. Hopefully someone with more technical knowledge of multi sig wallets can chime in on this. My rule of thumb is that if something requires you to trust someone with your currency don't do it. 

The big issue has always been "how do you move that much BTC without raising a red flag?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/03/18/evolution-market-a-scam-says-site-pr/

because is an affair of (trust) and drug.
big balls win ...

You mix the coins a few times and it's done...

clear and nothing more.

Wow some people have short memories, using a centralized "escrow" system, still, will people not learn.

This is a dark side of the Bitcoin economy  No one would ever handing over their your btc to anonymous strangers.

According to the article they did have a multi sig wallet (at least thats what they described) But they could have just been lying about that I guess.

Who cares more darknets dye hopefully less will pop up. Just sucks that there isn't even any honor among thieves these days with bitcoins

And/or decentralized exchanges.


Multi sig is pointless if you're not one of the parties involved. If the owners are saying they all have multi sig on the funds then you're still just trusting them that they're all not going to conspire to run off with the funds together so it's meaningless really.

Yes of course, a real multiSig address should involve 2 or more "person". If one person (like the admin of evolution) know all the private keys of the address then in that case it is very useless to have a multiSig address (just my opinion).


There is not any honor in a Darkweb marketplace, that is selling illega stuff (this is obvious) or am I wrong?

So the criminals turned out to be criminals. I for one am shocked.

I would actually like to see more darkness markets. I am not a drug user and don't own any weapons but I do think it takes power away from the cartels which is never a bad thing. I would also rather people get their drugs etc. from a UPS package than out on the streets. Silk Road and other dark market users seemed to provide a safer product as well because even in a place like that reputation was important.

If someone really wanted to I am guessing they could set up a multis wallet that includes the user as part of the required signature. Localbitcoins has a system that works fairly well.

Not fair. Some time ago, there used to be honour among thieves.  ;)

Is that a secured offline cold storage wallet on offline PC?  I`m confused about this , can you specify please...


Now that's ironical...and self evident


Your tax collector won't show you mercy so why would these drug crooks do it?

You can always expect the worse when you are dealing with criminals... why would you get in such trouble? if getting your coins lost in a somewhat decent exchange is very possible, imagine if you give bitcoins to some random dudes selling drugs lol.

thats the weak point of btc. That kind of actions make the prices goin down. and for the new people they afraiding for getting btcs

I don't think selling/buying drugs should make you a criminal. One day the gov may call us all criminals for merely using bitcoin if they try outlaw it.


It doesn't take away power from the cartels, only legalization will do that. Where do you think the drugs come from in the first place? The cartels are just the wholesalers, but they might be selling on the darkmarkets themselves for all we know.

Hackers have never pledged allegiance to the cosa nostra...

It is highly likely these forums are under LE control, exercise extreme caution if you are still using these sites

This wasn't a problem with hackers. It was the adminstration/escrow providers of Evolution who took off with the bitcoins.

This is worring... Here in Brazil it is not a crime to use drugs, its a crime just selling then... So, when I buy at a dark marketplace from a vendor outside my country, there is no crime at all...

Im new to dark marketplaces. Its better for me, cause I dont like to buy drugs in the places where they are sold in Brazil, wich are way worse then any drug selling place in world... (Rio de Janeiro lives in a "silent civil war")... And ppl that sell drugs in dark marketplaces use to create the substances in a home laboratory, or plant it, etc. What I mean is... Its a violence-less trafic, and I think it can weakens the traditional mafia in a long term, if ppl get massively to know about those markets... But, no one talks about this option of buying... Deepweb needs a better marketing (lol).

About the markets...

I used the one called Drug Market, wich doesnt seen to be so famous, (EDITED FROM HERE ON:) and i got f****** SCAMMMMED........... the site itself is a scam. Didnt realize not a single vendor answered anything, all the profile descriptions was linking to other market sites... But, as I am a begginer in this deep web world... I falled into the scam...

it's not proved yet. The problem is always with either inside jobs (members of the exchange itself steal it) or they somehow get hacked by external agents. I think the inside job theory is always the more plausible one.

I'm surprised no one saw this coming. It was the perfect plan for the admins. The criminals can not report their losses to law enforcement or else they would get in trouble for selling drugs, and the admins are running a website for criminals.

When most people read recent news regarding this incident, they pitty the people that lost money, thinking how its the average buyers of somewhat illegal stuff,but not all that bad overall..
You're wrong; majority of funds were held by the sellers (dealers), since there was no need for regular folks to keep their money there. You come in , buy what u need and thats that, no need
to keep funds there and take the risk of loosing them.
Don't worry, people that lost their funds got enough left to take that blow, and im glad that marketplace got closed, it only brought bitcoin to media and public rage, same like silkroad did.

cheers

I don't see why not. Aren't most hackers Italian?

What about the reloaded version of silk road that was working on i2p? I remember people over at /r/darknetmarkets being too scared to even try it just because of it's name. Yet i2p is supposed to be safer to some extent.

A few people have attempted to address your question, however have not done so to my satisfaction.

First of all true multisig would be somewhat difficult to implement because it would make it very difficult for many people to use because many people have the knowledge of bitcoin of a new; it would make it more difficult to obscure/tumble bitcoin while customers had their funds on 'deposit' at the sites (I know that SR1 did this for their customers, and would assume that other dark markets offered similar services); and probably most importantly it would make it a lot more difficult to collect whatever fee the market is charging for listing/selling products.

In addition to the above, it would probably create a number of instances where a lot of deals would end up taking place outside of the marketplace which would open the door for scams.

In order to describe how multisig works, you first need to know how a bitcoin address is calculated. In order to calculate a bitcoin address, you first need the private key, from the private key, you can easily calculate the public key, from the public key you can calculate the bitcoin address.

In order to calculate a multisig address, you will need to combine multiple public keys, as well as determine what "m" and "n" are when expressed as 'm of n', you would do this by having each party circulate a public key to a private key that they control. Once this is done, assuming that everything went smoothly, then the buyer and the seller can sign a tx giving all of the funds to the seller

Didn't know that, but that doesn't change anything. Very few Italians are part of organized crime.

So I guess this calls for legalizing drugs so that people won't get stolen anymore.

the deep web now it's more like a scam-fest of bitcoin than naything else, i'm not really surprised


are you sure about this? i thought, many hacker come from russia

The marketplace offered multisig, but it's up to imbecile users to utilize it. Oddly enough, darknet market users tend to be risk takers and a bit lazy.

I suspect that they've been running a fractional reserve for months now, slowly cashing out coins.

Well, This is not new. We must be careful with our bitcoins, and not use this places like wallets, because risk is huge.