Dark Market – the Internet you need to know
Uninformed media reports of the ‘DarkMarket’, tout it as a new system – a Silk Road the FBI could never seize. In fact its not new, and has been around for ages. But it is a useful tool for off-gridders.
DarkMarket works in a fundamentally different way to Silk Road or any other online marketplace. Instead of being hosted like a normal website, it runs in a decentralized peer-to-peer network: Users download a piece of software, which allows them to access the DarkMarket site. The really clever part is how the system incorporates data with the blockchain, the part of Bitcoin that everybody can see. Rather than just carrying the currency from buyer to seller, data such as usernames are added to the blockchain by including them in very small transactions, meaning it’s impossible to impersonate someone else because their pseudonymous identity is preserved in the ledger.…
