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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> A total of at least 320,000 transactions were carried out via the marketplace

That's the total from 1-2 years (I can't find when in 2019 did they start). If that's the biggest right now, I'm surprised how small the markets are.

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Agree. Maybe there are many small ones now rather than few huge ones. Would be interesting to see total dark market transactions by year.

The active ones with a significant number of transactions are a single digit amount typically with only a few 'bigger' ones (tho in reality still pretty small).

How do we know that we know all the active ones? Wouldn't they prefer to not be too widely known?

How would they have anywhere near a comparable amount of users if people can't find out about them?

They also had 20 servers seized which also gives an indication on size.

That doesn't give any indication of size at all. For a start "a server" isn't a standard size. That could be 20 Raspberry Pis or 20 machines equivalent to Amazon t2.2xlarge resources. Even if it was 20 Raspberry Pis, a site could handle tens of millions of transactions a year with a moderately well designed architecture.

"servers" is not a useful metric.

Very true, and likely to be news spin without further details.

Odds are most of that server capacity was used for DDoS protection, not for handling legitimate traffic.

For all we know they could call a gaming desktop or NAS a 'server', or a switch or a router.

They mention over 420,000 BTC plus tens of thousands of monero in transactions. That’s a fair size for 1-2 years.

Where does that amount come from? The article mentions 4,650 BTC and during that time the price mostly hovered around $10k. That's $85k a day in transactions and 584 transactions a day. I suspect about the same as my local supermarket.

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