Ivonne. Aplogies, my comments on this photo was rather superficial. The Silk Road was a website facilitating illegal activities on the so called Dark Web. (That portion of the internal only accessible using a browser called "ToR" - The Onion Router - which provides anonymity for its users on the internet.) Imagine Silk Road as a sort of eBay for trading illicit drugs, illegal weapons, outlawed hard core pornography, stolen credit card details, software to perform cyber attacks, etc. As well as using ToR for anonymity transactions also used the Bitcoin crypto curreny for payments to maintain anonymity further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)
The FBI (I'm sure in collaboration with other international agencies and cyber security companies) shut down this site. They then acquired Bitcoins related to the site which
they then sold and transfered to hard currency for a value of $48 million:
https://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-sale-silk-road/
Imperial college has a department specialising in block chain technologies (also known as Distributed Ledger Technologies - DLTs), a technology on which bitcoin is built. DLT has many other legitimate commercial benefits to do with encryption.security, non repudiation, and automatically enacted "smart contracts" (small computer programmes) associated with transactions but that's a complete subject in itself. Anyway, as part of their research IC monitor the Bitcoin block chain and can produce visualizations of transaction activity in realtime. This is a stored picture visualising the FBI's sale of the Silk Road bitcoins. I saw it at a demonstration of the IC Data Observatory although details weren't explain as it was the capabilities of the data views that were being demonstrated to Friends of IC not the specifics of the individual analyses. (More interestingly, they have displays analysing Twitter traffic hashtags prior to the 2016 Brexit referendum and the US elections. Based on that they predicted the outcomes of both in opposition to the opinion polls of the time. That's why I believe - although can't prove conclusively - that both votes were probably subverted by external agents.)
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/business-school/faculty-research/research-centres/imperial-business-analytics/data-observatory/bitcoin-transactions/
Michael Ixer ● 1728d