And to some extent, that use case has by no means actually gone away. “The ecosystem remains to be fairly vibrant,” mentioned Nicolas Christin, an affiliate professor at Carnegie Mellon College, who has studied darkish internet markets since 2011 and wrote the unique research of financial exercise on the Silk Highway. Cristin estimates that these markets nonetheless symbolize “between half a billion {dollars} and billion {dollars} per yr,” as new websites pop up – inevitably – to interchange those that shut down, equivalent to Hydra. “We’ve seen this story 5 – 6 instances,” mentioned Cristin. “At this level, it begins to look a little bit bit like “The Quick and the Livid” films. You assume one thing new goes to occur, but it surely’s all the time extra of the identical.”
