Now that Empire Market has exit scammed and users are migrating, I've seen some people I respect suggest that Monopoly and White House Market are likely to become market leaders. I'm a little skeptical of that, but if I'm wrong then it could potentially improve DNMs. (Thread)

Most cryptomarkets, including popular ones like Empire and Alphabay, have largely followed a similar structure laid out by Silk Road back in 2011. A centralised escrow system, optional PGP, and Bitcoin payments. It works, users understand it and it’s fairly easy to set up.

I say easy because you can just buy/find a public codebase with this model (e.g. Eckmar’s Script) and build new features on top, which is what a surprising number of market admins do, resulting in a flow of markets with bad security and a similar design. https://twitter.com/DarknetLive/status/1234578655982112769

That stasis in market design has led to bad outcomes. Poorly-built markets get hacked. Bitcoin stays popular but is easy for LEA's to trace (and can be ‘de-mixed’). Centralised escrow allows for exit scams and optional PGP means that many users don’t bother with it.

Enter WHM and Monopoly in 2019. Both markets place an emphasis on improving the security behaviours of their users in order to improve the stability of the DNM ecosystem. Forced PGP, pushing users to Monero, site coded from scratch. And, in Monopoly's case, no centralised escrow.

Both markets have in-depth guides on using their market, buying Monero and improving your OPSEC. And both markets have a pretty aggressive attitude to users who ask them to bring their architecture in line with other markets for convenience. They are hard-nosed about security.

More secure practices across users = more stable trade. So if these two became market leaders, then this could potentially be great for DNMs, because users would be forced to drop bad habits and learn better ones...

...And that's precisely why I'm skeptical.

Because, just as we see on the regular internet all the time, when you give people a tradeoff between convenience and privacy, most of us will choose convenience. In fact, users are already starting to complain about WHM's forced-PGP usage and are asking for shortcuts.

So whilst I'm not going to name any specific prediction for the next top market, I think there's a fairly good chance that it will mostly use Bitcoin, it won't enforce PGP, and it will use a standard centralised escro-

Well, you get the picture. /end.