Sheep Marketplace
Sheep Marketplace was an anonymous marketplace set up as a Tor hidden service. It launched in March 2013 and was one of the lesser known sites to gain popularity with the well publicized closure of the Silk Road marketplace later that year. It ceased operation in December 2013, when it announced it was shutting down after a vendor stole $6 million worth of users' bitcoins. Bitcoin theft incident In December 2013 Sheep Marketplace announced that one of the site's vendors exploited a vulnerability to steal 5,400 bitcoins, valued at about $6 million at the time. According to ''Forbes'' and ''The Guardian,'' several users reported the site had started to block withdrawals of bitcoins more than a week prior to the theft. Users furthermore suggested the site's administrators held far more than 5,400 bitcoins, pointing to records of a coincidental transfer of almost 40,000. As users in the site's forums began to complain and discuss the possibility of connivance, administrators took th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Darknet Market
A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor or I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, stolen credit card details, forged documents, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, steroids, and other illicit goods as well as the sale of legal products. In December 2014, a study by Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth suggested the second most popular sites on Tor were darknet markets. Following on from the model developed by Silk Road, contemporary markets are characterized by their use of darknet anonymized access (typically Tor), Bitcoin or Monero payment with escrow services, and eBay-like vendor feedback systems. History 1970s to 2011 Though e-commerce on the dark web started around 2006, illicit goods were among the first items to be transacted using the internet, when in the early 1970s students at Stanford University ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tor (anonymity Network)
Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's Internet activity. Tor's intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to communicate confidentially through IP address anonymity using Tor exit nodes. History The core principle of Tor, onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online. Onion routing is implemented by means of encryption in the application layer of the communication protoc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tor Hidden Service
Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's Internet activity. Tor's intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to communicate confidentially through IP address anonymity using Tor exit nodes. History The core principle of Tor, onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online. Onion routing is implemented by means of encryption in the application layer of the communication protocol stack ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Silk Road (marketplace)
Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market. It was launched in 2011 by its American founder Ross Ulbricht under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts". As part of the dark web, Silk Road operated as a hidden service on the Tor network, allowing users to buy and sell products and services between each other anonymously. All transactions were conducted with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency which aided in protecting user identities. The website was known for its illegal drug marketplace, among other illegal and legal product listings. In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down Silk Road and arrested Ulbricht.Ars TechnicaHow the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts, 3 October 2013 Silk Road 2.0 came online the next month, run by former site administrators, but was shut down the following year as part of Operation Onymous. In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted in federal court for multiple charges related to operating Silk Road and was ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency began use in 2009, when its implementation was released as open-source software. The word "''bitcoin''" was defined in a white paper published on October 31, 2008. It is a compound of the words ''bit'' and ''coin''. The legality of bitcoin varies by region. Nine countries have fully banned bitcoin use, while a further fifteen have implicitly banned it. A few governments have used bitcoin in some capacity. El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, although use by merchants remains low. Ukraine has accepted cryptocurrency donations to fund the resistance to the 2022 Rus ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Discussion Forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible. Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; example: a single conversation is called a " thread", or ''topic''. A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread and can be replied to by as many people as so wish. Depending on the forum's settings, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in to post messages. On most forums, users do not have to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Blockchain
A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where data nodes are represented by leaves). The timestamp proves that the transaction data existed when the block was created. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a ''chain'' (compare linked list data structure), with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are irreversible in that, once they are recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks. Blockchains are typically managed by a peer-to-peer (P2P) computer network for use as a public distributed ledger, where nodes collectively adhere to a conse ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bitcoin Fog
Bitcoin (ISO 4217#Unofficial codes for cryptocurrencies, abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network Node (networking), nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency began use in 2009, when its implementation was released as open-source software. The word "''bitcoin''" was defined in a white paper published on October 31, 2008. It is a Compound (linguistics), compound of the words ''bit'' and ''coin''. The legality of bitcoin Legality of bitcoin by country or territory, varies by region. Nine countries have fully banned bitcoin use, while a further fifteen have implicitly banned it. A few governments have used bitcoin in some capacity. Bitcoin in El Salvador, El S ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cryptocurrency Tumbler
A cryptocurrency tumbler or cryptocurrency mixing service is a service that mixes potentially identifiable or "tainted" cryptocurrency funds with others, so as to obscure the trail back to the fund's original source. This is usually done by pooling together source funds from multiple inputs for a large and random period of time, and then spitting them back out to destination addresses. As all the funds are lumped together and then distributed at random times, it is very difficult to trace exact coins. Tumblers have arisen to improve the anonymity of cryptocurrencies, usually bitcoin (hence bitcoin mixer), since the currencies provide a public ledger of all transactions. Due to its goal of anonymity, tumblers have been used to money launder cryptocurrency. Background Tumblers take a percentage transaction fee of the total coins mixed to turn a profit, typically 1–3%. Mixing helps protect privacy and can also be used for money laundering by mixing illegally obtained funds. Mi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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BTC-e
BTC-e was a cryptocurrency trading platform primarily targeting Russian auditory with servers located in USA - until the U.S. government seized their website and all funds in 2017. It was founded in July 2011 by Alexander Vinnik and Aleksandr Bilyuchenko, and as of February 2015 handled around 3% of all Bitcoin exchange volume. It was a component of the CoinDesk ''Bitcoin Price Index'' since the index's September 2013 formation. BTC-e was operated by ALWAYS EFFICIENT LLP which is registered in London and is listed as having 2 officers (Sandra Gina Esparon and Evaline Sophie Joubert) and two people with significant control: Alexander Buyanov and Andrii Shvets. The US Justice Department attempted to close down BTC-e on the 26th of July 2017 when they charged Vinnik and BTC-e in a 21-count indictment for operating an alleged international money laundering scheme and allegedly laundering funds from the hack of Mt. Gox Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya, Tokyo, J ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Coinbase
Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headquarters. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California headquarters and change operations to remote-first, part of a wave of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. History 2012–2019: founding and early years Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former Airbnb engineer. Armstrong enrolled in the Y Combinator startup incubator program and received a $150,000 cash infusion. Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs trader, later joined as a co-founder after noticing Armstrong's pos ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |