Agora

~ the goodbye ~

Tor was software I had read about and never had any reason to run. In 2013 that put me with almost everybody: the network existed publicly as a story about journalists and dissidents, and the busiest part of it was a shop. Agora was that shop for about two years, and up to that point it was the largest one there had ever been.

It opened in september 2013, a few weeks before the FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library and took Silk Road offline. That timing was the entire business plan, whether the operators had intended it or not. A market full of buyers and sellers suddenly had nowhere to go, and Agora was standing there with the lights on.

Nobody knows who ran it. There is no founder story here and no indictment with a name in it. The operators signed their announcements with a PGP key, which is the whole public identity of a business that was moving more product than any of its competitors.

What it sold was mostly drugs. The Digital Citizens Alliance counted 7,400 drug listings in january 2014 and 12,053 by that august, with the total including weapons and other services reaching 16,137 over the same stretch. That was more than Silk Road had carried at its own peak. Agora also listed categories the original Silk Road had refused on principle, which is one of the ways a successor grows.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what really happened ~

In november 2014 a joint FBI and Europol action called Operation Onymous seized Silk Road 2.0 along with dozens of other hidden services in a single coordinated sweep. Nobody outside law enforcement could explain how the servers had been located. Agora came through it untouched, and for a while that read as competence.

Then MIT researchers published work on attacks against Tor hidden services that could locate a server without breaking any encryption. The Agora operators put out a signed message saying they had detected activity around their own machines matching what the paper described. They said a fix was in progress but would take time, and told users to clear outstanding orders and pull any bitcoin out immediately. The date on that announcement was 26 august 2015 and the pause was described as temporary. It was not.

~ what it became ~

The traffic went to AlphaBay, which grew larger than Agora ever had been and lasted until july 2017, when it emerged that its operator had put a personal email address in the site's welcome messages. That is the difference between the two stories. AlphaBay was found through a mistake. Agora was closed by people who had not made one yet and did not intend to find out what theirs would be.

There is a reading of this where the operators were running an exit all along and used the paper as cover. No evidence for that ever surfaced, and the withdrawal window was real. Either way the effect on everyone watching was identical: for the first time a market of that size died because of what its owners believed about the network underneath it, rather than because a door came off its hinges in a data center somewhere.

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