Collective Dynamics of Dark Web Marketplaces
Abeer ElBahrawy, Laura Alessandretti, Leonid Rusnac, Daniel Goldsmith,, Alexander Teytelboym, Andrea Baronchelli

TL;DR
This study analyzes how dark web marketplaces adapt and reorganize after closures, revealing rapid user migration and systemic resilience despite illegal activities and risks.
Contribution
It introduces a novel dataset of Bitcoin transactions and demonstrates how user migration sustains dark market ecosystems after closures.
Findings
User migration is swift and efficient after market closures.
Migrants are more active users compared to non-migrants.
Migration favors markets with higher trading volume.
Abstract
Dark markets are commercial websites that use Bitcoin to sell or broker transactions involving drugs, weapons, and other illicit goods. Being illegal, they do not offer any user protection, and several police raids and scams have caused large losses to both customers and vendors over the past years. However, this uncertainty has not prevented a steady growth of the dark market phenomenon and a proliferation of new markets. The origin of this resilience have remained unclear so far, also due to the difficulty of identifying relevant Bitcoin transaction data. Here, we investigate how the dark market ecosystem re-organises following the disappearance of a market, due to factors including raids and scams. To do so, we analyse 24 episodes of unexpected market closure through a novel datasets of 133 million Bitcoin transactions involving 31 dark markets and their users, totalling 4 billion…
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