It leads one to wonder... what is the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers.
Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers?
Maybe some smaller African nations? Botswana? Mali? Burkina Faso? Togo? But what's the state of 'net connectivity there? Is sufficient bandwidth available? Are there colo centers or hosting providers there? I honestly don't know...
OK, maybe I was being a little glib. But still, the news reports I hear from that area haven't been very positive as of late, and I do wonder if the country is fundamentally stable enough to rely on hosting anything there.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Are you suggesting that Venezuela hasn't been undergoing a recent period of extreme economic and political turmoil and uncertainty?
I have thinking about this and I don't think it really has to do with location of your servers, it is the coding and architecture of the server environment along with server operators OPSEC.
All of the Dark Net drug website busts I have seen over the last few years are because of poor coding, poor architecture, poor security and even worse OPSEC. The people who run these sites are not professionals.
That's a good point, but I can't help but think it would also help to have your servers (and possibly yourself) located in a geo that isn't so willing to bend to the whims the US, various European states, etc.
That would also be very helpful but hiding the ownership of a server behind a wall of LLC's and Trusts from various locations around the world is also a good idea.
I was thinking you would need to ship them custom servers and have a specific network setup on the system. Standard out of the box rental servers are not going to work.
I honestly don't know how that would work with getting servers to an ISP for them to rack and follow the networking instructions.
Even if you did colo and shipped out your own boxes you wouldn't need to set up real LLCs. Fake information would still work fine, many places do colo for bitcoin.
I wonder whether it is theoretically possible to use small-sized botnet (500 nodes?) for p2p hosting. Something IPFS/Maidsafe/Storj-like, for example, tweaked for even more redundancy and small resource consumption.
Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers?
Maybe some smaller African nations? Botswana? Mali? Burkina Faso? Togo? But what's the state of 'net connectivity there? Is sufficient bandwidth available? Are there colo centers or hosting providers there? I honestly don't know...
Other possibilities?