Student : Jason Hsu Abigail Wang Advisor : Kuang Chi Huang

Outline ▪Introduction ▪Background ▪History ▪Product and Main Services ▪Accessing Silk Road ▪Silk Road Analysis ▪Feature of Silk Road

Introduction

Background ▪Silk Road ▪A series transmission routes between East and West online black market

Background ▪Anonymity ▪Crypto-currency

Background ▪Technically, the website is not a shop, it is a “marketplace” which provides an online platform for buyers and sellers to meet and transact with each other. ▪Up to the end of 2012, the estimated Silk Road 's sales exceeded more than 1.2 million US dollars monthly and operators could earn roughly 92 thousand commission fees per month.

History

Products and Main Services

Accessing Silk Road ▪Accessing the Silk Road was not as simple as going to Google search engine and typing ‘Silk Road’ ▪Requires a TOR program “The Onion Router” ▪First created by a non-profit organization called the TOR-Project ▪anonym’s user, it hides the users IP address so that governments cannot trace the location of the user. ▪TOR allows a user to safely purchase goods while hidden.

Silk Road analysis ▪“The original Silk Road was an old world trade network that connected Asia, Africa and Europe. It played a huge role in connecting the economies and cultures of those continents and promoted peace and prosperity through trade agreements. It is my hope that this modern Silk Road can do the same thing, by providing a framework for trading partners to come together for mutual gain in a safe and secure way”

Silk Road analysis ▪Advantages of Silk Road for being safe and secure to sell drugs and firearm. ▪The site neither sold nor managed these sales ▪platform which they accept a small commission fee for successful transactions ▪Silk Road was shut down at October 2013, Silk Road 2.0 was rebuilt shortly after. ▪Silk Road uses bitcoins to make transactions.

Business Model of Silk Road

Silk Road analysis ▪28 categories with about 4500 items for sale (Cristin 2012) ▪Drugs and drug related products are hit about 65% of all the items on auction ▪Silk Road does not publish transactions of sold products but there are other ways to collect them. ▪Keep track of sellers product profile ▪Feedback and comment of seller ▪1397 profiles exist on Silk Road, total number of items for sale at 24,422 ▪8000 Bitcoins per day to 15,000 Bitcoins daily

Top 20 categories of items available worldwide on Silk Road

Feature of silk road ▪Feedback ▪Forums ▪Chatrooms ▪Hero Status: certain heroes are awards a promotion to being welcomed into the administrator and developer family for keeping the community healthy and strong. ▪Silk Road wiki: guide users on how to use Silk Road more efficiently ▪Escrow: unique feature that prevents sellers and buyer of doing any fraud.

Q & A