Bitcoin payments can now be traced back to the dark web users!

The dark web is an encrypted part of the web that hosts online content that is not available on regular search engines. The dark web is also known as the ‘darknet’ and, it is highly popular for drug deals, illegal markets, and other illicit and criminal activities. It is extremely private and highly protected from the surveillance of authoritarian governments.

The dark web is responsible for facilitating a growing underground marketplace that sophisticated criminals use to traffic drugs, stolen identities, with other illicit products and services. And with the untraceable cryptocurrency as the primary source of payment, close cooperation between the governments, financial institutions, and regulators is required to tighten the belts around these nefarious practitioners.

How Bitcoin payments are being used to unmask them?

Researchers have found a way of identifying those who brought or sold goods on the dark web. The dark web contains numerous hidden services that can be accessed through an anonymity-protecting system, called Tor (The Onion Router).

By linking bitcoin wallets with transactions on the dark web, researchers at Qatar University in Doha were able to unmask 125 Tor users. First, they pulled out 150 hidden services from the dark web and found 88 active bitcoin addresses from the public data available on the landing pages, then they used the same technique to uncover more such services from Twitter and the Bitcoin talk forum. With this, they were able to connect the dark web and the public domain and used a statistical technique called the wallet closure and connected bitcoin payments from individual wallets.

Several authoritarian organizations have been trying day and night to block access to the dark web. After years of research, there are now threats to its legitimacy. Nevertheless, the growing use of bitcoin and technological advancements may drive dark web users to innovate other ideas to carry out operations on the dark web.