Is this a joke or a scam?

There are over 1,000 "fraud" items on your commission referral link here. Please consider that you are not only introducing people to a world of harm but profiting from it. This is a shame since you seem to also be adding some quality content to little biggy.

I'm aware of that, it's a black market. I have my opinion on some services and products offered but my opinion does not matter, nor does the opinion of any other individual or entity.

It's the sum off all opinions that will cause self regulation. No product or service causes harm on it's own. It does when an individual decides to either consume a substance or use a service that can cause harm. In fact black markets as TR reduce the harm inflicted upon the global population through e.g. 'the war on drugs" that does anything but harm reduction.

For sure it's not perfect, perfection comes through evolution and darknet markets are a recent phenomenon that will follow the same path. In my assumption we are going to see darknet markets that sell regular goods and services as a direct competition to the capitalist system in place. They are the exponent of Agorism: they deprive governments from resources.

I earn as it's a referral link:

In fact, I don't earn on this referral link, I randomly selected an invitation link that I found in a public location. Think about it: a custom, personal referral link is bad OPSEC practice. It would glue my persona here to one on TR.

But let's assume that it was a personal referral link. Then I merely provided a 'sneak peak' on an economical and sociological evolution that is inevitable and I would profit from the investigative work done, to provide it.

Using your own logic, any printed or online medium introduces anyone to 'harm'. As the foundations of the knowledge acquired to inflict harm require access to the knowledge to do so. Knowledge is never free.

How the hell does your opinion not matter if you are endorsing the market?

Some decent points you make if not for the conflation of drug intake freedom and stolen credit cards.

Conflation?

The agorist society to which we are evolving through technology self regulates through various services provided by the market that tackle this fraud. And there are various: white hat hackers, grey hat hackers, the anonymous collective ... that already do. Pedophile content, hate, terror, racism, corruption is hunted and has been countered.

I'm guesstimating but maybe the overall perception on the fractional banking system is that low, that no real services sprout. So for now it would appear that the market does not see it as high priority issue.

Don't shoot the messenger :-)

Homey you are a promoter of a haven for fraud here, not an innocent messenger. Self-regulation starts with your own self. Then it's up to the folks calling you out here and that seems to be working.

I've got 95 things to distract you from simple fraud

As always, the real story is a bit more complex then what e.g.. DeepDotWeb makes out of it. The problem is that a lot of people, even tech journalists, don't have the technical knowledge nor do they know the culture on the darknet, let alone stand the actors.

I have been following and using some dark net services, even before the first SilkRoad. I'm a data cruncher that uses the web as my test lab, using information sources which are publicly accessible. I have a bunch data scraping tools, that basically visit all these sources and that stores the data I want. A whole bunch of data is a dataset.

Datasets are fun. Especially when combined and using existent or self invented algorithms. I'm not going to explain in detail, there are whole books on this.


So the TradeRoute. TR started as a relatively small black market that seriously expanded when Alphabay got shut down. Alphabay, as we all know has been shut down. The owner committed suicide in Thailand. Prior to the shutdown, Dutch police had already taken over Hansa Market which was where most Alphabay vendors and customers went. Hansa was a giant flytrap for anyone that did not go 100% in Opsec.

Next in line was Dream Market, although it had a substantial amount of users, the market and forum was a paradise for scammers. And it wasn't really the best user interface. The continuous rumours that it had been infiltrated by LEO did not help much either.

So TR, which had a decent UI and management of site and forums, dethroned Dream quickly. The TR admins were not exactly the best when it came to security. But they did have a bug bounty program. Somewhere in May, this year, a known blackhat, of which the name I can't disclose, did a full security audit of their stuff. That audit unearthed a bunch of exploits, that were not that critical but which needed to be fixed. Some fixes required adding certain components and reconfiguration of existing software. So the TR infrastructure needed downtime to deploy these.

For some reason they stopped at 70% or something. The things that needed downtime were never implemented because the market was growing too fast and there was literally not a second in 24 hours where they didn't have thousands of users online. When they finally took the decision to bring the market down for maintenance. Team DDOS struck the dark net. And there is no fix for that DDOS. It's a design flaw in Tor, it's shit easy to DDOS a .onion website if you know the

"What is the best Darknet shop which is not prone to exit scams?"
dejos: "TradeRoute!"

Maybe you haven't done research long enough homey or maybe just don't understand what humility could do for you. Either way you have a lot to learn here.

Note to anyone reading this: traderoute has since exit scammed.