A response to Dolliver's “Evaluating drug trafficking on the Tor Network: Silk Road 2, the sequel”

Abstract

The leading aim of Dolliver's (2015)) paper “Evaluating drug trafficking on the Tor Network: Silk Road 2, the sequel” is to document changes in the size and structure of cryptomarkets following the demise of SILK ROAD 1 (SR1) using data she collected from SILK ROAD 2 (SR2), which she casts as successor to its namesake. There are undoubted strengths in Dolliver's study. She should be commended for the use of automated collection of ‘digital traces’ (Decary-Hetu & Aldridge, in press). This methodology allows researchers access to full populations rather than to the more limited samples generated by self-disclosures of market participants (e.g. Caulkins, Gurga, & Little, 2009). We also applaud Dolliver for having thoroughly cleaned and recoded her data. Although this is standard good practice, the ‘big data’ generated from Internet-derived data can make doing so exceptionally resource intensive. As we have discovered, the categories into which cryptomarket vendors place their products for sale do not always correspond to their own product descriptions. The analysis we produced for a working paper on SR1 (Aldridge & Decary-Hetu, 2014), without recoding, resulted in occasional erroneous estimation of the revenue generated by different drug types, which we identified only after cleaning and recoding the nearly 12,000 listing dataset. These strengths aside, we identify two main problems with Dolliver's paper.... Language: en