Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace
Nicolas Christin
Carnegie Mellon INI/CyLab
nicolasc@cmu.edu6.2 Potential intervention strategies
Given the nature of the goods sold on Silk Road, it is quite clear that various law enforcement agencies may have a strong interest in trying to disrupt Silk Road operations. They appear, so far, to have been unsuccessful since the site is still up and has grown in size since Sen. Schumer called on the U.S. Attorney General and the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to put an end to it.
We discuss four possible intervention strategies that could be considered: disrupting the network, disrupting the financial infrastructure, disrupting the delivery model, and laissez-faire.
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Attacking the financial infrastructure. Another possible disruption strategy is to attack the financial infrastructure supporting Silk Road. Bitcoin has shown, in the past, to be a very volatile currency. The June 2011 theft of a large number of Bitcoins from the Mt.Gox exchange [4] actually caused an abrupt collapse of the currency. Certain users have been complaining in forums of the uncertainty on the prices they end up paying due to the instability of Bitcoin and the various commissions they have to pay to purchase Bitcoins, and then to purchase items on Silk Road [6].
Disrupting the Bitcoin network appears, compared to attacking the Tor network, to be a more actionable possibility. In fact, in the aforementioned Gawker article [10] one of the Bitcoin developers argued that Bitcoin was not providing the level of security Silk Road and other anonymous marketplace operators would desire. More precisely, recent research [30] has shown that Bitcoin transactions are partially vulnerable to traffic analysis. Indeed, the history of all transactions is publicly available and network analysis can allow to map sets of public keys to individual users and transactions.
Since currency exchanges like Mt.Gox where users redeem Bitcoins for cash bind public keys to actual identities, Bitcoin anonymity guarantees are weaker than most Silk Road users seem to assume, even tough additional intermediaries (tumblers) are in place. In particular, large Silk Road sellers withdrawing massive amounts of Bitcoins at once may be relatively easily identified.
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8. Conclusion
(...) A surprising result is the tight coupling between Silk Road and the Bitcoin market – the daily sales on Silk Road correspond to almost 20% of the average daily volume of USD-BTC exchanges on Mt.Gox, the largest exchange forum. As a result, it seems like a potentially effective intervention policy would be to destabilize the value of the Bitcoin, to create instability in the marketplace.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1.pdfhttp://www.ini.cmu.edu/people/management_staff/nchristin%20_bio.html
