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Cryptomarkets or darknet marketplaces host multiple ‘vendors’ selling a variety of illicit products. The most sold and sought products on such markets are illegal drugs. These markets use cryptocurrencies as a payment system and provide participants with anonymity through their location on the dark web, and in recent years they have seen continuous growth in revenue and exchange. Existing literature has provided various explanations for this growth, but in 2017 the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Europol concluded in their 2017 ‘Drugs and the Darknet’ report that current interpretations of trends are not sufficient. This chapter will provide an alternative explanation for this phenomenon by considering web-based drug selling and purchasing in terms of trends towards ‘Uberisation’ and ‘McDonaldisation’ and applying Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to the discussion of the dynamic cultures of consumption and different subcultures of the drug world.

The growth in cryptomarkets has reinvigorated the research on illicit drug distribution due to the availability of large-scale data. This data has enabled researchers to ask new and detailed questions about how participants in these markets trust each other enough for the market not to collapse. This question deserves more attention because it has become a taken-for-granted notion that repeated transactions and social categories create trust. Whether online or on the street, economic exchanges under illegality are more uncertain than transactions in the legal economy. This puts higher demands on trust, as there is less information and the stakes are higher. In this chapter, the author presents definitions, typologies, and disciplinary contributions to the study of trust and examine how it has been operationalised in a sample of 13 peer-reviewed articles. These articles focus on three dimensions of trust: process-based trust that derives from repeated transactions with known partners; character-based trust measured by the networked reputation scores; and institutional-based trust in the platform and its administrators. In practice, the trust bases are intertwined. Drawing on the broader social science literature on trust, a mesolevel operationalisation that centres on networked reputation scores as embedded in processes and institutions can draw the research together in a multidisciplinary framework.

Cryptomarkets have expanded rapidly since the launch of Silk Road in 2011, offering a significant new mode for the sale and distribution of illicit drugs. One of the key questions accompanying the proliferation of cryptomarkets and online drug distribution concerns how these unique online fora alter relationships between drug suppliers and their customers. Existing research points to an increase in perceptions of safety and respect among people who use cryptomarkets to purchase drugs relative to other ‘offline’ modes of drug acquisition. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that drug suppliers are also attracted to cryptomarkets by perceptions of increased safety, as well as by market norms and institutional processes that are characterised by respect and courteous engagement. These issues fall broadly under what has been termed market ‘gentrification’ – that is, the substitution of offline drug market norms, which are sometimes characterised by violence, intimidation, suspicion, and exploitation, with relative feelings of safety, respect, and courtesy. This chapter explores the ‘gentrification hypothesis’ and examines how the unique structural characteristics of cryptomarkets, which include user feedback and ratings, dispute resolution systems, and administrator and community ‘policing’ of cryptomarkets, as well as online discussion forums, assist in fostering the development of pro-social norms that appear to be prevalent on cryptomarkets.

This chapter argues that the Americanisation of online policing has questionable impacts in Australian prosecutions involving drugs obtained and distributed through dark web cryptomarkets. The authors describe several Australian prosecutions of mid- and low-level dealers who have accessed drugs through the dark web and contrast these with the United States (US) case against the cryptomarket, AlphaBay. The discussion in this study emphasises how Australian police and courts view the relative weight of dark web activity associated with the domestic and transnational supply of illicit drugs that result in formal prosecutions. The authors suggest that large-scale forms of online and dark web police surveillance undertaken by US enforcement agencies reflect Ethan Nadelmann’s (Cops across borders: the internationalization of US criminal law enforcement, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) thesis on the Americanisation of global policing through transnational communications networks. The authors then explain how key elements of transnational dark web drug supply appear to have a marginal bearing on criminal investigations into low- and mid-level traffickers in Australia, which rely on conventional surveillance tactics to identify clandestine mail pickups, physical distribution methods, and irregular money trails. However, the authors then illustrate how the Americanisation of online policing that targets high-level entrepreneurs and seeks to dismantle or eliminate dark web cryptomarkets has important implications on Australian reforms aimed at enhancing online surveillance powers to target a range of crimes that are often wrongly associated with illicit drug cryptomarkets. The authors conclude by demonstrating how intensive dark web surveillance has limited direct impact on routine drug policing in Australia, with dark web communications simply another medium for facilitating the physical detection of illicit transnational drug transactions.