Inside the ‘DarkMarket’ Prototype, a Silk Road the FBI Can Never Seize

The Silk Road, for all its clever uses of security protections like Tor and Bitcoin to protect the site’s lucrative drug trade, still offered its enemies a single point of failure. When the FBI seized the server that hosted the market in October and arrested its alleged owner Ross Ulbricht, the billion-dollar drug bazaar came crashing down.

If one group of Bitcoin black market enthusiasts has their way, the next online free-trade zone could be a much more elusive target.