While downvoting this is warranted, this is certainly true. To catch up on the biggest news that has come out of Bitcoin, I'd suggest reading on 'Silk Road' and Ross Ulbricht. Wired has a very good 2-set long form on this[1].
If you don't want such a verbose story, Ars Techica follwed it well too[2]
By volume, sure, AlphaBay was definitely a bigger successor, but Silk Road was unprecedented. Something like AlphaBay was inevitable after Silk Road (Next was Hansa, but turns out was already a honeypot by that time).
Silk Road was the first to bring forward the notion of how cryptocurrencies can be used for something much more malicious than coffee. The news it made, and with a face to the organization made it a bigger story, and with Federal Officers involved in a related crime, I will maintain it is a much more important story than AlphaBay.
On a sidenote, AlphaBay isn't the all secure operation you think it was, the 'admin' used a clearnet personal email address for some sort of welcome message, and several other stupid mistakes (check out the document posted a couple days ago in detail and a link to a forum in the comments).
There will be another market which will be bigger than AlphaBay. Currencies with more privacy oriented features are coming baked in, so it will be harder to catch them too.
I did not say that at all. Though since you brought it up, the FBI and Dutch Police's explanation for how they busted the site is very suspect. It does not sound legitimate at all, it's much more likely they cracked the site in another (more illegal/unethical) way and used parallel construction to hide what they did.
>>> isn't the all secure operation you think it was
>I did not say that at all.
You didn't, but I said that to show that it didn't earn it's place as the bigger competitor, it was just bound to happen no matter who braved it.
>Though since you brought it up, the FBI and Dutch Police's explanation for how they busted the site is very suspect. It does not sound legitimate at all, it's much more likely they cracked the site in another (more illegal/unethical) way and used parallel construction to hide what they did.
Mostly agree. But I don't think there's anything illegal about cracking the tor network, AlphaBay's servers or one of its admins' computers. There was probably a warrant for whatever they did, especially since it was at the international level involving multiple agencies. It might also be a vulnerability in the tor network, but I bet we would most likely never know.
If you don't want such a verbose story, Ars Techica follwed it well too[2]
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/series/the-silk-road-trial/