Let’s get a few things straight.
Silk Road’s closure isn’t the death knell for Tor, the anonymizing network one must be connected to in order to access sites on the most well-known area of the dark web. Nor does it spell the end of Bitcoin, the pseudonymous currency of Silk Road, or cryptocurrencies at large. The sky falling and Bitcoin dying is an assertion that has been made incessantly for years.
Silk Road’s closure is a win, but isn’t a game-changing win in the war on drugs. It’s going to slow online drug trade down temporarily, while many Road users go back to traditional — and much more dangerous — methods of procurement.
Silk Road’s closure is also not going to legitimize Bitcoin by removing the shadiest part of that economy.
Grandiose statements from authorities looking to play up their success and position Silk Road’s closure as a definitive milestone on their journey to some kind of unobtainable decisive victory, and the pieces written by shortsighted journalists that are either obituaries for these technologies or claims that now, at last, the stigma associated with them is gone, are some of the most ridiculous claims I’ve seen published in a while. Ridiculous claims are not uncommon in the widely misunderstood areas of Bitcoin, Tor, the dark web, and online privacy.
By now it’s widely known that alleged Road operator Ross Ulbricht, who used the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, was caught — not because the FBI found a way to track him through Bitcoin or Tor, but because Ulbricht made a massive misstep, providing authorities with evidence to connect the man to Silk Road through information he provided on the clearnet.
Had a technical breakthrough been responsible for cracking the case, then for a time authorities may have been warranted in celebrating a major win against the infrastructure supporting illicit online trade, instead of just happy to have taken out one of the players. The fact that Silk Road facilitated over a billion dollars in illicit trades over the past few years before the FBI got lucky by spotting a blunder proves that cryptocurrencies and anonymizing networks are a tough problem to crack, and I have no doubt that had technical vulnerabilities in these systems been responsible, it would only be a matter of time before an improved alternative became available.
That’s not to say the existing systems don’t have vulnerabilities. You’d have to be an idiot to think that you’re invulnerable while connected to Tor or while buying your drugs with Bitcoins, and I won’t be surprised if authorities figure it out at some point. But even when that day comes, it won’t spell the end of the online drug trade any more than Silk Road’s shutdown does.
This is the way technology works, and we’ve seen it in countless cases across a breadth of areas. Piracy is a great example. Those who have attempted to fight piracy over the past fifteen years have shown a special kind of stupidity in failing to realize that there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. They killed Napster, began a litigious war against the world’s single mothers and those who don’t know how to password-protect their wi-fi, and put the founders of The Pirate Bay in prison — and yet piracy is still a part of day-to-day life for vast numbers of consumers, who are so used to the practice that the fact it is a crime doesn’t even register on their minds when they’re loading up uTorrent anymore.
I am firmly of the opinion that Silk Road is the online drug trade’s Napster.
The fact remains that a technical breakthrough did not crack this case. What’s far easier than replacing Bitcoin and Tor? Replacing Silk Road. Building a replacement isn’t even necessary as other marketplaces have already existed for some time. Those marketplaces that have established some credibility during their time in Silk Road’s shadow are the most likely to benefit as the next port of call for Silk Road’s masses.
Some developers will spring into action and attempt to capitalize on the downfall of Dread Pirate Roberts, competing with those remaining established marketplaces. New and established alike, they’ll be run by those who have learned from Ulbricht’s mistakes and take a more vigilant and much quieter approach.
Right now, as the value of the Bitcoin drops in an exodus of panic, there are undoubtedly those snapping them up to make a profit on speculation that the exchange rate will once again rebound. The same thing happened just a few months ago. When authorities took down dark web hosting provider Freedom Hosting at the end of June, which took popular anonymous email provider Tor Mail offline, the value of the Bitcoin dropped quickly — from around US$100 to a low of $75.65 just over a week later, before it started picking back up again and ultimately rose to a high of $147 during September.
The Tor Mail outage was the most significant aspect of the Freedom Hosting bust for Silk Road users, many of whom had come to depend on it for various aspects of their trades and panicked at what a server seizure might entail, and was probably a much larger factor in the sharp price drop than other elements of this story, such as the arrest of Freedom’s owner who authorities dubbed the largest facilitator of child pornography in the world.
That particular attack on anonymous illicit trade and the Bitcoin economy really slowed things down — for just over a week.
At the intersection of Bitcoin and Tor is a case study in authorities embroiling themselves in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole because they can’t take down the infrastructure that supports this activity. And much like the game of whack-a-mole itself, the moles are going to pop up faster and in greater numbers as time goes on.
The only way to win a game like whack-a-mole is to pull a Kobayashi Maru: to change the game itself, in this instance by crippling the technologies that make sites like Silk Road possible. Maybe one day they’ll find a way to do that to Bitcoin and Tor — and then we’ll be watching a more abstract game of whack-a-mole play out as authorities seek to do the same to those technologies’ battle-hardened replacements.
While the online drug trade isn’t going away anytime soon, we can expect to see today’s events spark further interest and activity in the legalization debate. According to authorities, Silk Road packages they have tracked have generally been high purity and low in adulterants compared to drugs bought on the street. A reputation-based marketplace that results in high purity drugs that are what they say they are is actually a good thing as far as harm minimization goes; many drug-related deaths are the result of dealers selling a substance under the name of another drug that may be inherently more dangerous or one that has a drastically different safe dosage.
That is to say nothing of the reduced risk to end consumers, who no longer need to subject themselves to a face-to-face interaction with the criminal element. Online or off, drug dealers are criminals, but it’s much harder to hurt someone or rip them off through a computer screen — though not impossible. One of the more shocking revelations from today’s bust involves the allegation that Ulbricht hired hitmen via the dark web and paid them in Bitcoin.
Sometimes it even seems like the DEA is using the same messaging as legalization proponents. As a spokesperson told ABC News last month, “There is no good batch of molly” and “there’s nothing pure about it” because widely-used drugs are made by criminals. Of course, the spokesperson is right: there is no good batch of MDMA, only probabilities, and there is no guarantee that Silk Road users are getting the right substance or a pure substance, and scams happen regularly. It’s simply more likely that you’ll get the right goods. Though it’ll stoke the fires of that debate, Silk Road isn’t a study in what legalization might look like. It’s a look at how ideas that were not too long ago futurist concepts in books by authors like Neal Stephenson function in the real world: cryptocurrencies, anonymous reputation-based marketplaces, and so on.
The legalization issue is more nuanced than any of that, of course; on one hand there’s plenty of hard evidence to suggest that marijuana usage is far less likely to lead to both harm to self and harm to others than legal drugs alcohol and tobacco, but I’d hate to live in a world where tweakers could get their fix at the local supermarket’s cigarette counter or an above-board online store. I can’t help but feel, though, that often authorities inadvertently make an argument for the opposing side.
So what does Silk Road’s closure really mean? Ulbricht isn’t likely to have a lot of fun going on in his life any time soon. Online drug trade will temporarily slow down while street drug trade gets a boost. Bitcoin will more than likely recover its value once again given some time and Tor will still be used by many around the globe for a wide variety of reasons, both legitimate and not.
And ultimately, this time next year — once the mice re-emerge from the walls a little bolder for having dodged the mousetrap the first time — there will probably be even more people buying their drugs online than there were before the FBI took Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts down.
Image Credits: liryon/Flickr, Zach Copley/Flickr
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