Saturday 25 January 2014

Rough Trade on The Silk Road

The Market Place.

It used to mean just that. Usually a central location in a village, a town, a big city where people knew to come to sell their produce and wares and their customers to browse and buy. It would be a bustling spot for traders and out of a transitory presence over many centuries would develop the commercial core of our urban environments from the Middle Ages with permanent shops and services.

Such places would be a focus of civic activity with gatherings, meetings, protests and insurrections, executions and celebrations.

I grew up in a series of market towns and became very familiar with the sights, sounds and functions. In my early years in Abingdon, Buckinghamshire I remember the excitement of massing in the market place at the Town Hall for the distribution of hot cross buns as part of the Easter Festival. These were thrown into the assembled crowd from the town hall balcony. In Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk my Father worked just on the market place and in those days before out of town retail parks it was a case of having to regularly come to the central location for basic grocery shopping in the Liptons Supermarket. In Brigg, Lincolnshire there was a weekly market with stalls and stands selling every household and general good that you were ever likely to need. At Christmas the market place was the scene of seasonal fairs and I was often to be found in some brass band or small group of musicians entertaining the festive shoppers. We, as a family, then moved to Beverley, East Yorkshire. The town had two longstanding and traditional places for the Saturday and the Wednesday markets, the former with an ornate Market Cross built in 1711 as a prestigious feature to signify the wealth of the town. It has required regular renovation every few years but still serves as a community focal point, a bandstand and a shelter for the townspeople. Often argued as the older of the two places, the Wednesday Market took a secondary role from as early as the 1730's.

In my adult years I have continued to live near a Market Place and have enjoyed a few moments people watching or in more recent times, sat on a pavement terrace with a coffee and sticky bun.

In many former thriving market places in the UK there is now a rather desolate atmosphere as shops have closed down and have not been replaced. A resident population on whom the traders relied have moved out to the suburbs and soul less outer estates.

What does a Market Place now mean to a good proportion of us?

I expect that the most common answer would be "The Internet".

How far distant is the idea of a market place now from those we knew and frequented, where there was contact and interaction face to face? The transaction process in the historic interpretation of a market place was one of open honesty and disclosure. The goods were on show. They could be touched, tested, checked and experienced at the point of sale. The whites of the eyes of all parties could be examined and if you did not like what you saw then there was an option to just walk away. The Internet is a remarkable global market place but one of mistrust, misrepresentation and mischief even with the best safeguards in place and amongst individuals with a good rating from their peers in previous business dealings.

Take the Silk Road.

Sounds quite romantic and epic and indeed the term comes from the network of trade routes between Europe, India, China and destinations in between started by the Han Dynasty in 206BC. It operated on a wealth generating basis, a mutual process of buying and selling that produced great fortunes and also broke as many again.

In the domination of the internet as the Market Place the evocative Silk Road has become an insidious underground website for the trafficking of drugs and many other forms of contraband and activity. It had all of the signs of being a very clever operation in that for 2 years from 2011 it was able to resist the attentions and determined efforts of Law Enforcement to bring it down. Termed a Tor hidden service the online browsers could do so with with anonymity and progress to a form of registered membership through an auction of a trading account.

The Chief Operator under the pseudonym of "Dread Pirate Roberts" was a promoter of the free market but in its most illicit and toxic form. The FBI shut down the Silk Road in 2013 but its ethos persisted in a second incarnation within a matter of a few weeks.

The currency adopted has been the bitcoin, a peer to peer digital payment system or cryptocurrency which was earned in exchange for products, services or other currencies.

The seizure of the inaugural Silk Road netted the FBI 144,000 bitcoins worth $28.5 billion dollars. Although a small player in the currency markets the bitcoin has its own speculators and exchange rate basis.

By March 2013 the market place was advertising 10,000 products of which 70% were drugs including heroin, LSD and cannabis. Other items, not necessarily illegal, ranged from weapons to erotica, jewellery, art works, clothing and cigarettes. The loosely described "terms of service" do allude to a bit of a conscientious code in prohibiting the sale of anything intended to harm or defraud but obviously based on a very broad interpretation of what is moral and right .

The slickness of the site has earned it the title of the Amazon.com of illegal drugs or Ebay for drugs.

Consumers, faceless or just misguided have frequented the market place and an estimated $15 billion in transactions have been made annually although more like $30m to $45m is thought to be closer to reality.

In terms of numbers of participants this level of activity equates to around 3900 vendors and around 147,000 buyers and this is represented by the accumulation of nearly 80% of the bitcoins in circulation.

The market place via this medium is extensive with 30% of registered users in the US, 27% of undeclared stateship and the rest across a who's who of the major economic nations. Traffic through the Silk Road system in all of its versions and wannabees has been regular and even after successes by the Authorities in terminating the networks there is always another just in waiting. It is the free market gone mad.


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