and you believe that? They have no idea of knowing and each day would be different. Those numbers were probably pulled by the number of forum users or someshit.
Well it was an almost year long research project at the University of Carnegie Mellon.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1.pdfAbstract
We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods being sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics. A relatively small “core” of about 60 sellers has been present throughout our measurement interval, while the majority of sellers leaves (or goes “underground”) within a couple of weeks of their first appearance. We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers to approximately USD 1.9 million per month; this corresponds to about USD 143,000 per month
in commissions perceived by the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over the past few months. We discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results, including ethical considerations for future research in this area.
They did a complete scrape of the entire SR every day for eight months and dumped the listings, feedback, and order statuses into a database. From that and analyzing the daily changes and timestamps they built a model to extrapolate daily and monthly volume. Slight more than just "pulled by the number of forum users or someshit".
While obviously is some error (it is an estimate) it is the most detailed look at the SR yet. It seems unlikely their methodology would be so bad that they are off by a magnitude. Their estimate is SR operator has gross revenue of ~$200K per month. If it is $150K or $400 it doesn't really material change the assessment that Pirate operation is simply too large to be the SR tumbler. Hell even if the SR operator
GROSS REVENUE was $2 million (a stretch to think their methodology was that inaccurate) it seems very unlikely they would give 60% of that away for "tumbling services".
