Darknet Marketplace Monero Market Goes Offline Until January 2017
“We believe Monero is by far the best cryptocurrency at the moment to buy/sell anonymously,” an unknown rep of Monero Market told CCN.com before the Monero-focused dakrnet marketplace went offline today.
The representative added:
Bitcoin is not anonymous anymore. There has been lot’s of article of buyers/sellers being busted recently and this is just the tip of the iceberg. We believe in Monero and we do believe our market will grow in the next months as more and more people will get busted using Bitcoin.
Monero Market was the first darknet marketplace to solely use Monero, a crypto-currency which uses a consensus algorithm to ensure the anonymity of the user.
Monero is an open-source pure proof-of-work cryptocurrency running on Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD. Monero uses the proof-of-work algorithm, CryptoNight, an AES-intensive and “memory heavy” algorithm reducing the advantage of GPU over CPU processing.
“It seem (sic) there is no place for an exclusive XMR market right now,” Monero Market said in a statement posted to Reddit . “Not a single transaction since we launched. The risk and the cost running this type of market is not worth it at all.”
Monero Market said they would continue to develop the market and release a new version in January “hoping there will be more users than bag holders at this time.” They still have faith in Monero.
“We do believe XMR will be a major coin over the next years but the community need to use the coin for real use and not just hold it hoping to get rich quick,” the team wrote in a signed PGP message. “The real value of a coin stand in the daily volume of transactions (real transaction to buy something).”
They re-iterated: “Before people starts speculation that this is an exit scam…. let’s be clear here… Since we launched we have not received a single deposit (vendor bond, purchase, etc…) which is the reason we took the decision to put it offline and continue to work on it and release a more complete version after the hard fork.” The message was signed “MM.”
The history of darknet marketplaces is wrought with examples wherein buyers, sellers and even developers involved in darknet marketplaces are outed by authorities and taken to prison. The loudest example of this is that of Ross Ulbricht, who was given a lifetime sentence for his role as Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the Silk Road.
A DarkNet phisher recently busted , despite using a tumbler to mix coins, “is proof no one is safe,” according to the Monero Market representative. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is using blockchain analysis tools to keep track of the dark web.
Monero, though, was still learning itself when it came online. After discussion cropped up about Monero Payment ID’s possibly providing a link between an individual and a transaction, the darknet marketplace made a change.
“For this reason, we integrated address on our marketplace so users don’t need a Payment ID to deposit on our marketplace,” the poster said.
The XMR community felt twofold about the emergence of Monero Market. Happy to see a company using Monero, many were displeased it was a darknet marketplace.
“I think they want the coin to success outside the DNM world,” the rep said. “The problem is that by Monero nature, DNM and XMR are a perfect fit. Monero will gain value over the time as more DNM adopt it.”
The marketplace launched September 30, 48 hours after Oasis left the darknet marketplace leaving many with unreturned funds. It lasted about 20 days.
“We, as a market owner, should be happy to see a competitor leaving,” the Monero Market representative said at the time. “But they left by exit-scamming which is bad for the crypto community and was bad for us as lot’s of people think we are Oasis because we launched our market when they exit scammed.”
Images from Shutterstock.
