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Comment by FDSGSG | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is an excellent currency for all sorts of illegal transactions.

Buying or selling drugs online? Odds are you're using in bitcoin. Running a ransomware extortion scheme? Odds are you're using bitcoin for payments. Running an international wire fraud scheme? Odds are your drops are paying you in bitcoin.

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Patently false. It is one of the worst currencies for illegal transactions. The last place you want your illegal money to be is a public ledger. Maybe monero or another private currency would be more common with criminals

Sure, Monero is technically better. But actual usage is what matters, and Monero doesn't have that.

There's one DNM pushing Monero, nobody on cybercrime forums is using it. Ransomware operators have tried it, but usually shifted back to Bitcoin.

It's only an anecdote but I used to buy Adderall on Libertas, which was a Monero-only drug market, seemed to work pretty well and solved a real world problem for me.

And Libertas ended up shutting down because their exotic tech choices drove away all the users.

At least 90% of darknet trade happens using Bitcoin.

Source on that 90%?

I run data collection scripts on 64 different darknet sites. Markets that accept both BTC and XMR get hardly any XMR deposits, WHM is a major market that makes up essentially all the XMR traffic but is growing much slower than BTC-accepting markets despite being very popular on Dread.

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