Bitcoin is the most popular currency on the dark web

Author: Mia

Two professors at the Department of War Studies at King's College London have published their latest findings after investigating the Onion Router and Tor networks, both of which are designed to make it difficult to track the activities of online users.

The study found that the site offered 12 illegal goods and services, including in the financial sector, with Bitcoin still the preferred digital currency for most transactions.

“Bitcoin is the most used currency for trading services hidden behind Tor,” wrote Daniel Moore, a cyber threat intelligence engineer at the War Research Unit.

A report published in February-March, "Politics and the Internet in the Shadows," mentioned: Analysis of global political strategies found that there are about 300,000 network addresses, 5,205 of which are certified, and about 2,723 of these URLs are considered illegal, but they all continue to exist with "high confidence."

The illegal goods and services on these websites include drugs, weapons and money. The research team found that the drug category had the highest registration rate, with 423 websites, followed by finance, with 327, and other categories with 1,021.

Financial websites that have been proven to be illegal have three main areas of content: money laundering, stealing credit card numbers, and trading counterfeit currency.

Since the Silk Road was shut down in October 2013, Tor's anonymity has been widely questioned. In October 2014, academics at the University of Luxembourg found that even if Tor and Bitcoin were used together, users' anonymity could still be compromised by attacking the site for about $2,500. Motherboard's latest report shows that the US government, with the help of researchers, has identified ways to reduce the anonymity of Tor sites.

But the latest reports also suggest that coin-mixing services, such as CleanCoin, which emerged around the end of 2013, can ensure privacy by providing users with bitcoins from a variety of sources, making it "impossible" to track the origin.

The report's authors, including King's College professor and technical writer Thomas Reid, immersed themselves in the featured onions between January and March 2015, browsing up to 100 pages per site to avoid biasing the findings.

JPM compiled from

Coindesk, Bitcoin Remains Most Popular Digital Currency on Dark Web, by Michael Del Castillo.