Daryl Lau,
a self-described “computer
stuff” guy, has a knack for gathering and assembling
interesting data. In the past he made a map of the world’s supply
of burgundy. This
week, he turned his
attention Silk Road 2.0, one of the most popular black
marketplaces on the deep web.
Based off the National Institute for Drug Abuse’s list of most
widely used illegal drugs, he put together a list of the top nine,
and scraped Silk Road for information.
MDMA, also known as “Molly” in its pure form or “ecstasy” when
adulterated, by far had the most listings at 1,321. Marijuana came
in second with 761 listings, followed by LSD and cocaine. All nine
popular illicit drugs only accounted for 3,585 listings, though.
Lau points out that, “To put things in perspective, at the moment
of writing this SR [Silk Road] has approximately 13,000
listings for drugs,” which leads him to conclude that “prescription
drugs account for a large portion of SR drug listings.”
MDMA is popular at music festivals, and finding a reputable
seller (or, on the flip side, being recognized as a reputable
seller) is important – a lifesaver, even – since MDMA is frequently
cut with other drugs, like bath salts, and a number of
concertgoers have died of overdoses due to impurities. As
such, it’s not a huge surprise that Lau found 48 of the 100 most
reviewed items were MDMA. Though, proportionately, marijuana has
more reviews per listing.
“The average price of the top 100 items is $129,” writes
Lau, but his data analytics tool did not determine the quantity of
each item, so the number is deprived of some significant context.
“If we sum up all the product reviews x product prices, we get a
huge number of USD $20,668,330.05.”
Due to its anonymity, Bitcoin is the only currency Silk Road
permits, so Lau’s estimates are converted from Bitcoin’s value at
the time of the research.
So, who’s selling all these drugs? America is number one, with
93 sellers. Australia came in second with 45 sellers, and Great
Britain was third with 40.
Lau explains that he did this project “simply [as] a collection
of observations,” and that it’s not over yet: “I’ve set up a
cron-type job to crawl SR daily and crunch some numbers.
It will be interesting to see how things change over time, though a
month may not be enough time to see any significant shifts.”
His next report “will focus on pricing, trends
and predictions.”
Silk Road used to be substantially larger, but it was shut down
by the FBI last year. Now, the largest (by a hair) and fastest
growing online black market bazaar
is Agora. A convenient way of to search these sites is the deep
web’s new
equivalent to Google, called
Grams.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1xGfBqY
via IFTTT