Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

by Andy Greenberg

Tor was the dark web’s active ingredient, providing a kind of double-blind anonymity. It was designed so that anyone could visit a dark web site who knew the site’s address—a long and random-seeming string of characters. But no visitor to that site could see where it was physically hosted, nor could the site identify the location of its visitors. Any third party snooping on their connection could learn nothing about the locations of the computers on either end.

There were no real search engines for the dark web, and browsing it was often vexingly slow, given that Tor worked by triple encrypting your web traffic and bouncing it through three random computers around the world.