How Darknet Sellers Build Trust

Trust used to be a very personal thing: You went on the recommendations of your friends or friends of friends. By finding ways to extend that circle of trust exponentially, technology is expanding markets and possibilities. Consider the darknet. It is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, despite a heavy cloak of anonymity.

You can’t get to the darknet using your regular web browser; most access it via an anonymizing software called Tor (an acronym for “The Onion Router”). The darknet is peopled by journalists and human rights organizations that need to mask their browsing activity but it’s also home to hundreds of thousands of drug sellers and buyers. People who would commonly be stereotyped as untrustworthy, the worst of the worst, yet here they are creating highly efficient markets. Effectively, they are creating trust in a zero-trust environment. Nobody meets in person. There are obviously no legal regulations governing the exchanges. It looks like a place where buyers could get ripped off. Theoretically, it would be easy for dealers to send lower quality drugs or not deliver the goods at all. Yet this rarely happens on the darknet and, overall, you’re more likely to find buyers singing hymns of praise about the quality of the drugs and reliability