How The Silk Road 2.0 Was Born
Silk Road is an online market that is operated as a Tor (The Orange Router) hidden service in which users can browse anonymously without being monitored. Besides it being commonly known for drug trafficking, it also deals with other items like books, art, digital devices, apparel and other types of materials. Following the closure of the Silk Road by the Federal Government, there has been an introduction of the Silk Road 2.0, an untouchable website.
The Closure of Silk Road
Ross William Ulbricht, the alleged owner of Silk Road who disguised himself as ��Dread Pirate Roberts’, according to the FBI, was arrested on the 2nd of October 2013. He was suspected of trafficking drugs, facilitating computer hacking, money laundering and soliciting murder.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation held more than 26,000 BTC from the Silk Road accounts that were approximated to cost around 3.6 million dollars. 144,000 BTC that were worth around 28 million were seized and it was believed that they were owned by Ulbricht.
The Rebirth
Thanks to the ever evolving Technology, the Silk Road 2.0 came into existence on the 6th of November, 2013 and was under the control of Dread Pirate Roberts. The system refurbished the origin website’s outlay and it promised to enhance its security. The owner took precaution of supplying encrypted copies of the sources of the website in order to let it be created easily if it is shut down again.
The Silk Road 2.0 employs the anonymity tool Tor along with the crypto-currency Bitcoin that shields the identity of the users. There is also a new security feature which lets the users use their PGP encryption key to play as an authentication act. A surprising feature is the login page of the website which is a parody of the seizure of the original site by the Department of Justice.
Since the shutdown of the original Silk Road, it only took the system slightly over a month to launch the new website that is dubbed ��the dark web’ that recorded alisting of almost 500 illegal drugs.
The Silk Road 2.0 Operation
It was announced on the 20th of December, 2013 that 3 suspected Silk Road administrators have been arrested. Among the three, two of them were Gary Davis and Andrew Michael Jones named as ��Libertas’ and ��Inigo’ in the website admin section. During this period, the new Dread Pirate Roberts unexpectedly surrendered the control of the website and froze all the activities on it together with its escrow system.
A new acting admin using the screen name Defcon took its control and vowed to revive the site. However, in February 13th, 2014, Defcon reported that the escrow accounts on the website had been interfered via the susceptibility in Britcoin’s system called the Transaction Malleability. The site remained active, but bitcoins in the escrow accounts that were worth 2.7 million dollars were reported to have been stolen. It is believed that the accounts were hacked and people stole the bitcoins from the anonymous online marketplace, which resulted in a big loss of the system entirely.
The Silk Road 2.0 is still running, but it is not as active as it used to be in its rebirth and during the original website era. Click here to learn more.