And to some extent, that use case has never really gone away. “The ecosystem is still quite vibrant,” said Nicolas Christin, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who has studied dark web markets since 2011 and wrote the original study of economic activity on the Silk Road. Cristin estimates that these markets still represent “between half a billion dollars and billion dollars per year,” as new sites pop up – inevitably – to replace the ones that shut down, such as Hydra. “We’ve seen this story five or six times,” said Cristin. “At this point, it starts to look a little bit like “The Fast and the Furious” movies. You think something new is going to happen, but it’s always more of the same.”
