Been away from the DNMS for the last few months and holy shit has things changed. AB and hansa both got seized. I knew about AB but hansa was a surprise(my favorite market too). And now the market superlist looks like its being starved(fuck you leo, stop being good at your job). Dream doesnt look like an option either with all there bullshit. Man, what the fuck.
edit:apperently u/young_k got arrested and multiple dnm related subs got shutdown. shits been out of control
And you're surprised? Were you expecting the evolutionary process to conveniently pause in your absence? The darknet is growing exponentially. It's not as if the posh, WASPy kids who were ordering 8 balls anonymously on the internet are just going to stop doing drugs when the feds take down a server. And they're definitely not going to take their freshly waxed, white Ford Raptor to the fucking barrio or to MLK Blvd to try to solicit drugs from an actual gang member. Once you've grown accustomed to Chase processing your payments, and Postman Pat handling logistics, it's hard to go back to the shitshow of the traditional black market. The point being, the darknet will only grow bigger as more people learn to use it, and those who have used it will continue to do so regardless of prosecution.
This means that the game is changing. People used to think that bitcoin was akin to anonymity because despite having a public ledger, the coins could be tumbled in ways that could obfuscate their origin. People thought this because they believed it would require a prohibitively large amount of analytical effort (i.e. money) to research a way to "untumble" the coins. Well it seems as of now (much to the chagrin of the operators of the BTC-e online exchange) Google put up the money.
Bitcoin is close to being a decade old technology. Ross Ulbright has had enough time to read legal documents in prison that he could likely pass the bar exam. What was once new and novel to law enforcement, is now well documented and part of standard protocol. The reality is that even this subreddit has become relatively low hanging fruit. Googling terms related to darknet commerce will often give results to reddit on the first page.
High profile busts have been increasing, but sales are not down. The vendors and consumers with any sense have moved to places that can't be publicly found within ten seconds of using a search engine. Evolution waits for no one, and if you don't continue adapting, you'll one day find that you're the low hanging fruit.