Dark Net Markets (DNM) are online markets typically hosted as Tor hidden services providing escrow services between buyers & sellers transacting in Bitcoin or other cryptocoins, usually for drugs or other illegal/regulated goods; the most famous DNM was Silk Road 1, which pioneered the business model in 2011. From 2013–2015, I scraped/mirrored on a weekly or daily basis all existing English-language DNMs as part of my research into their usage, lifetimes/characteristics, & legal riskiness; these scrapes covered vendor pages, feedback, images, etc. In addition, I made or obtained copies of as many other datasets & documents related to the DNMs as I could. This uniquely comprehensive collection is now publicly released as a 50GB (~1.6TB uncompressed) collection covering 89 DNMs & 37+ related forums, representing <4,438 mirrors, and is available for any research. This page documents the download, contents, interpretation, and technical methods behind the scrapes.

Dark net markets have thrived since June 2011 when Adrian Chen published his famous Gawker article proving that Silk Road 1 was, contrary to my assumption when it was announced in January/February 2011, not a scam and was a fully-functional drug market, a new kind dubbed “dark net markets” (DNM). Fascinated, I soon signed up, made my first order, and began documenting how to use SR1 and then a few months later, began documenting the first known SR1-linked arrests. Monitoring DNMs was easy because SR1 was overwhelmingly dominant and BlackMarket Reloaded was a distant second-place market, with a few irrelevancies like Deepbay or Sheep and then the flashy Atlantis.

This idyllic period ended with the raid on SR1 in October 2013, which ushered in a new age of chaos in which centralized markets battled for dominance, the would-be successor Silk Road 2 was crippled by arrests and turned into a ghost-ship carrying scammers, and the multisig breakthrough went begging. The tumult made it clear to me that no market or forum could be counted on to last as long as SR1, and research into the DNM communities and markets, or even simply the memory of their history, was threatened by bitrot: already in November 2013 I was seeing pervasive myths spread throughout the media—that SR1 had $1 billion in sales, that you could buy child pornography or hitmen services on it, that there were multiple Dread Pirate Roberts—and other dangerous beliefs in the community (that use of PGP was paranoia & unnecessary, markets could be trusted not to exit-scam, that FE was not a recipe for disaster, that SR2 was not infiltrated despite the staff arrests & even media coverage of a SR1 mole, that guns & poison sellers were not extraordinarily risky to purchase from, that buyers were never arrested).

And so, starting with the SR1 forums, which had not been taken down by the raid (to help the mole? I wondered at the time), I began scraping all the new markets, doing so weekly and sometimes daily starting in December 2013. These are the results.

Download The full archive is available for download from the Internet Archive as a torrent (item page) . A public rsync mirror is also available: rsync --verbose --recursive rsync://78.46.86.149:873/dnmarchives/ ./dnmarchives/ For a single file (eg the 2 Grams exports), one can download like thus: rsync --verbose rsync://78.46.86.149:873/dnmarchives/grams.tar.xz rsync://78.46.86.149:873/dnmarchives/grams-20150714-20160417.tar.xz ./ (If the download does not start, it may be a Torrent client problem related to Getright-webseeding-support; if the torrent does not work, all files can be downloaded normally over HTTP from the IA item page, but if possible, torrents are recommended for reducing the bandwidth burden & error-checking.)