[vezzy-fnord]

As the article itself said, successor sites are inevitable (and there are at least two that are thriving right now in SR's fallout).

Those who prefer online black markets over physical transactions will simply migrate to the new marketplaces and consequently turn them into the "new Silk Road".

The only true effect, perhaps, will be people taking security even more seriously. I read a statistic at some point that approx. 80% of SR users didn't use PGP (The Daily Dot sources this claim, otherwise I cannot validate it).

[codyb]

I believe there were actually already competitors to the silk road long before this happened. Something called Atlantis Marketplace[0]?

Although that appears to have been shut down as well and perhaps absconded with users money[0].

If you go here[1] (reddit) you'll see postings for a "sheep marketplace".

I went to the silk road once. Definitely very interesting to check out. It's pretty amazing 1.2B dollars worth of transactions were concluded there.

All in all I'm totally against the drug war even if I don't feel the need to order meth or lsd online.

[0] - http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4773902/shuttered-undergro...

[1] - http://www.reddit.com/r/atlantis/

[pyre]

> 80% of SR users didn't use PGP

I find this to be dubious. How does PGP relate to SR usage? When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software? Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts? How was this information sourced? Was there just an informal poll on their forums?

[gwern]

> I find this to be dubious.

I don't. People are lazy and don't want to use PGP because it's confusing and hard. PGP-related questions were some of the most common help problems, on /r/SilkRoad, people would regularly mention not encrypting their address (ranked up there with early finalization for being incredibly frustrating for those of us who knew what we were doing), and the Atlantis CEO stated that like 90% of Atlantis users relied on the Atlantis-provided PGP encryption rather than encrypting it themselves.

> When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software?

SR had an internal message system, much like Reddit's PMs. You would copy the public key off the vendor's profile page on SR (or possibly from a thread on the forums), you'd ASCII-armored encrypt your address to the public key, and paste it into an address form field during the order process. You'd do the same thing for a regular PM.

> Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts?

Sure: ASCII armor, remember. Any forum which allows you to type in text, allows PGP signing of messages. Few people bothered, except for important statements like from DPR about new rules or .onion addresses or stuff like that.

[cbhl]

PGP isn't just for email. PGP can be used to sign and/or encrypt messages wherever you publish them.

PGP would be useful in ensuring that SR isn't tampering with your messages between any two parties on the site.

[lmm]

The site recommended buyers use PGP to encrypt their on-site messages to sellers (including their mailing addresses), so that even SR admins wouldn't have access to them. It's slightly cumbersome but really the only way to do secure messaging on the web, as the lavabit story shows.