Anonymity is definitely a big problem, but there's something to be said for a network that doesn't have a central authority. I don't think the problem with Silk Road was the anonymity, it was more the fact that it was a central authority - once that was taken down, the whole system stopped. As the article says, it's very difficult for the feds to take down a network like this if there's a ton of people using it.
Right, but distributed systems are solved problem at this point, anonymity is much harder, and GNUnet's primary model is distributed / mesh darknets as a foundation for some of their anonymity features.
That's a really good point. In my university Networks & Protocols course we made an anonymous messaging fabric where all the nodes could talk to one another but none knew who anyone else was, and every node could connect into the network by just knowing one node's address.
Could you make a market like this anonymous in the same fashion? Even if the Feds seized one node they'd have only seized one node?
I think you could, check out GNUnet, seriously. Those guys have been laboring away for a long time to produce a platform for anonymous and encrypted communication.
GNUnet can be used to build a darknet of any sort: P2P chat, a social networking application, email, you name it. Brilliant people are plugging away at it to build a platform for people with less knowledge of cryptography (like me) to build this sort of stuff on top of.
Read the docs? Their API is C based so it's not necessarily as easy as a Node.js or Ruby programmer might be used to.
They do have a P2P chat program built on-top of it so you can use that as an example and I think someone did their thesis on building a "facebook for GNUnet" on an older version. Not sure if that code is public though (it most likely is, I just don't know where).
Why aren't there any of these guys trying to build this sort of thing on-top of https://gnunet.org/ ?