Interview With The Admin Of Bitbazaar Market

Hello everybody, I hope you all are doing well. As you guys already know that bitbazaar market is gone, We don’t know yet whether it was an exit scam, a hack or seizure by law enforcement. Bitbazaar was one of the most intriguing marketplaces we have come across. In its short life span it grew steadily to become a mid-level market.

We had the opportunity to talk to its admin many times in the last few months. We conducted an interview with him in April 2020, in which we talked about various things related to his market and overall darkweb situation. Unfortunately we didn’t had the time to publish it then but here it is now, the full unedited interview for your enjoyment.

C. Aliens: Tell us a little about yourself and what you do? (On your Job of course…)

Bitbazaar admin: I am one of the market administrators and my responsibility is monitor all our servers security and traffic (to mitigate attacks and to prevent injections) and to monitor our users activity to block spams and scams requests.

C. Aliens: Please give me a PGP signed proof so that I know you are real admin of BitBazaar?

Bitbazaar admin: 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512


I am one of BitBazaar administrators and I am replying this interview to
DarknetStats.com
Apr 26 2020


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C. Aliens: Can you tell about the history of BitBazaar (for those how don’t know)

Bitbazaar admin: Administrators are old darknet users and unfortunately we got scammed many times, it’s why we started investing to develop a new and fresh market where we can assure the security and to make sure we never will got scammed again. At that time we heard our friends and the community and now, 9 months later, BitBazaar is a from community to community market. It was hard because we are attacked all the time, but it makes us stronger than never.

C. Aliens: What makes BitBazaar distinct from the so many other markets? What about the markets features – what makes it safe to use / better than the others?

Bitbazaar admin: We always work to make great features and to stay being the most complete, safer and trustworthy market. Our main features includes: – Auctions (eBay style) – Accountless, users can buy anonymously without needing create an account so they orders aren’t linked to any account profile and each order have your own temporarily invoice key and invoice password that are completely vanished from our servers when the order is completed – 24 hours support (answer rate ~5-10 minutes) – Multilanguage platform – Built-in forum – Multicurrencies (BTC, XMR, LTC, DASH, ETH and BCH) – Friendly UI/UX – 1% commission fee to vendors, the lowest on entire darknet – 20% referral commission to users, the highest on entire darknet and more…

C. Aliens: What increase have you saw in terms of users, listings and trading volume since Apollon exit scam? What is the size of the market (how many listings / users)?

Bitbazaar admin: We grew around 200% in number of listings and 646% in number of users. We allow our platform to be accountless, we grew 646% of registered users, but the increase was more. Today we have +16,000 listings and +97,000 registered users.

C. Aliens: How much are you making money (~around) for that? I know you/your team working hard for the market doing endless hours.

Bitbazaar admin: We can’t provide this information. We set the lowest fee on the entire darknet (only 1%), this way we don’t profit a lot but it’s the necessary to pay our staff, to maintain our servers and to still developing new features and security updates to our community.

C. Aliens: Are you enforcing PGP encryption or have PGP / 2FA login?

Bitbazaar admin: On our FAQ page we have a section dedicated to buyers and we strongly recommend them to enable 2FA. Today we only enforce 2FA to vendors that are growing in number of sales, to users we do our best to educate them to enable it and our system have an own encryption service where all sensitive data can be encrypted automatically before being sent to other user/vendor.

C. Aliens: What is your vision for BitBazaar? How do you see your market progress and grow in six to twelve months?

Bitbazaar admin: As we told before, we still working hard to make sure the darknet community will have a trustworthy, safer and complete place to deal freely. Recently we grew a lot since some famous exit scams and we want to still updating BitBazaar platform to make sure it will be always safer than never and to our staff doing the best OpSec to assure we will still here to serve the community doing our best as we ever do. Our target to next six and twelve months? In 6 months we want to be the number 3 market within the biggest markets and being responsible for at least 20% of the darknet transactions. In 12 months we want to be the market number 1 and take at least 50% of the transactions made in darknet.

C. Aliens: What is the number of current personnel/staff of BitBazaar?

Bitbazaar admin: Inside our team we have 6 people working as security specialist, developer, sysadmin and support.

C. Aliens: Do you have any security staff available to answer user questions or respond to critical user findings related to the security of BitBazaar? Has BitBazaar’s software been tested for security flaws?

Bitbazaar admin: Yes, our platform is tested daily and it’s why we have security specialist focused to find new attacks vulnerabilities and to test it in BitBazaar platform. Our 24 hours support is always prepared to receive bugs and breaches reports and it’s included on our Bug Bounty Program.

C. Aliens: You seem to implement all the right features needed by both vendors and users. How did you mitigate the recent ddos attacks on your market when most of the other darknet markets were down?

Bitbazaar admin: Initially we also faced hard DDoS attacks and old users will remember in Christmas we started to being attack and we only mitigated this attack 2 weeks later. Thanks to our community support we back stronger than never and now we have +100 servers to maintain BitBazaar online and to mitigate all attacks, it’s why now we have the most stable platform within darknet marketplaces. We are being DDoSed all the time and some days it reach 400,000 requests per second, but our technical team work very well and we always mitigate it.

C. Aliens: We see that you are now using the same ddos captcha built by Dread’s admin HugBunter. Dont you think its dangerous to use code built by other market admins? Did you test it for any backdoors it may have?

Bitbazaar admin: Our captcha is not the same from Dread. We analyzed their code and we developed our own captcha based on their, this way we can make sure it’s 100% safe.

C. Aliens: Are you still getting ddosd? How well is this captcha doing?

Bitbazaar admin: This new captcha model works very well, as we said before some days we have 400,000 requests per second, but this captcha help us to mitigate the attacks.

C. Aliens: Got any Tip for the market users to make their stay and usage safer?

Bitbazaar admin: We always recommend our users to use Tails (or Qubes+Whonix), disable Javascript on Tor configuration and to always set 2FA based on PGP to assure their accounts security and to prevent funds losses. Also we strongly recommend them to only visit our platform using our official URLs (like our links listed on DarknetStats.com) and to never trust when someone sent a different link. Don’t forget to always encrypt sensitive data before send it to another user.

C. Aliens: Anything else we did not mention that you would like to add?

Bitbazaar admin: We want to thank you DarknetStats.com about this interview and for this opportunity to show a bit more about the BitBazaar history and main principles. We expect and we work hard to still here for the long term and to still helping and doing our best to all darknet community to make sure now we will have the most complete, trustworthy and safer marketplace. Enjoy darknet, use BitBazaar.

——Interview End——

I hope you have enjoyed reading the interview as much as I did doing it.

Yours truly,
C. Aliens