The Silk Road, until it's demise, was also a tremendous driver of Bitcoin adoption. Not only did it's exclusive use of bitcoin lure new bitcoin users directly, it's media attention and ongoing controversy indirectly sparked interest in the uninitiated.

Further, the Silk Road inspired the creation of other centralized black markets, many of which are still thriving. Markets like Agora, Evolution and the Silk Road 2 have emerged and comprise an online black market magnitudes larger than the Silk Road did in it's prime. However, these markets are fragile. All it takes is the carelessness of an administrator, an exploitable hack opportunity, or some clever detective work to bring them down. This is not the sustainable future of the online drug trade, no. What's needed is a new, decentralized approach.

The OpenBazaar and the rise of decentralized markets

Author Rod Beckstrom wrote the book ‘The Starfish and the Spider’ comparing centralized and decentralized organizations using starfish and spiders as the books core metaphor. The spider is centralized. If you chop off the spiders head, it’s dead. In contrast, starfish do not have a centralized brain. Their nervous system is spread throughout their entire body. This unique trait gives them the remarkable abilities. Most know that starfish will regenerate arms when they are chopped off. More stunning is the fact that the chopped off leg will, itself, generate a completely new starfish.

The Silk Road was a spider. All of it’s data and operations stemmed from the same server and the same man. All federal agents needed to do was chop off the head to bring an end to the organization.

While the Silk Road community routed, many supporters began to ponder what an undefeatable and uncensorable replacement would look like. It was clear that the spider needed to be replaced by a starfish. It would be a decentralized market powered by distributed nodes across a vast network of servers. Buyers and sellers would be connected directly in a peer to peer manner. Savvy black market participants had such a clear idea of what would replace the Silk Road because this would not be the first time the governments attempts to control and censor would be thwarted by decentralization. Just take a look at the music industry.

Napster was the first major file sharing program to allow users to illegally download copyrighted music. When it's popularity exploded in 2000, the RIAA and several governmental institutions banned together to prosecute the Napster team and take down the service, much to the chagrin of the millions of users. The RIAA led victory was short lived, however, as the centralized Napster service was replaced by bittorrent, a decentralized new foe that made napster look as cute as the kitten in it’s logo.

The organizations that swiftly took down Napster posed no threat to BitTorrent. Every battle they ‘won’ was merely severing a leg from a starfish. Fast forward to present day and the forces in the music industry that battled BitTorrent have long given up and your grandma uses it to download ‘The Golden Girls’ episodes.

Meanwhile, goverments are failing to learn from history and will soon waste astronomical amounts of resources battling a foe they can’t defeat. The new decentralized foe they will face is the BitTorrent of commerce. They call it the OpenBazaar.

“History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” -Joseph Anthony Wittreich

[Enter OpenBazaar from far right]