Darkcoin the new cryptocurrency now ruling drug selling dark web

Darkcoin the new crypto-currency now ruling drug selling dark web

Dealing drugs is a shady business run by shady people requiring shady and dark web. Secrecy is warranted and so people involved in the trade are naturally finding out new ways to avoid detection. This has led to online drug sellers at least, adopting crypto-currency as a means of payment. It is cashless, fast and the one currency being accepted currently is especially secretive. This world was ruled by Bitcoin upto now but a new more secretive crypto-currency is fast taking its place – Darkcoin.

Darkcoin in the dark world

Darkcoin is the currency is in vogue now a days on the dark web. It was launched earlier this year with the main goal of being more secretive than Bitcoin. Over the past month, drug dealing websites have been putting this claim to test. Websites exist that use Bitcoins almost exclusively also, but there is a way to trace bitcoin transactions. Darkcoin allows you to hide your money trail. Currently, two underground websites have been found using Darkcoin as a medium of exchange for drugs.

The website owners claim they started accepting darkcoins as it is no more effort than using bitcoins and at the same time provided higher levels of secrecy, something bitcoin lacks. “Using [darkcoin] on Diabolus is no more difficult than using bitcoin, and we hope that this currency will receive more adoption because of its superior anonymity,” a Diabolus administrator known as Accida wrote on the Reddit forum devoted to dark net markets two weeks ago. “Ultimately, Diabolus cares about protecting your security and anonymity, and we’ll consistently take action to maintain it as best we can.”

History

The dark web has been interested in bitcoin use since early 2011, that was before bitcoin gained popularity. Bitcoin offered users to make Paypal like swift payments and was a good substitute for cash. The only problem arose was that all bitcoin transactions were recorded in the ledger called blockchain. Every transaction could be traced back- if not to a name then to an alias of the bitcoin holder. Protecting oneself takes a lot of pain staking effort for those dealing in drugs.

Darkcoin is designed to scramble any attempts at blockchain tracing. Darkcoin users can, whenever they want, swap their coins with two other users, a process known as CoinJoin. That exchange is organized by a so-called Master Node, one of the servers that runs the darkcoin network in exchange for periodic payments in the currency. And since that coordination of CoinJoin transactions is protected by encryption, it’s nearly impossible for an outside observer to match up darkcoin payments with anyone’s identity.

Current scenario

The creator of darkcoin Evan Duffield has said that when he created the currency, he never thought it would be used for such activity, yet he’s happy that people are recognizing darkcoin and he is sure this will give a boost to the adoption of this system. And to be fair, everything has negatives. It’s not his fault that his creation is being used for less noble activities. Bitcoin also got buoyed by the adoption by Silk Road, way before it got its fair sharein the spotlight. Duffield points to dozens of websites that already accept darkcoin payments, many in exchange for private web hosting or VPN services to encrypt and anonymize internet traffic. “Early on with bitcoin the only thing you could do with it was gamble and buy drugs. Then it got past that and was accepted on many sites all over the internet,” says Duffield. “The same thing is happening with darkcoin.”

Darkcoin had in the past reached a valuation of $13, making it the second most valuable crypto currency second only to bitcoin at that time. But since then, a steady decline has followed suit with valuation down to just $2 now. The creator hopes this new found acceptance will result in an increase in valuation. The rise and fall in value however, hardly means anything as compared to privacy, as the black market Silk Road administrator known as the Dread Pirate Roberts said after a bitcoin crash in 2013. “Bitcoin’s foundation, its algorithms and network, don’t change with the exchange rate,” he wrote in a message at the time. “It is just as important to the functioning of Silk Road at $1 as it is at $1,000.” That may be even more true of darkcoin, which is specifically designed to allow anonymous transactions.

Other crypto-currencies aka altcoins

Since the takedown of Silk Road last year by the Feds, the crypto-currency market has been evolving , using features like multi-signature transactions and even peer-to-peer selling systems to better protect transactions from surveillance. And the lack of privacy is being tackled head on my Darkcoin and the yet to be released Zerocoin.  Analysts are expecting darkcoin acceptance to only grow based on the privacy concerns people have. Though major sites aren’t expected to start accepting darkcoin soon, smaller sites may start accepting it sooner as a means of differentiation.