I wasn’t surprised today when I read that Silk Road 2.0, a Tor anonymized dark website on the onion network was seized and shut down by the Feds. The site, at its peak, was moving $8 million dollars a day in drugs and related ephemera.
, 400 “dark market” sites dealing in illegal goods and services including counterfeit currency, stolen credit cards, drugs and weapons were shut down.
When Napster was hot on the scene in the late ’90s, politicians, musicians and the music industry were clamoring to shut the service down. On its face it was blatantly illegal and operating on borrowed time. Looking a bit beyond the service, it was a bold experiment into the future of what music distribution could be.
Of course the service was eventually shut down, though to the dismay of those clamoring politicians, musicians and industry honchos other services sprouted in its place. And over time technologies evolved, like peer-to-peer networks and bittorrent, making it increasingly more difficult to stop music piracy.
The lesson to be learned from the Napster case is that when you shut down a popular technology you encourage technology advancements that addressed weaknesses in the previous system, and you drive pirating underground.
Remember in Season 3, Episode 4 of The Wire where Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin created Hamsterdam, a free zone to buy and sell drugs in Baltimore. Colvin was able to centralize the city’s drug problem, bring in health services to treat addiction and disease while cleaning up the streets of Baltimore.
As far as this analogy goes, this is akin to Silk Road 2. There was one centralized place to buy and sell drugs, keeping buyers and dealers off the streets and minimizing crime.
Eventually Hamsterdam was shut down, drugs moved back underground and new methods were developed to subvert the police. So where’s the analogy here? OpenBazaar.
OpenBazaar is a tech akin to bittorrent that decentralizes the anonymous stores in the network so if you take down one node hundreds if not thousands more nodes exist all over the globe. This wasn’t quite the case with Silk Road 2, it lived on a server somewhere, it was just anonymized.
With OpenBazaar, users will be free to host their own stores, buy and sell anything (not necessarily drugs), decentralized and anonymized and mostly out of the purview of the federal government.
Will the Feds find a way to infiltrate the technology? Probably, but will they take it down? It remains to be seen. Though if it does, you can guarantee someone will figure out a way to bypass the Feds even further.
The big lesson here is that technology enables what people want and if they want it badly enough they’ll have it, regardless of the law. You can chop off the head of Napster or Audio Galaxy or Silk Road 1 or Blue Sky, but you just end up with 100 new services in their place.
