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.
Ketamine will be popular. Right now they have ongoing medical studies trying to determine it's efficacy. You
need to infuse the drug, so it's a hard core drug, but
in terms of preventing someone from committing suicide
the drug shows promise. (I'm not condoning it, just passing
along what Psychaiary is talking about amount themselfs--other than stock picks.)
Legalized weed might eat away, but if the market is anything like Colorado, it's too expensive vs dark weed. It's so bad in fact that there are projected budget shortfalls because there are few consumers in the space.
Even with safe MDMA, the risk of possession carries a far greater weight in a lot of the country than something like weed. So people tend to take more risks, and thus the price is higher. If you could somehow subvert this cost by buying in bulk through a trusted vendor on the Internet, you stand to make some money for your troubles. This is, in my opinion, the most likely reason why SR has large quantities of MDMA and LSD.
I would hazard a guess and say that DMT is probably pretty high on the best seller list. The common theme is that there is a huge market for things that fall under the catch all of the label drugs that are being used for very different reasons than what a stereotypical addict is chasing.
Precisely for this reason there are actually places in Holland where people can have their ecstasy pills tested, so that they know exactly how much MDMA and what other stuff is inside.
I'm not that aware of how Silk Road 2.0 works, but with all the anonymity involved, would it be very difficult for a seller to complete transactions to herself with dummy accounts to pump up their ratings? This was very common in the Amazon and Ebay world when I was around those several years ago.
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
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?
> 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.)
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
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
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.
Is that reliable though? I'd imagine the DEA is more likely to investigate a dealer declaring their location as Washington DC than one declaring Netherlands. So their is a definite incentive to falsify this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
User Agents have proven to be (somewhat) uniquely identifiable under specific conditions so it seems like a reasonable precaution regardless of Silk Road configurations.
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?
For the most part, yes. You can find directories on Tor (but you have to find the onion for the listings, too). You can get started by searching the clearweb.
tedks|11 years ago
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|11 years ago
Could this be selection bias? If you're dead you can't give a bad rating?
marincounty|11 years ago
virmundi|11 years ago
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/high-times/marijuana-prices-co... http://khon2.com/2014/04/09/colorado-tax-revenue-on-recreati...
tomphoolery|11 years ago
icpmacdo|11 years ago
ma2rten|11 years ago
fubu|11 years ago
xorcist|11 years ago
Yeah, what's a few contract killings among friends...
freework|11 years ago
gouggoug|11 years ago
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|11 years ago
gwern|11 years ago
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|11 years ago
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|11 years ago
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...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets
SchizoDuckie|11 years ago
st0p|11 years ago
Havoc|11 years ago
_bdog|11 years ago
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|11 years ago
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.
justathrow2k|11 years ago
Obi_Juan_Kenobi|11 years ago
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|11 years ago
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|11 years ago
underyx|11 years ago
Why is that necessary, though? If Silk Road has any checks in place that protects against scraping, why are those in place?
Havoc|11 years ago
xj9|11 years ago
baby|11 years ago
this would be pretty awesome.
I'm also really surprised about the numbers of german sellers in Europe.
SnotJockey|11 years ago
alasdair_|11 years ago
misiti3780|11 years ago
gabrielhn|11 years ago
Sir_Cmpwn|11 years ago
For the most part, yes. You can find directories on Tor (but you have to find the onion for the listings, too). You can get started by searching the clearweb.
slurry|11 years ago
TheOsiris|11 years ago
Suuuuure ;)