So I've been pretty absent from the sub for awhile but this issue has been playing on my mind a lot and it's getting to the point that I can't believe it has gone unnoticed for so long.
For those of you who haven't been around long enough to experience the sexy beast of a market that Agora was, let me preface this topic with the history of it's closing.
Agora replaced Evolution after it's exit and quickly became the largest and most popular market by a considerable margin. For a good while, things were well and stable with the DNM scene and we prospered. This was pretty short lived, though, when Agora went offline and there was a bit of a silent panic among buyers and vendors who needed a nez market HQ. The thing that saved the DNM scene when Agora went offline was the surplus of medium-sized "plan B" markets that existed at the time. We had markets like Blackbank, Nucleus, Abraxas, and Alphabay to pick up the slack. These markets weren't nearly the size of Agora but many vendors were spread across these markets and they all had decent customer bases, layouts, reputation.
Soon thereafter, these markets began to exit scam. Blackbank went down, then Nucleus, Abraxas, and suddenly we were left with Alphabay. There were a few other small markets but the biggest of which was DHL. This is still true today as Alphabay dominates in terms of market popularity and has stepped up as a new-age Agora. Now, we get to the big issue--there are almost no viable "plan B markets" today. If Alphabay was to exit or go down, we would be royally screwed.
The medium-sized markets that exist today are Dream, Outlaw, Hansa, and DHL. You can weed almost all of these out as viable options as safe haven marketplaces for various reasons. Dream is untrustable. I would never in my life perform a transaction through Dream even at a 50% off price. If you need to see why, just check the Superlist. Outlaw and Hansa do not have the reputation or resources to endure a mass migration in case of an Alphabay exit. The same thing that happened with the fall of Agora would happen again: one or two of these markets will rise up as a sort of savior, see a huge revenue increase, and exit with the funds. You can be skeptical about this claiming admins would be smart enough to stay in for the long haul, but the fact is the volatility of these markets is not worth the long haul 90% of the time. Admins know this. They will cash in and bail out.
This brings us to DHL being my favorite as the Alphabay predecessor but it also could not handle a mass migration. Allowing a huge amount of non-reputable buyers and vendors completely undermines the point of the DHL market. If it decided to accept new buyers and vendors again, the direction of the market would have to shift entirely and it would likely be a timely process. I just don't see DHL completely switching gears like that.
I've drawn this out enough so I'll wrap it up. I have been involved in this community for a good while now--along with many of you. Do not let yourselves forget how important market variety is. Alphabay could exit or be shut down at any time and we have no means of recovering from that contingency. I do not have the means of actually taking any steps to resolve this myself other than trying to shed some light on the subject, but I will say if there was ever an opportunity for an emerging market to succeed, it's now. A lot of you might think this is dramatic and Alphabay is safe or it doesn't make sense to exit, but the fact is you just never know.
I marked this as a discussion so let's talk about it. What do you guys think? How big is this problem? What input can you share? Let's keep this whole DNM thing going strong!
Edit: Okay, let me clarify part of a point I'm making here. I see a lot of people saying "with demand there is supply." Yes, this is true with legal, regulated market systems. However these markets are only created illegally. This adds an element of riskk. Supply, demand, and risk. These markets can make huge amounts of cash within minuscule margins of time through mass migration. When these markets hit that monetary goal and thank to themselves, "we have X-million now, it's not worth the risk to stay up when I'm already this rich is when exit scams come. Yes, you can hope that a market does not hit that point at which they think there is not enough reward for the risk--but my entire point is that that point will be reached even faster by these markets because of the small pool we have to choose from, driving a huge amount of Alphabay's traffic towards one or two main markets. These two markets will triple, quadruple--even more--over the course of a couple of weeks. This is a huge problem for us as customers! The escrow balance on these sites will be huge and will probably equal what the market can make on commissions over the next few years. Why would an admin keep the site live when they've made X-million in two weeks which is equal to what they'll make in their entire future lifetime and have to worry about the huge risk increase of being the current biggest market? In my opinion, it seems like so many of you are hopeful that a new market will fill the void but you can't trust that! Nine times out of ten, people will cash out quickly instead of investing in the long haul with that amount of risk.
My go to markets are:
Both offer Multi Sig and its founders have strong emphasis on opsec