Silk Road – Dark Web and Tor

Think of the internet as an iceberg in the ocean. The part that is visible to you and me is the “surface web”, which consists of the indexed pages on the internet, such as Google, or things you might find on Amazon and Facebook.  

Then there’s the deep web. The deep web is a subset of the Internet consisting of pages that can’t be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. Pages that require membership fall under this category, so like online banking, your company intranet, and the very page that you are watching this web lecture on.  

Then, there’s the dark web, also called the “dark net”. This is a further subset of the “deep web”. None of the content can be accessed via a normal Internet browser, instead, you need a special cryptographic software, such as The Onion Router, also known as Tor.  

Tor is a free software, initially created by the US Department of Defense and the US Navy in the 1990s for the purpose of secured communications. The name itself is the analogy of an onion with lots of layers, layers upon layers – as it offers anonymous access to online resources by passing user requests through multiple layers of encrypted connections. Therefore, you can think of the software essentially as a digital invisibility cloak, hiding users and the sites that they visit.  

And it is this anonymity of the dark web, coupled with blockchain’s relatively anonymous and decentralized nature, that laid the foundation for the infamous marketplace Silk Road, which we’ll introduce next.