[michaelt]

Your concern is a reasonable one: Ross Ulbricht was literally the founder of Silk Road and so should have been able to make darknet transactions as well as anyone - and yet he (allegedly) engaged in six different murder-for-hire attempts spending $730,000 - and none were successful [1].

For more mundane services, though, most 'darknet markets' like Silk Road have a seller account reputation system, like ebay; and a payment escrow system. So you can choose a seller who has 100 previous transactions and a 99.5% positive reputation. And if they don't deliver, they don't get paid.

You can also ramp your purchases up gradually, buying the $10 1-hour DDOS and the $60 1-day DDOS, thus confirming the supplier can deliver before spending more than you can afford to lose.

And of course it's traditional for every bitcoin/darknet service to eventually fold with some insider making off with everyone's money. For that, I don't know what the common mitigations are, apart from not carrying an account balance larger than you can afford to lose.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/21/silk-road...

[thatcat]

That was shown to be a scam by some of the investigating officers who were later arrested for trying to keep some of the btc.

[michaelt]

It was indeed a scam - which is what I mean when I say bilbopotter is reasonable to be concerned that some darknet services are scams.