page_title: Darknet market
section_title: Customer interactions
hierarchical_section_title: Darknet market / Market features / Customer interactions
caption_attribution_description: English: Evidence entered into the record of Ross Ulbricht's Federal trial in the U.S. Southern District Court of New York, depicting a flowchart of Silk Road's payment system, as envisioned by the U.S. Government.
context_page_description: A darknet market is a commercial website on the web that operates via darknets such as Tor or I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, stolen credit card details, forged documents, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, steroids, and other illicit goods as well as the sale of legal products. In December 2014, a study by Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth suggested the second most popular sites on Tor were darknet markets.
  Following on from the model developed by Silk Road, contemporary markets are characterized by their use of darknet anonymized access, bitcoin payment with escrow services, and eBay-like vendor feedback systems.
context_section_description: Transactions typically use Bitcoin for payment, sometimes combined with tumblers for added anonymity and PGP to secure communications between buyers and vendors from being stored on the site itself. Many sites use Bitcoin multisig transactions to improve security and reduce dependency on the site's escrow. The Helix Bitcoin tumbler offers direct anonymized marketplace payment integrations.
  On making a purchase, the buyer must transfer cryptocurrency into the site's escrow, after which a vendor dispatches their goods then claims the payment from the site. On receipt or non-receipt of the item users may leave feedback against the vendor's account. Buyers may "finalize early" (FE), releasing funds from escrow to the vendor prior to receiving their goods in order to expedite a transaction, but leave themselves vulnerable to fraud if they choose to do so.
  Following Operation Onymous, there was a substantial increase in PGP support from vendors, with PGP use on two marketplaces near 90%. This suggests that law enforcement responses to cryptomarkets result in continued security innovations, thereby making markets more resilient to undercover law enforcement efforts.
caption: Flowchart of The Silk Road's payment system, produced as evidence in the trial of its owner.
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