Atlantis

~ the goodbye ~

Atlantis is the only name in this part of the record that bought itself a marketing campaign. Everything else on tor in 2013 was built to be hard to find. This one made an animated commercial about a stoner named Charlie who finds good weed online, then put it on youtube where anybody at all could watch it.

It opened in march 2013 as the third market of consequence on the network, behind Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded. The pitch was product management rather than ideology. Faster pages and lower vendor fees, with a support desk that answered. It was also the first of these markets to take litecoin alongside bitcoin. Read the promotional copy with the subject matter stripped out and it is a startup deck.

My distance from this is total, and for once it is not a regional distance. In september 2013 i was in ankara doing engineering work, and the entire tor market economy reached me through english-language tech press months after the fact. The reason it stays interesting is that it is a marketing story wearing a crime story's clothes.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the commercial ~

The video went up in june 2013 and it worked, in the sense that press coverage followed immediately. A co-founder claimed more than a million dollars in sales after it ran, and over half a million dollars in june alone. Asked on reddit why a hidden service would want publicity, the answer was that vendors wanted buyers and buyers had to hear the name somewhere.

What it also bought was attention from the other direction. Silk Road's operator, whose diary was later read out at his trial, thought the advertising was reckless. He was right about the general principle and wrong about which of them had less time left.

~ the notice ~

Around 20 september 2013 the front page changed to a message saying that due to security reasons outside their control there was no choice but to cease operation. Users had one week to withdraw. The notice added that coins left after that point would not be recoverable, which turned out to be the accurate part.

Then the site was gone, and the withdrawals had not all cleared. Staff and customers argued in public about which had happened, a genuine security scare or a robbery dressed as one. The european drug monitoring agency's own table of market closures lists it under exit scam.

~ the funny part ~

Ross Ulbricht's journal, entered as evidence at his trial, records the atlantis operator telling him they were closing because a leaked fbi document had described weaknesses in tor. Whether such a document existed has never been shown. Less than two weeks after the atlantis notice went up, the fbi arrested Ulbricht in a san francisco library and Silk Road was seized.

So the market that made a cartoon commercial about itself walked away intact with a warning nobody could verify, and the market that kept its head down was seized. Both operators believed they understood the risk they were carrying. One of them was even right, for reasons that may have had nothing to do with what he thought he knew.

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