The data of the dark web  Jul 14th 2016 by THE DATA TEAM
“SINCE the launch of the Silk Road five years ago, dark-web markets have represented a shadowy and much-maligned corner of the internet. And the secretive nature of such sites makes them difficult to study. But last year a researcher using the pseudonym Gwern Branwen cast some light on them. Roughly once a week between December 2013 and July 2015, programmes he had written crawled 90-odd cryptomarkets, archiving a snapshot of each page . The Economist has extracted data from the resulting 1.5 terabytes of information for around 360,000 sales on Agora, Evolution and Silk Road 2. There are, inevitably, flaws in the data. Mr Branwen’s scrapes probably missed some deals….”