The Silk Road, I learned, was an e-commerce market on the dark web. In other words, it was one of thousands of specially protected websites that relied on Tor to hide the location of its servers and that could be visited only by someone running Tor on their computer, too. 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
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