Unless everyone has been living on a rock around here we have all encountered a very brutal attack at our freedom to using the DNM's. I am here to bring a breakdown of what's been happening in the last few weeks. I will preface this with I just got back from a long 8 month and 1 day long vacation, so I may have missed some points.
ALPHABAY: It seems like in the early days of alphabay, while the forums and the site were separate entities anyone using the nulled version of Vbulletin that AB was running was sending out emails in December of 2014 to the new users, and people recovering there emails on the forum and in the email fields it showed an email of Pimp_alex_91@hotmail.com this was his said personal email. Thought I'm sure a check into his email address on social media such as linked in found it belonged to a "Alexandre Cazes" in December of 2008 they found a post on www.commentcamarche.com by a user of Alpha02 where he posted something about removing a virus from a digital photo he ended the post with a signature of alpha02 and his email on the day of the raid (July 5, 2017) they saw him logged in as "admin" and was chatting with the data center that hosted one of their servers about a "law enforcement created service outage" he also had passwords to all the servers and infrastructure for AB The following has been confirmed seized 1,605.0503851 BTC 8,309.271639 Ethereum 3,691.91 Zcash On top of the following hot wallets 293.79476862 BTC 43.05943697 BTC 360.384477 ETH 11,993.15882 Monero So in total 8.8 million dollars
Hansa This one hurt A LOT more it seems like the Dutch police have had control over Hansa since June 20th 2017 from the looks of the very little info they have out more than 10,000 foreign addresses have been handed over to Europol and more than 500 Dutch addresses were reported for courier intercept! Going as far as editing code to capture passwords used editing auto pgp encrypt and any Bitcoin so they can watch the blockchain.
Dream Market This market is kind of I feel is a sinking ship and is impending doom. Not hating, it's just that the signs are pointing that way. Seems like MANY MANY MANY popular vendors have had their PGP key changed to the Dutch Nation Police's PGP key not even hiding it as a quick look up of ownership shows 'DNP', Fredthechicken has retired saying "good luck, Dream" if and when something happens here I will update.
August 1st BTC will be going through a user initiated hard fork to BCC (FUCK BCC). This means any coin you have RIGHT NOW IN YOUR CONTROL (NOT COIN BASE OR ANY EXCHANGE SOMETHING THAT LETS YOU CONTROL YOUR PRIVATE KEYS) you will be receiving equal value in BCC if you choose to go BCC. Otherwise you can stay BTC this allows the 2 coins to separate, but keep in mind everyone is going to be buying and selling so just because you see BCC sky rocket, what I think will happen, doesn't mean it's going to go anywhere because everyone will be dumping it. Once they get uncomfortable with the bubble it will create and you would see the coin crash down. How deep will it go? We will never know. In my opinion, and I have no skin in the game, BCC is going to fail and it'll just be another shit coin. BTC will be updating to a 2mb block size here soon (segwit2).
So as the saying goes, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." What is there to learn here? For right now in the use of a market for the next market is most likely more risky (not saying it's not horrible) but since a lot of vendors on Alpha and Hansa were also on Dream we are not sure what info they have gotten about those vendors what will be happening to them and vice versa. There are safe markets, like DHL, but the vendors aren't all on there. DHL vets there vendors so your chances of getting ripped off goes down significantly. TMG has a forum based DD system. I must say, I don't think I'll be using a market for a few months while we see more info that comes out about this.
If I have forgotten about anything feel free to ask me it here I will respond as soon as possible I'll be here all night
-Lucid
What a discordant and sad attempt at summarizing the years events.