Journal article
Collective dynamics of dark web marketplaces
- Abstract:
- Dark markets are commercial websites that use Bitcoin to sell or broker transactions involving drugs, weapons, and other illicit goods. Being illegal, they do not offer any user protection, and several police raids and scams have caused large losses to both customers and vendors over the past years. However, this uncertainty has not prevented a steady growth of the dark market phenomenon and a proliferation of new markets. The origin of this resilience have remained unclear so far, also due to the difficulty of identifying relevant Bitcoin transaction data. Here, we investigate how the dark market ecosystem re-organises following the disappearance of a market, due to factors including raids and scams. To do so, we analyse 24 episodes of unexpected market closure through a novel datasets of 133 million Bitcoin transactions involving 31 dark markets and their users, totalling 4 billion USD. We show that coordinated user migration from the closed market to coexisting markets guarantees overall systemic resilience beyond the intrinsic fragility of individual markets. The migration is swift, efficient and common to all market closures. We find that migrants are on average more active users in comparison to non-migrants and move preferentially towards the coexisting market with the highest trading volume. Our findings shed light on the resilience of the dark market ecosystem and we anticipate that they may inform future research on the self-organisation of emerging online markets.
- Publication status:
- Accepted
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.3MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-020-74416-y
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Research
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 2020
- Article number:
- 18827
- Publication date:
- 2020-11-02
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-08-12
- DOI:
- ISSN:
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2045-2322
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1132602
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1132602
- Deposit date:
-
2020-09-17
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- ElBahwary et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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