A member of an anti-drug police unit stands guard over marijuana packages seized from FARC guerrillas in Colombia Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

The dark web may have a silver lining, according to a pair of academics: A new class of geekier, less violent drug dealers.

A law professor and a professor of criminal science argue, in a paper released online, that by reducing physical contact between drug dealers -- particularly between dealers and their suppliers -- the Silk Road's bustling Web-based narcotics trade may have prevented bloodshed that would have occurred in the street-level illegal drug market.


The Silk Road, after all, became a bustling online drug bazaar by giving users a new way to deal in contraband anonymously. On the site and dozens of copycats that followed its takedown by law enforcement in October, users' physical locations were obscured by tools like bitcoin and the anonymity software Tor. Those crypto protections are designed to prevent anyone -- including cops and competitors -- from knowing where users are. According to University of Lausanne criminologist David Decary-Hetu and University of Manchester law professor Judith Aldridge, that layer of anonymity made technical know-how and online customer service, not a propensity for violence, the barrier to entry for dealers on the Silk Road. "This new breed of drug dealer is... likely to be relatively free from the violence typically associated with traditional drug markets," reads the paper, the title of which calls Silk Road "a paradigm-shifting criminal innovation." "Whereas violence [in the traditional drug trade] was commonly used to gain market share, protect turfs and resolve conflicts , the virtual location and anonymity that the cryptomarket provides reduces or eliminates the need -- or even the ability -- to resort to violence. "In the drugs cryptomarket era," the paper adds, "having good customer service and writing skills...may be more important than muscles and face-to-face connections."

Aldridge and Decary-Hetu's study, still being reviewed for publication by a journal they declined to name, doesn't offer crime statistics to back up that argument. Instead, it uses slightly convoluted logic based on assumptions about the source of violence in the drug world. The Silk Road's role in reducing bloodshed, they say, is a "very clear inference" from an analysis of the size of transactions made on the market. Using a custom web crawler, they scraped Silk Road in September of 2013 -- just before its shutdown by the FBI -- to collect a snapshot of all feedback and review data from the site's vendor profiles. Those posts provided a catalog of past deals on the site, including their frequency and size. They found that the high average price of those deals, along with other clues, implies a surprisingly large number of Silk Road buyers were not consumers, but dealers buying wholesale.

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That's a different take than previous studies, which have described Silk Road as an eBay for drugs. Instead, Aldridge and Decary-Hetu say their data shows a vast portion of the Silk Road's sales were "business-to-business." That finding moves the market's role farther up the drug market supply chain than was previously thought, they argue, placing it closer to the cartel-controlled drug producers behind much of the trade's violence. And since the study argues the traders on both sides of a Silk Road deal were often drug dealers, the researchers claim Silk Road's business-to-business deals mean twice as many opportunities for violence were prevented.

All of that assumes, without much hard evidence, that transactions between drug dealers and their suppliers lead to dangerous conflicts more often than transactions between dealers and their customers. But Aldridge argues you don't have to swallow that premise to take her larger point about how the Silk Road model reduces violence: Virtual drug deals don't allow for physical attacks. "People who don't meet face to face can't hit each other or shoot each other," she says.


According to the study's measurements, the top 20 percent of Silk Road deals were for more than $1,000-$1,475 (£600-£900) for cannabis and $3,494 (£2,084) for ecstasy, for instance. Those amounts, which Decary-Hetu and Aldridge compared with previous studies on real-world drug dealers, sound like far larger purchases than those intended for personal consumption. And in terms of revenue, those high-priced deals were much more important to the site's sellers' livelihoods, bringing in between 31 percent and 45 percent of their total revenue versus just 3 percent or 4 percent for deals in the cheapest 20 percent. The presence of products like "precursor" ingredient for synthesising drugs and lab notes also implies that drug dealers, not just consumers, were shopping on the site.

The study also notes that the Silk Road trade focused far more on less addictive and harmful drugs than might have been previously assumed. "Drugs typically associated with drug dependence, harmful use and chaotic lifestyles (heroin, methamphetamine and crack cocaine) do not much appear on Silk Road, and generate very little revenue," the study reads. It explains that skew by pointing to the waiting period between a Silk Road drug buy and the product's arrival, vacuum-sealed, in the mail. "The site may therefore have suited purchases by recreational users with the resources and time to place orders and wait for deliveries; dependent users with chaotic lifestyles, in contrast, were likely to have had neither."

If the Silk Road did in fact reduce violence, that's in part by design. The site's founder, who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts and is alleged to be 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht, wrote that his creation was intended to enable non-violent, small-time dealers and to take power away from bloody cartels. "For the first time I saw the drug cartels and the dealers, and every person in the whole damn supply chain in a different light," he wrote on the site's now-defunct user forums in 2012. "Some, especially the cartels, are basically a de facto violent power hungry state, and surely would love nothing more than to take control of a national government, but your average joe pot dealer, who wouldn't hurt a fly, that guy became my hero...It wasn't long, maybe a year or two after this realization that the pieces started coming together for the Silk Road."

The notion of the Silk Road as a peace-loving innovation, of course, is tarnished by prosecutors' accusations that Ulbricht paid would-be assassins to kill six people, including a blackmailer and an employee he worried might act as an informant.

But Aldridge counters that those murder-for-hire attempts took place outside the Silk Road's market, and have little to do with its interactions. "Our argument about situational violence doesn't mean people can't be violent in other aspects of their lives," she says. "They can engage in domestic violence or fight when they're drunk, but none of those things are facilitated by a crypto market."


She also notes that despite the prosecution's claims, the killings Ulbricht allegedly commissioned don't appear to have occurred; they may well have all been law enforcement stings or scams by con artists posing as assassins. The same anonymous, bitcoin-based transactions that worked so well for facilitating drug deals, Aldridge argues, haven't turned out to be as convenient a system for paid murder. "We haven't seen any, to our knowledge, murder-for-hires happening on crypto markets," she says. "In fact, it may be much harder by virtue of the markets' anonymity."

Even if they do reward nonviolence, Aldridge and Decary-Hetu admit the Silk Road and the sites it's inspired still account for just a tiny portion of the overall drug trade. Zeta drug cartel enforcers won't need to trade their AK-47s and briefcases of cash for Tor and bitcoin just yet.

This article originally appeared on Wired.com