News Feed
- DrugHub has agreed to fully refund all users who lost money in the SuperMarket exit scam.
- Retro Market has gone offline. Circumstances of the closure unknown.
- SuperMarket has closed following an exit scam by one of the admins.
- The admin of Incognito Market, Pharoah, has been arrested by the FBI several months after exit scamming.
- Silk Road
- darknet markets list
- Popular P2P exchange LocalMonero has announced it is closing.
If you for instance want to avoid using specific servers, or you want to be in control of your SMP server communication, etc. you could motivate this. On the other hand, you will be exposed to many attack vectors.
You need to consider the benefits with the concerns before just doing it.
If your goal is to reduce metadata exposure, then it might be worth it. But that assumes you already solved:
payment (anon)
hosting (non-traceable VPS or local box behind decoyed relay)
endpoint hygiene (no leaks, no DNS, no WebRTC, hardened OS)
physical risk (no tie to your identity/location)
Otherwise, you shift trust from third-party infra → to yourself without being more secure.
Also consider: SMP is async, no push notifications unless you build polling or push mechanisms, which introduces side-channels. Hosting also requires uptime, maintenance, patching against 0-days.
My take: unless you operate at vendor level opsec or above, you gain more by using vetted infra behind layered anonymity (VPN→Tor→client). Hosting should be a last step, not the first.