Silk Road Reloaded Ditches Tor for a More Anonymous Network
Trying to shut down Silk Road, and any of its many-headed hydra reiterations, seems to be the ultimate lesson in futility. According to Motherboard, a new version of the online black market, called Silk Road Reloaded, launched today on the I2p anonymous network, dealing with several altcoin currencies.
In fact, those are two of the biggest differentiators between this new Silk Road and its ancestors. Where Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0 used Tor and Bitcoin almost exclusively, Silk Road Reloaded will use a total of eight different forms of cryptocurrency, including Darkcoin, Dogecoin, and Anoncoin, with more along the way. As Motherboard mentions, Silk Road Reloaded has most of the illicit unmentionables you'd expect from an online black market, save for weapons and stolen credit card credentials.
The biggest news is that Silk Road Reloaded transitions from Tor to the anonymous, decentralized I2p network. Think of it as the deeper deep web. When Silk Road 2.0 was shutdown in November last year, black markets struggled to find an alternative to set up shop, fearing that Tor had been compromised or was culpable due to its U.S. government ties (those fears have not gone away.). It would seem that Reloaded has found a possible answer.