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| Courtesy of Flickr |
For
more than a thousand years, the route known as the Silk Road was the major
source of trade that connected East and West. Delivering everything from
Chinese silk to spices and precious gems, this trade route used everything from
camels to wooden boats to create a web of commerce that covered the known
world. Two millennia later, this concept was reborn online in a web portal
of the same name. The chief difference is that while the digital Silk
Road did indeed concern itself with connecting a worldwide web of virtual
traders, these entrepreneurs did not deal in frankincense and myrrh, but in a
cornucopia of contraband that openly advertised everything from cannabis to cocaine
and firearms to forgeries.
