Traveling the silk road: a measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace

By Nicolas Christin. The Web Conference, 2012

861 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics, and that most items sold are available for less than three weeks. The majority of sellers disappears within roughly three months of their arrival, but a core of 112 sellers has been present throughout our measurement interval. We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month; this corresponds to about USD 92,000 per month in commissions for the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over our measurement interval. We discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results, including ethical considerations for future research in this area.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79fb8e6bbcdafa0912b224dbba1bb41c8b96c85c

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Citations in the corpus

A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names (2013, methodology): “’s economic analysis of Bitcoin mining [10], Christin’s study of the Silk Road marketplace [4] and Moore and Christin’s analysis of Bitcoin exchange failures [13].”
Sex, Drugs, and Bitcoin: How Much Illegal Activity Is Financed through Cryptocurrencies? (2019, methodology): “…by ample anecdotal evidence, objective empirical evidence in the form of darknet market scrapes that show the goods and services traded there (e.g., Christin 2013; Aldridge and Décary-Hétu 2014; Van Buskirk et al. 2014; Soska and Christin 2015), as well as actions by law enforcement agencies,…”
BitIodine: Extracting Intelligence from the Bitcoin Network (2014, background): “Structural patterns in the topology and dynamics of the Bitcoin transaction graph that have implications for the users’ anonymity are shown in [8], whereas [3] collected precious information about the Silk Road before the seizure by the FBI.”
Competition in the Cryptocurrency Market (2014, neutral): “Additional work in the computer science field include Christin (2013), who examines the anonymous online marketplace in crypto-currencies.”
An inquiry into money laundering tools in the Bitcoin ecosystem (2013, background): “cryptographic currency which emerged over the past three years and has been regarded with suspicion for its allegedly anonymous and irreversible transactions [2], its popularity in underground markets [3], and its association with several cases of investment fraud [4], [5].”
Social signals and algorithmic trading of Bitcoin (2015, background): “One of the first markets to adopt Bitcoin was the Silk Road, a website where illegal commerce became possible thanks to the relative anonymity of Bitcoin [13].”
Mixcoin: Anonymity for Bitcoin with Accountable Mixes (2014, background): “For example, the Silk Road marketplace mediated and mixed all transactions between buyers and sellers [7], while some “eWallet” services promise that when users withdraw funds they will receive random coins from the provider’s reserves.”
Do libertarians dream of electric coins? The material embeddedness of Bitcoin (2014, background): “However, one of the most popular uses of bitcoin for commodities is for anonymized trading in illegal goods (Christin 2013), and most prominent of the sites for such traffic is the Bitcoin-exclusive”
Concentrating Correctly on Cybercrime Concentration (2015, methodology): “Christin [3] provided an empirical characterization of ‘Silk Road,’ which was the first large-scale such marketplace.”
Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem (2015, methodology): “4 The November 2011–July 2012 Silk Road data comes from a previously reported collection effort, with publicly available data [13].”
Price Fluctuations and the Use of Bitcoin: An Empirical Inquiry (2015, neutral): “The only study that is tangentially related to ours was by Nicolas Christin [35], who examined the operation of Silk Road—an illegal online marketplace.”
SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies (2015, neutral): “Silk Road [27], which operated from Feb.”
The price of anonymity: empirical evidence from a market for Bitcoin anonymization (2017, background): “Undoubtedly, cryptographic currencies facilitate some forms of criminal activity [44, 13].”
Ownership, uses and perceptions of cryptocurrency: Results from a population survey (2021, background): “Christin (2013) estimates that 4.5% to 9% of Bitcoin have been involved in trades associated with Silkroad, a marketplace similar to eBay but for illicit goods.”
How is Bitcoin Money? (2016, background): “5 percent and 9 percent of all trades on exchanges where Bitcoin is traded for other conventional currencies (Christin, 2012).”