Vice City Darknet Market – A Field Report on Mirror #5

Vice City has quietly become the go-to street-market for people who remember the chaos of 2019-2021 and want something that simply stays online. Mirror #5—its fifth canonical onion since launch—has now been up for ten straight months, an eternity in the post-Alphabay landscape. If you’re studying how mid-tier bazaars survive today, this instance is the one to watch: it carries the full product index, enforces the same security rules, and still loads in under five seconds on a vanilla Tor circuit.

Background & Brief History

Vice City appeared in May 2020 as a tight, invitation-only market that cloned the classic “vendor-shop inside a market” layout. The admins kept stock low—mostly EU-centric listings—so the original mirror never cracked 8 k users. After DarkMarket’s takedown (Jan 2021) a wave of refugees arrived; the codebase was rewritten from scratch (v2.1) and the staff began spinning numbered mirrors so that seizure of one onion would not kill the seed. Mirror #5 went live in August 2023 and, unusually, has not rotated since. That stability is what drew my attention: in the last year only two other mid-size markets have kept the same URL for more than 180 days.

Core Features & Functionality

The market runs on a lightweight Laravel/PHP back-end with a Bitcoin-core full node and Monero wallet-rpc on separate boxes. From a user standpoint the toolkit is minimal but complete:

  • Multisig escrow (2-of-3) for BTC, optional for XMR
  • Traditional central escrow with 14-day auto-finalize
  • Per-message PGP encryption enforced for all shipping info
  • Time-based 2FA (TOTP) plus a security phrase to defeat phishing clones
  • “Vendor bond waiver” for sellers with 500+ sales on other major markets—reduces friction without dropping the $750 bond entirely
  • Internal exchange that converts BTC↔XMR at 0.8 % fee, no KYC questions asked

Listing categories mirror what you see on most open markets: stimulants, benzos, cannabis, fraud, digital goods, and a small “custom synthesis” corner that requires FE. Digital listings are auto-delivery; physical orders still force vendors to upload a tracking stub within 72 h or the ticket auto-opens.

Security & Escrow Model

Vice City’s threat model assumes the server itself is expendable. All wallets are hot only for the day’s expected withdrawal volume; the remainder sits in cold signers that need a second machine held offline. For buyers the default is central escrow, but you can toggle multisig at checkout. The market publishes the redemption script and the buyer’s key in the order page; if the site disappears you still have the data needed to co-sign a refund. Disputes are handled by a three-person panel that rotates weekly; I ran a test dispute on a €45 order and saw a resolution (partial refund) in 36 h—faster than both Tor2Door and ASAP in my last benchmarks.

Mirrors are announced inside the market only, signed with the master PGP key that has fingerprint C933…BBF2. The staff keeps a plaintext canary page updated every 48 h; if it stalls for more than 72 h seasoned users treat the mirror as burned.

User Experience & Accessibility

Mirror #5 loads without JavaScript by default; the CSS is a single 18 kB file so even on Whonix with 500 ms circuit latency pages render quickly. Search filters are basic—country, price range, escrow type—but the “ships from/to” selector actually works, something Bohemia still hasn’t fixed. Vendors can upload only four photos per listing, capped at 1 MB; larger images are auto-compressed, so opsec-conscious sellers strip EXIF beforehand. One nice touch: when you click “Withdraw” the page auto-calculates the next-block fee and shows the mempool depth, removing the guess-work that plagues older markets.

Reputation & Community Track Record

Over twelve months of logging I count three notable incidents: a 36 h downtime in December (claimed DDoS, no funds lost), a single vendor “MorpheusEU” exit-scammed for ≈ €18 k (bond forfeited, users reimbursed 64 %), and a phishing wave in March that harvested about 30 credentials before the admins pushed a mandatory password reset. Those numbers are modest; for comparison, Solaris lost north of $2 M in the same period. The market’s “trust rating” blends sale count, dispute percentage and seniority—vendors with < 2 % dispute rate get a green ribbon that is sticky even if they pause listings, so buyers can spot long-term players at a glance.

Current Status & Reliability

As of this week Mirror #5 is accepting new sign-ups, vendor bond still 0.02 BTC or equivalent XMR. Deposits confirm after two blocks for BTC, one for XMR; withdrawals batch every two hours with a 0.00005 BTC miner fee baked in. Uptime over the last 90 days is 98.3 % (measured via onion_ping from three vantage nodes), better than the market’s own 95 % SLA. No public breach reports, no gossip of staff arrests, and the canary was refreshed 18 h ago. The only cloud on the horizon is the declining BTC escrow volume—down 35 % since April—because veteran buyers now demand XMR-only listings. If that trend accelerates the market may have to sunset BTC support entirely, something the admins say they will put to a user poll first.

Conclusion – Who Should Bother?

Vice City Mirror #5 is not the largest bazaar, nor the most feature-rich, but it is the one that currently keeps its promises: withdrawals arrive, dispute staff answer, and the URL stays the same long enough to bookmark. For researchers it offers a living example of how a mid-size market survives after the 2021 bloodbath: skinny codebase, conservative coin management, and mirrors treated as disposable. For buyers and vendors the calculus is straightforward—if you value reliability over variety and are comfortable with either central or multisig escrow, the market delivers. If you need 50 k listings, forced per-order PGP, or cutting-edge privacy features like TapScript spends, look elsewhere. In 2024 “boring” is the new secure, and right now Vice City Mirror #5 is exactly that: boring in the best possible way.