how is it possible to see how much activity and trade silk road has?

[paulie_w]

people keep saying "silk road is only 2% of bitcoin transactions"

how does anyone know that? doesn't he keep a currency tumbler going, and i'm sure he never uses the same receiving address.

how do people know anything about it?

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[RaTTuS]

65% of stats are made up on the spot

[stevegee58]

68.27% of stats are made up on the spot

FTFY 

[elux]

Like this: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139

Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace.

We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods being sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics. A relatively small "core" of about 60 sellers has been present throughout our measurement interval, while the majority of sellers leaves (or goes "underground") within a couple of weeks of their first appearance. We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers to approximately USD 1.9 million per month; this corresponds to about USD 143,000 per month in commissions perceived by the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over the past few months. We discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results, including ethical considerations for future research in this area.

WIRED article: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/06/silk-road-drugs

PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1.pdf

[Gaff]

Or if you can't be bothered to read it:

They automatically crawl the silk road and look at feedback for each listed item. 1 feedback = 1 sale. Multiply by the price of the item and tada! you have the turnover.

The fee schedule for listing on SR is known so you can also work out how much (gross) income SR is making.

[justusranvier]

When talking to people whose objection to Bitcoin is illegal activity then Silk Road is only 2% of the Bitcoin  economy.

When talking to people whose objection is that Bitcoin is all speculation and no commerce then Silk Road is 98% of the Bitcoin economy.

[HeavyMetal]

When it comes to regular money the black market is probably one of the largest economies on Earth.

[istar]

Or if you can't be bothered to read it:

They automatically crawl the silk road and look at feedback for each listed item. 1 feedback = 1 sale. Multiply by the price of the item and tada! you have the turnover.

The fee schedule for listing on SR is known so you can also work out how much (gross) income SR is making.

Cant this be gamed?

[Gaff]

Or if you can't be bothered to read it:

They automatically crawl the silk road and look at feedback for each listed item. 1 feedback = 1 sale. Multiply by the price of the item and tada! you have the turnover.

The fee schedule for listing on SR is known so you can also work out how much (gross) income SR is making.

Cant this be gamed?

It has some flaws certainly, the paper describes in more detail how they try to work around these problems so the curious should start by reading there. I don't think there's any serious issue with gaming, I guess you could buy an item cheaply then up the price shortly afterwards to make it appear like there's more turnover, which might not get spotted depending on how often the web-crawler runs. But really why would you bother? Bear in mind it costs a non-trivial amount of money to become a SR vendor in the first place. More likely there's privately listed items that don't get picked up at all.

Sure it's not perfect but as a method of calculating a ball-park figure for how much SR turnover there is, it seems pretty reasonable.

[robbonz]

New Scientist said Silk Road total turnover for dealers was in the region of 11,000 BTC per DAY if i remember correctly

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/08/silk-road-bitcoin-illegal.html

[kangasbros]

When talking to people whose objection to Bitcoin is illegal activity then Silk Road is only 2% of the Bitcoin  economy.

When talking to people whose objection is that Bitcoin is all speculation and no commerce then Silk Road is 98% of the Bitcoin economy.

LOL.

It should be noted that not all users leave feedback. I have noted that with iPhone/Android apps maybe 1-10% of users leave feedback. Maybe with drugs it is a different thing, but I doubt it...

[Marco Polo]

When talking to people whose objection to Bitcoin is illegal activity then Silk Road is only 2% of the Bitcoin  economy.

When talking to people whose objection is that Bitcoin is all speculation and no commerce then Silk Road is 98% of the Bitcoin economy.

LOL.

It should be noted that not all users leave feedback. I have noted that with iPhone/Android apps maybe 1-10% of users leave feedback. Maybe with drugs it is a different thing, but I doubt it...

I would think that ratio is much higher on SR since the vendors rep are what customers look to when deciding what vendor to purchase from.
So the vendors want to get as many good feedbacks as possible, they often ask the customer to give feedback before the item has been delivered(!).

Still I dont think 100% of the customers leave feedback.

[repentance]

I would think that ratio is much higher on SR since the vendors rep are what customers look to when deciding what vendor to purchase from.
So the vendors want to get as many good feedbacks as possible, they often ask the customer to give feedback before the item has been delivered(!).

Still I dont think 100% of the customers leave feedback.

For some reason I was under the impression that SR requires you to leave feedback before releasing the funds from escrow.

I do agree that there's no way to gauge the amount of private sales activity, so figures based on public sales will always be on the low side.  That true of Bitcoin itself, too, though.  Not all trades go through exchanges and private trades can't really be tracked.

[Adlai]

It should be noted that not all users leave feedback. I have noted that with iPhone/Android apps maybe 1-10% of users leave feedback. Maybe with drugs it is a different thing, but I doubt it...

Next up: the iPhone 5, featuring new apps such as Siri, Safari, and Silk Road.

[vokain]

a lot of transactions take place outside the SR interface too I'd presume.

[Adlai]

a lot of transactions take place outside the SR interface too I'd presume.

I presume otherwise:

• Vendors value positive feedback
• Silk road offers mixing and escrow
• Vendors wanting to avoid the public eye can have hidden accounts