The New Invite-Only Dark Web Market for All-Natural Drugs

​You know that friend with the Bob Marley banner hanging on her wall? The one that thinks "Don't Worry, Be Happy" is by Bob Marley, and goes on about how pot is safe because it's from the Earth, and the Earth can't hurt? You know who I'm talking about. That friend. There's now a market on the dark web for her.

Havana is a market with a focus on pot, pot derivatives such as edibles, and mushrooms. No synthetically produced drugs are allowed, and neither are the kinds of services that pop up on other markets: offers for stolen credit cards, hacked Uber accounts, and Amazon return scams. The idea is that Havana is a place for people who just want to buy some weed cookies, which some users believe could improve the public's perception of the darknet, especially as the marijuana legalization movement continues to gain steam. "Like, think about how the media views this," a user called "Flowers_n_bongs" wrote on Reddit. "'Oh, all these awful markets with their drugs and weapons, trying to get users hooked on child porn yadda yadda yadda,' but these markets are just for safe transactions and all they have are drugs."

Havana launched in beta on an invite-only basis yesterday, and currently only highly rated vendors on other darknet markets are being allowed to sling on the site. Havana's selling points include a slick user interface—most markets on the dark net are pretty Web 1.0—and an easy to use multi-signature payment system that uses an open source applet called BitSigner, which is aimed at cutting down on a common form of fraud known as an "exit scam."

A functional and uncomplicated multi-signature system is more or less the holy grail for darknet drug buyers who lost Bitcoin in any of the numerous multi-million dollar scams that have plagued the darknet over the last several years.

The market's launch caused a bit of a hubbub on Reddit's /r/DarkNetMarkets subreddit, with users praising the site's BitSigner multi-signature system and scrambling to get invites to the site. But not everyone has been so bullish. Some users believe that Havana's owners are a bit lost on the security front.

One user, "Sapiophile," noticed some red flags, the most serious of which was the Havana owners' suggestion that users employ a cryptographic function called MD5 to check their BitSigner download for signs of tampering. MD5 has been hackable for about a decade, and most cryptography enthusiasts have moved on to more secure standards.

"In my opinion, you really need to shape up," Sapiophile wrote, "or this stuff will come back to bite you and/or your users in the ass—unless that's what you're going for?"

This warning is particularly meaningful for Havana, since Cannabis Road, the last big drug market to try and go full-on granola, was hacked and lost tens of thousands of users' Bitcoins in one fell swoop.

None of these things will really matter unless people actually use Havana. When I checked the site out, it seemed like every listing is an example made by a single vendor called Fidel_Castro, and the forums were similarly dead. Since Havana's operators are being pretty selective in who they let in during its beta stage, it's possible that the market will eventually become more active.

Really, Havana is just the latest entrant in an exploding ecosystem of darknet markets each claiming to be more secure and lawful than the last. But with simple multi-signature payments, an interface that's easy on the eyes, and an all-natural bent, it could very well take off among the darknet's green crowd.