Black Market Reloaded

~ the last words ~

Black Market Reloaded is the one that closed because it was winning. Every other name in this part of the record ended in a seizure notice or a stolen escrow account, and this one ended with its operator writing a post explaining that too many customers had shown up.

It had been running since 2011 as a hidden service on Tor, under an operator using the name Backopy and nothing else. It sold drugs, and it also sold the things its larger rival would not list. Stolen card numbers were allowed and so were firearms, which is the line Silk Road had drawn and refused to cross.

That made it the second choice for most of its life, and second choice was a comfortable place to be. A smaller market attracts less of everything, including the sort of attention that arrives with a warrant.

None of this was ever anywhere near me. It sits in the part of internet history i can read about and cannot personally remember, and the interesting thing in it is not the goods but the arithmetic. Anonymity on a network like Tor depends on a crowd being the right size, and Backopy is the only operator in this story who appears to have done that calculation honestly.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

The first ending came in october 2013, two weeks after the FBI took Silk Road down. A site administrator with access to the servers leaked the source code publicly. The worry was not that competitors would copy it. It was that somebody reading carefully enough could work backward from that code to the identity of the person running it.

Backopy announced the site was closing. Then, a few days later, the announcement was withdrawn on the grounds that the leak turned out to be less revealing than first thought, and the market stayed open. The whole episode is a compressed lesson about who the actual threat is in an operation like this. It was never the police that week. It was staff.

~ the closing notice ~

Then came november. Sheep Marketplace went dark with 5,400 bitcoin missing from its escrow, and everybody who had been standing on Sheep moved again, most of them to Black Market Reloaded. It was already carrying Silk Road's displaced traffic from october. The second wave landed on top of the first.

Backopy posted that the site would go offline. The reasoning given was that Tor was not designed for a user base that size and the market could no longer promise anonymity to the people using it, which is the only promise it had ever actually been selling. The site went dark in late november 2013, on schedule, without taking anybody's balance with it.

~ the long tail ~

The traffic moved on to Agora and then to Evolution, and Evolution spent fourteen months proving it could hold everyone's money before walking off with it in march 2015. So the market that shut itself down for being too popular handed its users to the market that robbed them. Nobody in that chain got a better outcome by staying.

Backopy was never arrested and was never publicly identified. That is a rarer ending in this category than the prison sentence is, and it happened for a boring reason. The site stopped while it was still small enough to stop cleanly.

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