Seems like an unusually high amount of DNM's falling recently, while the past few months has been relative smooth sailing.
Just in the last week or two:
Cannabis Road hacked with 200 BTC stolen.
Pirate Market admin missing and withdrawals disabled.
OUTLAW market hacked, all BTC stolen.
Pandora admin / all staff missing.
Is anyone willing to bet which is the next to fall? Of course, I don't want that to happen. But it seems inevitable that these markets rise and fall all the time. Interested in hearing people's opinions about which will be next to run into difficulties and the reasons for their choice of DNM.
Can refer back to this thread in the future to see if your predictions were accurate. All DNM's on the sidebar are choose-able.
What do you say?
I've got a feeling that Agora will close soon - but in an orderly way. The first TOR marketplace to successfully retire without robbing people, getting hacked or busted.
By the middle of this month, Agora's owners had earned 81,538 BTC in commission. If we call it $500 oer bitcoin, that's $40 million - easily enough to pay for a second server.
This is Agora's commission wallet.
https://blockchain.info/address/1HC3dc4DubRat1P39YBBkwVRbph3ijbtPQ
I don't think I'm giving away any secrets - 5% of every transaction passes through this wallet, so it lights up like a christmas tree if you do a forward-looking taint analysis from your own Agora deposit address.
you will also see that a decent tumbler operates in agora, this wallet l is unmissable, but customers and vendors coins get tumbled when you withdraw, and you are actually paid somebody else's bitcoin that was tumbled yesterday (the fact that they were buying drugs too isn't important).
The wallet raises some interesting thoughts:- if $40M is agora's 5% cut, that meabs that $800M dollars of business has taken place in a marketplace which is STILL IN BETA, and has 20% downtime.
More importantly, I feel, is that Agora's 5% commission stopped going through that wallet in mid-august. The person or people who wrote agora's software has 40 million dollars, but is holding off from buying more processing power. they won't have had a day off since february. DDOS attacks, hackers, law enforcement, constant nursemaiding of the struggling server, scammers, escrow disputes in every time zone - most markets fake a hack and shut down, JUST TO GET A DAY OFF.
When BBMC moved to Agora in February, we got SheepRoadReloaded2 (the forensic blockchain accountant) to deposit a few cents into our agora wallet from the 1Ah wallet he uses for chasing bitcoin thefts. Then I emailed Agora admin and got them to promise they will never steal from us. I thought it went without saying a year ago, but it doesn't. Agora admin are men of few words, but they have quite a dry sense of humour usually. They were all new and idealistic, SR2 hadn't hemoraged all its its vendors and customers to agora yet and there were new market features everyday. They seemed really upset that anyone would suggest they would do a runner, but they grudgingly agreed and promised to never rob any BTVA vendors, and we won't send SRR2 after them to do a forensic blockchain audit.
Its not worth it for 1 bitcoin or so. Agora were involved somehow with bitcoinfog, and they'd seen Sheeproad's wallet dropping pennies through their tumbler and come out of the other side with the bitcoins he was chasing.
In the aftermath of silk road, marketplace owners were cracking up and robbing us every 6 weeks I suggested that Agora should decide when its going to retire, and pre-announce it. They really seemed to like that idea, because markets usually carry on to failure.
They must be like old men now. Rich, but no time to spend it. Every day, the discussions about retirement must be getting more frequent.
I just feel that technical problems are being put on hold at Agora, and they're taking each new day at a time, exhausted but carrying on.
They will announce that they're shutting down. We have a month, finish any business and take our bitcoins (I hope).
They could always use their good name, as the first market not to fail, to start up again with more servers, admins etc in place from day 1. DPR is a hero because he didn't rob us, but he did something worse:- he didn't know when to stop. He, and lots of other people are in prison. and we still lost our bitcoin.