One could analyse the data for indicators of an 'exit-scam,' when a vendor or site owner disappears with a customer's cash.

It might be possible to calculate the total number of sales per day on a market, and see whether there are any correlations with the Bitcoin price, he wrote. 'I want to enable all sorts of research and analysis.'īranwen's archive is now open for anyone to use, and he gives some suggestions for research that could springboard from his work. He's worked out the relative risk of running or participating in a market, judging by the number of known arrests from that particular market, and also mapped how long each market existed for.Ī vibrant academic community exists around these sites too, with some researchers looking at the size of different marketplaces, and others investigating whether drugs on Silk Road were sold mostly to individuals, or to other drug dealers. These include academics such as Nicolas Christin from Carnegie Mellon University, and even dark web personalities such as the vendor known as 'El Presidente,' who made a backup of drug dealers' contact details and PGP keys in the event of marketplaces disappearing.īranwen has contributed plenty of pieces of original research looking at the dark web markets. Most of the files in the collection are HTML or CSS, Branwen told Motherboard in a Twitter message, and the archive doesn't just contain Branwen's own data sets, but also those from several other people as well. Gwern Branwen has collected the item listings, customer feedback, images, forum posts and much more of all English-language dark web markets 'This uniquely comprehensive collection is now publicly released as a 52GB (~1.6TB) collection covering 89 & 37+ related forums, representing <4,438 mirrors, and is available for any research,' he wrote. Branwen did this on a weekly or sometimes daily basis, according to a write-up on his site.

Since 2013, Gwern Branwen has collected the item listings, customer feedback, images, forum posts and much more of all English-language dark web markets.

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