
Trends in the Silk Road 2.0 - dlau1
http://lau.im/articles/analyzing-silk-road-2-0-part-1/
======
tedks
It's interesting and probably not surprising that the most popular drug on the
Silk Road 2.0 (and probably other darknet marketplaces) is MDMA. MDMA is
difficult to find in pure forms and impurities can kill you. If you buy MDMA
from a vendor with a 4.9/5 rating, you can be reasonably certain you're
getting quality product (comparable to old pressed pills you can hear aging
ravers wax nostalgic about) at a fair price.

I expect marijuana legalization will eat away at darknet marketplace weed
sales, leaving MDMA and LSD as the top two. Which is exactly how it should be.
They can be made in large quantities by moderately-skilled chemists to a high
degree of purity and safety, and the Silk Road allows them to be distributed
without any violence. It'd be impossible to bulk-search the mail for them.
MDMA could be packaged as any white powder and LSD is literally paper.

I hope that this safe availability of MDMA and LSD quenches the misinformation
campaigns that have so horribly marred their reputation for the public. Both
of them have incredible potential for therapeutic and recreational use.

~~~
jimktrains2
> MDMA is difficult to find in pure forms and impurities can kill you. If you
> buy MDMA from a vendor with a 4.9/5 rating

Could this be selection bias? If you're dead you can't give a bad rating?

~~~
trose
You can test it without ingesting it. With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few
people were smart enough to sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

~~~
xamolxix
> With hundreds of reviews I'd hope a few people were smart enough to
> sacrifice some of their MDMA to test it.

I guess that it depends on how easy it is to test it. If it requires a
chemistry degree and a lab I am guessing they won't test even if they are
otherwise smart.

~~~
spudlyo
Testing is actually pretty easy, you can get a fairly comprehensive test kit
from dancesafe.org[0] for $65.00.

[0]: [http://www.dancesafe.org/product/coomplete-adulterant-
screen...](http://www.dancesafe.org/product/coomplete-adulterant-screening-
kit/)

~~~
refurb
Holy flippin' mark-up! $65 for four bottles that contains maybe $1-2 worth of
chemicals?

Anyways, as someone stated above, these kits test for the presence of MDMA,
not necessarily all adulterants. There is the issue of cross-reactivity as
well.

It's better than nothing, but I'm not sure I would trust a drug that hadn't
been run through an HPLC.

------
freework
A few months ago I had the idea of creating a project to scrape Silk Road. The
idea was to parse all listings, determine the quantity, divide by the price,
and then average it through the entire site. The end result would be an
average price for weed/lsd/mdma,etc. Sort of like the Winkdex, except for
drugs prices. Shortly after I got it running, Silk Road 1.0 got shut down.
Then the darknet market "scene" became really fragmented into like 10
different sites. Writing scraping code is tedious, so I abandoned the project.
The code is here:
[https://github.com/priestc/weedprices](https://github.com/priestc/weedprices)

------
gouggoug
The disclaimer is interesting:

 _The following information is for educational purposes only, I have no
affiliation with the Silk Road 2.0, nor have I ever purchased anything off the
site. As far as I know, visiting the site and writing about it with no
intention to buy (commit a crime) is perfectly legal._

Any lawyers could confirm the last part of the disclaimer?

~~~
phpnode
what crime would a visitor be committing?

~~~
Havoc
I'd imagine something along the lines of "knowing about a crime being
committed without reporting it".

~~~
malka
I'm not sure the cops would like it, if each person who ever visited SR out of
curiosity gave them a phone call.

~~~
extempore
The purpose of criminalizing such activity is not to discourage people from
engaging in it. It is to guarantee that everyone is a criminal, thereby
ensuring that leverage is always available.

------
gwern
> I somehow doubt this guy has sold half a million dollars worth of MDMA at
> $1.5k a pop in such a huge quantity, but the price seems to be in line with
> other sellers for an equivalent amount.

Actually quite possible: the Dutch seller SuperTrips sold into the millions
range, so half a million for the top seller is possible.

> I’m not entirely sure what the rules are regarding who can give feedback,
> but there seem to be people buying huge quantites if a user must buy a
> product to be able to review it. I have never purchased anything from the
> site, and I wasn’t presented with any choices to review an item.

You can only review a listing if you have ordered it & paid for it (SR2 no
longer does escrow); but you are also allowed to review a listing before your
order arrives, which means scraping feedback can be very biased given that
most users who are scammed will never go back to update their feedback. (That
is, suppose a well-regarded seller has decided to quit selling; they put up a
bunch of listings, accept orders & payment, withdraw all the money since there
is no longer escrow on SR2, and continue until they're banned. The buyer will
leave item feedback like '5 stars: Trusted vendor, waiting eagerly for
package' and when it dawns on them that they've been scammed, never switch it
to '1 stars: got scammed'. So anyone who scrapes the feedback of this seller
will see a sterling 5-star-average profile.)

------
dobbsbob
A single price index/ticker doesn't really work since every country has a
different price. A lot of buyers on these sites are importing cheap MDMA from
Canada and Europe where it's plentiful to their city where it fetches 3x the
price. For example right now cocaine price in Canada is 2.5x what it costs in
the US, and at least 4x more in Australia. Reason I know this because every
week there's been shootings here of gangsters jacking each other to get their
hands on high priced product. Before it wasn't worth it to them to risk a
shooting but now the payoff is $80k per kilo so the streets are a warzone.

When weed is fully legalized guess we will see it as a traded commodity on the
NYSE. Invest in a dope portfolio, freedom 35 retirement plan

------
GigabyteCoin
Your report is quite interesting!

I only wish you had performed it on one of the more popular darknetmarkets as
Silkroad 2.0 has been publicly labeled a scam (they managed to lose
everybody's funds and have paid ~80% of the smallest losers back so far [0])
and is thus nowhere near as popular as places like Evolution according to the
good people on /r/DarkNetMarkets

[0] [http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-
bitc...](http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins-
stolen-unknown-amount/)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets](https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets)

------
SchizoDuckie
WTF. According to a quick calculation 23% of the whole index of today ships
from The Netherlands...

~~~
st0p
That's not surprising. The Netherlands have a long history of producing
quality XTC / MDMA and are one of the biggest XTC exporting countries
worldwide. Furthermore, given the relaxed weed legislation a lot of marijuana
is produced here.

~~~
SchizoDuckie
I am aware of that, I just wasn't aware that you can just ship that stuff
worldwide by mail so easily..

~~~
st0p
A 99 euro vacuum food saver will get you a long way in sending drugs
worldwide. Combine that with some clever packaging and the chances of it
getting caught at customs are pretty small.

~~~
Havoc
Heard the same from friends - they were sending meat products that were a
little on the grey side of import rules across a border. Vacuum packing +
bleaching it overnight seems to keep the sniffer dogs away. Whether that works
for drugs I can't say though.

~~~
dobbsbob
Dealers use moisture barrier bags that are heat sealed now as apparently dogs
can detect vacuum sealed bags though unclear if it's outside contamination,
like somebody putting together a package in a room full of weed shavings or
smoke.

~~~
Havoc
>apparently dogs can detect vacuum sealed bags

Both heat sealed and vacuum sealed are air-tight, so that difference should be
a non-issue. Its the stuff sticking to the outside of the bag that might be an
issue. For meat I'd imagine bleach should do the trick...no idea what you'd
need to remove drug traces though. Not a skillset I plan on deploying anytime
soon so didn't research it.

------
_bdog
Drugs are a fascinating topic in my opinion, because they have affected
humankind and it's decisions since ever and more than anyone wants to admit.
It's a topic that is everywhere, and that simultaneously nobody has a clue
about (a bit like climate change or high finance). People don't know which
drugs there are, how they work, how dangerous they are, how much they are used
etc.

I talked to many people who are affected by the topic: teachers,
psychologists, doctors, concerned relatives. I keep telling them: Even in this
rich city Vienna, drugs aren't something that pops up in dark alleys behind
trainstations, drugs are everywhere and used by functioning people you had no
idea about. And they use massive amounts.

There are doctors who say that they tell their clients, that it's ok to smoke
one or two cannabis-joints a week. What they don't realize is that a regular
smoker (which might be a 13-year-old) doesn't smoke one per week, but more
like 5 joints a day. This is a point which get's more important now that
states around the world are legalizing cannabis. It really isn't very
hazarous, in the sense that it kills you or makes you unable to function, so
people can get used to smoking excessive amounts. But: every psychoactive
substance you take constantly will, by definition, change you. When usage-
patterns get to the "all the time"-category most points doctors and
legalization advocates make become invalid, because now it's not about side-
effects of a drug you take now and then, but about the effects of a
permanently altered state-of-mind you "cultivate".

I regulary ask sellers at highway petrol stations which cigarettes and
smoking-utilities they sell the most. There was not only one time where their
answer was: long rolling-papers and the lightest tobacco = ingredients for a
joint.

LSD isn't just something out of a Beatles song, some people told be they had
tried it with 15, because they could get it at their (noble high-
society)-school. There were hooligans at a big local football/"soccer"-stadion
charged with possession of it.

The issue/problem of cocaine is interesting, because (like cannabis) it is one
of the few drugs that permeates all of society from blue-collar-workers to
high-society. I once helped a completely confused guy in a smoking to get a
taxi home, who stuttered that he lost his purse while getting high on cocaine
on some actor's party. He is a painter and a director at one of the famous
theatres here, and gifted me a painting he had with him for the taxi-fare I
paid.

I once saw two truck-drivers delivering goods to the local supermarket around
the corner, snorting something of a magazine at 6.30 a.m.

It's a bit hard to get data about mass of cocaine consumption in the US, but
estimations are about 200 tons (400k pounds, please adopt the metric system!)
per year. They regularly find unmanned submarines who can transport tons of
cocaine. Some of them are sophisticated enough that they might be able to
cross the atlantic. Think of the R&D involved there, that cartels have the
money to buy.

One of the problems in the vietnam-war was that Vietnam was and is a big
platform in international drug-trafficking and many US-soldiers got addicted
to heroin while trying to "get away" from the war. Estimations are that more
than 40.000 soldiers were addicted. Many of them probably still are, no matter
what some people say, it's close to impossible to get away from
heroin/opiates. The only easy way to deal with the poor addicts is provide
them with their stuff until the end of their lives.

Afghanistan was (still is?) the largest Opium and Cannabis-exporter in the
world. Since they don't have many other goods than that, in the 90ies the US
more or less allowed or tolerated the drug-business there, so the warlords
("afghan resistance") could buy weapons to hold back Soviet Russia. So, in the
war since 2001 US-money flows to both sides of the conflict. US-soldiers are
paid to fight against warlords who get their money from selling their heroin
in the US (and in the rest of the world). Isn't that ridiculous?

[..insert many more anecdotes and hair-raising numbers..]

To sum it up:

* Drug use is way more excessive than society is comfortable with.

* Drugs aren't mostly used while sitting on the sofa, they are used while working, while riding vehicles, while doing anything really.

* Almost everything people know about drugs (from names to numbers) is incorrect (if they know anything at all).

Disclaimer:

* Numbers above might be inaccurate, because I don't have time for proper references, but the magnitudes should be correct.

* This is not an opinion about how to work with the situation (i wouldn't call it problem, since drug-use has been always there, it's a property/corner-stone of human existence), I have opinions about that, but it's a very complicated matter. There's also a difference in advising addicted individuals and their relatives, which is (depending on the drug) relatively easy, and finding rules/laws for society at large.

~~~
araes
In general, liked the post, and generally agree that drugs have completely
permeated our society, and we mostly need to accept, and deal with, the fact
that they're here.

Oddly though, I disagree with the summary points, although they're almost
impossible to prove.

For example, I think the large majority of Americans can tell you a decent
amount about marijuana. Maybe not purchasing info, but general effects, and
good guesses on how much folks smoke. I would also guess that if its being
legalized in places, than it can't be much more excessive than they're
comfortable with. I do agree that they probably can't tell you much more. LSD,
Ecstasy, Heroin, Cocaine - they're probably all mysteries to the vast majority
of folks.

I would also guess that the vast majority of drug use still happens on a sofa.
Obviously, there are people like you say, who use drugs while they're driving
or out on the job. Heck, I'm sure a lot of the fast food industry is
constantly out of it (see American Beauty). But drugs are still a disorienting
state change for many folks, which means a lot of them want to be in a
comfortable, safe place when they use them - namely at home on a sofa.

~~~
_98fj
@Mostly sofa use: This probably depends on the drug, I guess it's true for
cannabis, but not for cocaine.

@Knowledge: What fascinated me is that regular users I asked (at a drug-
checking-station at clubs for example) also didn't know much more than the
name of the stuff they're putting in their body. On the other hand most
drinkers also don't know the biochemical/medical stuff, just how to handle the
situation (more or less).

------
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
I'm a little disappointed that the author didn't investigate prescription drug
sales. Google 'XanaxKing' if you'd like to understand something about how
lucrative this trade is, and how popular it is on the deep web. These are
professional operations moving significant quantities, so we're missing a
major part of the market.

I would also have liked to see some indication of how the data was cleaned or
some quality control measures, but understand that this was a quick
experiment. More interesting data should surely follow in the second post that
analyzes changes over time.

------
imaginenore
Cool data, but your charts are absolutely horrible

1) Try to pick more different colors. Choosing two different shades of pink,
of grey and of cyan to represent unrelated things makes zero sense.

2) The sellers-by-country map is completely unreadable, it's just very slight
variations of the shades of pink. Italy looks almost as pink as Canada, but
it's 16 times less active.

~~~
Istof
or just add labels on the graph itself and you won't even need colors (bonus
for the color blinds)

------
underyx
>Crawling through tor already obfuscates your identity to a certain degree, so
we don’t really have to do anything other than cycling User-Agent strings to
look different from any other client.

Why is that necessary, though? If Silk Road has any checks in place that
protects against scraping, why are those in place?

~~~
Havoc
User Agents have proven to be (somewhat) uniquely identifiable under specific
conditions so it seems like a reasonable precaution regardless of Silk Road
configurations.

~~~
underyx
He can specify his own User-Agent string. If he sends the user agent
'silkroadparserbot v0.0.1' with every request, that is going to provide no
information at all.

Even if this wasn't, did you think that after one change of UA he would be
getting more 'uniquely identifiable' with each new request sent?

~~~
Havoc
You're missing my point. Have a look at what the EFF has to say (with cool
test too):

[https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

~~~
underyx
I did know about this before, and I suspected that you were referring to this
earlier. None of this is applicable to a scraper.

------
baby
If there could be some sort of graph for the prices of cocain, heroin, lsd,
etc... similar to this one: www.davidwong.fr/ltc/

this would be pretty awesome.

I'm also really surprised about the numbers of german sellers in Europe.

------
SnotJockey
Australia, punching well above it's weight here. One 15th of America's
population, 1/2 it's sellers and listings.

~~~
alasdair_
It's almost as if someone sent all the criminals to that one island...

------
misiti3780
i know this is a dumb question but im new to tor - how does one go about
finding the addresses of hidden tor services like silk road? is it just word-
of-mouth?

~~~
gabrielhn
www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets has a list in the sidebar

------
TheOsiris
_I have never purchased anything from the site, and I wasn’t presented with
any choices to review an item._

Suuuuure ;)

