Did you really think someone would risk life in prison for a 0% fee? Donations are one small step away from outright begging. How were they to monetize that? I expected sob stories from their admins and staff. You knew they were waiting for enough to stay in escrow and account balance to make a theft worth it. They did not really innovate. Monero had been coming from alphabay but they whipped their developers harder to ensure they had their first implementation. It was a gamble, this not so new cryptocurrency they yet had the power to sway its price. Marginally though, and we all know they took some small speculative profit from that but it was not enough. They had no long term goals and no long term financial stability. $100000 is a lot to many people.
They did not take enough lessons from prior exit scams but they did take one. Moneromarket. It is likely the ironclad to evo. I suspect that the admins of oasis are the staff kimble and verto never tipped out to from their exit scam.
Or could they be LE?
Of course $100000 in dark money is not much to LE, it would fund one of their agents to troll me on reddit for a year but why bother when many can be encouraged to do so for free?
The oasis market PR guy, behind the scenes would often try to talk with me as equals and though I would politely brush him off each time when he wanted to offer me or alphabay something, he so often tried to get on my good side through other means without appearing too much as a pleaser, I can dig up our old PMs but I remember their essence. I gave him opportunities to troll me viciously, the kind that would generate 3, 2 day long lasting front page posts here but he declined even when I would casually mock them. Why? It would have generated a lot of eyeballs on their market which translate to revenue.
I have made real friends on here, but the proof of friendship in such avenues as tor is to extract nothing from it. It is enough for me to demonstrate that you just want to live without hurting others. I need no gifts or praise.
I do not make threads when I have no proof, but this is the thread I have made with the least proof. A handful of PMs that maybe I am misconstruing. Take it for what you will, I felt you deserved to know.
The third option that I feel strongest towards is right around when oasis was knocked down, so too was the hub, the avengers, hansa, dream, and if the user reports I saw are not lies, alphabay as well. All are back up, except for oasis. They never got a professional security audit did they? Their PR guy in our chats enjoyed stressing their technical know how, but that only ever said to me that they were bluffing and in fact had very little.
PS if you as a vendor or staff are ever separated from the herd of buyers, you will be caught and you will go to prison. Their little vendor store scheme at the end felt exactly like the vendor only login page from SR2. If you can blend in with the crowd you are safe.
I'm confused as to what you are saying here. What is the truth about Oasis? You give like three possibilities.
$100K seems like a really tiny take from running a DNM. Nevermind there was no dragging it out, no allowing deposits but no withdrawls - also if you kept track of the order numbers on the site Oasis was rapidly expanding and starting to blow up.
Oasis took more orders in the last 6 weeks than they did in the 6 months before that. Given the trajectory their orders were on I don't think they exited - I think they were hacked.
The entire time I used Oasis they steadily improved the site - 2FA implementation, the Monero thing was actually a couple of weeks before the site went down - and they improved the vendor listing options just a couple of days before the site went down. An exit would have been planned well ahead of time.
They were hacked.
Smash and grab - 140BTC sounds about right given the number of vendors on Oasis and the order flow.
IMHO this makes the most amount of sense given the peculiar timing of the site - especially the steady rate of improvements and - more importantly - order numbers. If certain trends held even a 4 or 6 week delay would have doubled or tripled their take.
The admins were probably as dumbfounded as anyone else to find all/most of the BTC gone.