Just a week before Dream Market officially shuts down, some are speculating the move might bring about a shift in the price of Bitcoin.
Although the cryptocurrency has proved to be affected by other factors, we cannot neglect the fact that one of the largest dark web marketplaces is going down, and therefore the coin might encounter some unwanted consequences.
The Final Countdown
J-CODE, a U.S. law enforcement unit tasked with tackling drug trafficking, recently announced an operation resulting in more than 60 arrests.
This operation went by the name SaboTor, derived from the words "sabotage" and "Tor." Generally, it was a successful crackdown, with more than 50 dark web accounts closed in the process.
Police also confiscated 51 weapons, around 300 kilograms of drugs and a total of $7 million in both cash and cryptocurrency.
Soon after the operation's results were made public, one of the top darknet markets made an unexpected announcement.
In late March 2019, the moderators of Dream Market disclosed that the site would be shutting down on April 30, 2019.
Since the closure of Silk Road in 2013, Dream Market has risen to become one of the largest dark web drug marketplaces to date.
The market has an impressive lifespan of six years, which is unusually long for darknet platforms.
Dream is also a significant source of transactions using the most dominant cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
With Dream's closure, darknet vendors and buyers rushed to find alternatives.
Around this time, a wave of concerns surfaced as darknet users were unsure whether the market was compromised by law enforcement.
Many speculated that the announcement may have come from undercover operatives, rather than legitimate Dream Market moderators.
A large number of users found it strange that Dream Market reported their shutdown one month in advance.
This is where suspicions started floating around, and the idea of the police being behind this announcement was not too far-fetched among the chief concerns.
On Twitter, users warned about the possibility of the site being compromised by the DEA.
In a similar sequence of events in 2017, Hansa Market was run as a honeypot by law enforcement for 30 days before it was officially shut down.
ALERT: Assume that Dream Market is compromised. Today they announced they are shutting down 30 days from now, in April. Law enforcement ran Hansa as a honeypot for 30 days after seizing it. This feels very similar. #darknet #tor pic.twitter.com/bEsvT6JB6W
- DarkDotFail (@darkdotfail) March 26, 2019
After Dream's announcement, members of the darknet community were quick to recognize the familiar circumstances.
This ultimately led to shared concerns among Dream's users and their insecurity to withdraw their own funds from their digital wallets.
In late-2017, a string of outages affected Dream's site and several users complained about losing their Bitcoins during these incidents.
Additionally, a lot of money is being trapped, as users do not want to risk their transactions being possibly tracked.
Will the Price of Bitcoin Be Affected?
One thing is for certain-the transactions that are being made on the dark web offer an immense amount of liquidity to the price of Bitcoin.
However, judging by past takedowns, the coin and its price generally proved not to be largely affected by various changes that come from the dark web.
While the Bitcoin market might be influenced by the government's shutdown, crackdowns on darknet marketplaces are not likely to impact the currency's value.
With mainstream interest and adoption, Bitcoin has grown so large that it is generally clear of being affected by the closure of top darknet markets.
