Hello fellow travellers of the shady web! I just noticed that I have been severely stupid & evil in the past and I'd ask you to take a minute and see if you agree.
I believe there's nothing morally wrong with drugs, at least if, for the moment, we disregard the effects addiction can have on family and those pesky drug wars. But I am sure you have at some point taken a curious stroll through the more exotic merchandise also available on AB and some other markets: carding, fraud, fake documents, the occasional semi-automatic.
My obvious point is: these are the ingredients for crimes that are most definitely not victimless, and by continuing to spend coin on these markets, you become complicit, you create suffering.
Let me start with the second point, i. e. what effect do your drug trades have on these other deals? It's quite easy, actually: drugs probably account for the majority of AB's revenue and without that revenue stream, they would have a hard time financing the software development and infrastructure that also runs the real crimes.
In addition, if enough people would shun these misery-peddling marketplaces, the markets would have to decide. With drugs being the better business, they would probably abandon these sideshows.
But how are those activities harming people? Oh, let me count the ways:
Being a victim of identity theft can ruin a life. With your credit score ruined, you're liable to lose your house, job, car and, by extension, family and social life. You can end up on the street or in jail, either because you cannot prove that someone else commited crimes in your name or because you had to resort to crime after losing everything. I'm sure a bit of googling will give you examples of victims who fell so deep that they took their own life - all just to finance some Belorussian's beamer.
Even the smaller-scale credit card fraud isn't victimless: yes, the banks usually eat the fraudulent charges. But that only means that the loss is spread among everyone. The next time you use your credit card to fill up your car, remember that 2% of that price goes to the credit card companies, and part of that fee is needed to offset the losses these fuckers on AB caused.
There aren't very many moral reasons to aquire fake birth certificates. These documents are used by criminals to escape the law. There's some rapist lying on a beach right now who would be in jail if he had not had the opportunity to easily order a fake passport online.
I know the situation in the US is different, but at least in Europe it's extremely hard to aquire weapons. I know that this is probably not what happened in Paris, but at some point there will be a guy spraying a café with Alphabay-branded bullets who would otherwise had only had access to a less-letal switchblade.
So for these reasons, I ask you to use your power to clean up these markets. Being a recreational user of some fun chemicals doesn't make you a natural ally of murderers and plunderers. Make some noise and watch them change.
See its kinda hard to explain but what you are saying i can compare to this: BTC is used for many seriously illegal things, i mean there were stories going around that ISIS may have millions in BTC. Its also used to buy guns,fake passports, hire assassins, poison to kill others and a whole list of things that are just terrible. So by your reasoning maybe we should protest bitcoin?
What i am getting at is that the darknet in a whole is something that has no rules or laws or regulations. When you start to attempt to impose these types of laws it becomes the same thing as what we ran away from. You are basically saying that if we protest AB they will change but the problem is this isnt a democracy, each market is its own dictatorship and they do whatever makes them the most money. Also AB wont change its way trappy is a carder so i mean it wouldnt be logical for him...
Im not saying i support these activities you just have to realize what you are asking is the opposite of the purpose of these sites.