Dark Web Explained: How Cryptocurrency Downloaded the Dark Web BySydney Butler-March 26, 2019.1016 Lesser understood sections of the web often appear to spill into the mainstream world with terms like “hacker” and “virus” that usually make it completely incorrect for the evening news. Two fairly recent examples of this are the words “Dark Internet” and “Cryptocurrency” Both are words which many people find very frightening outside of the most hardcore tech circles. It does not help that the popular media misrepresents the meaning of these words. What you may not know is that the Dark Web and Cryptocurrency are linked very intimately. In fact if the industrialized world may never have learned of the Dark Web for the cryptocurrency. I’m getting ahead of myself though so let’s get started at the start.
.1017 That’s the million dollar problem. One which we replied on TechNadu several times. Among these pages you will find a lot of insightful technical information about the Dark Web. That being said, knowing what the Dark Web is, and what makes it different from the internet that you use every day, is actually pretty simple. The key is Hidden Services CryptionTor. To The Onion Router, Tor is short. That refers to the process of routing internet traffic from one device to the next. That way nobody at any stage knows anybody else’s identity or location. An incredibly powerful identity protection system which makes it almost impossible to trace anybody. That’s why this secret network has created hundreds of websites that host content that could cause trouble for people if they tried to put it on the surface web. Tor isn’t just the secret web example, but it’s the largest. For as far as we know, at least. Any kind of Dark Web has been around for a long time. So why do we think all of a sudden? Much of the answer has to do with crypto-currency.
What is Crypto-monnaie?
.1018 In order to understand what crypto-currency is all we need to talk about money in general first. Most of the money’s in digital form these days. No one really carries cash over to the bank when your paycheck is deposited into your bank account, so that it can be stored in a safe. Money is instead held mainly in digital form. The financial institutions of the world work together to keep track of the money flow through detailed digital ledgers. The key fact here is that all of these transactions are centralized and they are all exchanged. This makes moving money around secretly virtually impossible for anyone. It’s the whole reason people try to smuggle cash bales across the border or come up with incredibly complex money-laundering schemes. Cryptocurrency is doing away with all that central planning and power. To build the holy grail known as digital cash, it uses a synced distributed transaction ledger and very complicated encryption math. Money converted to cryptocurrency does not need to be tied to any one person’s identity. Whoever has keys to that wallet crypto has the money. Interesting right? But what does the Dark Web have to do about that? Let’s get to the goof things now!
How is it that they go together?
You might claim in many respects that the golden age of cryptography is well and truly over. The major markets have been shut down, and the authorities are seeking ways to cut through some of the systems designed to protect users ‘ identities. In particular Bitcoin is definitely no longer anonymous. Unless those who build cryptocurrency technology are able to stay ahead of those who want to undermine the technology’s anonymity we may see things diminishing much further than they already have. The government seems to be seeking to rid the internet of anonymity as a whole, and the Dark Web is this philosophy’s antithesis. Who will actually win is somebody’s guess.