Darknet surge: virtual currency becomes a criminal bargaining chip
The "economic powerhouses" on the dark web are enough to support the defense line of virtual currency value. In 2014, the average daily Bitcoin transaction volume on the six major darknets reached US$650,000, while the average daily transaction volume of BitPay, the world's first formal Bitcoin payment provider, was only US$435,000.
As the price of Bitcoin skyrockets, transaction fees continue to be high. Litecoin, which has similar functions to Bitcoin but has better transaction speed and fee prices, briefly occupied the mainstream of darknet transactions. However, due to privacy issues, it was quickly replaced by Monero.
Monero has added technologies such as ring signatures and obfuscated addresses to increase anonymity. This "invisible" function makes it impossible for people to judge the flow of funds, and even if the address is tracked, it cannot be traced back to the original holder. In July 2017, when Alpha Bay, the largest darknet market, was seized, 160,500 Bitcoins, 258,300 Ethereums, and 369,100 Zcash were all confiscated, but only Monero, an unknown amount due to the lack of private keys. . Monero, which even the U.S. Army and the National Security Agency were helpless to do anything about, was once sought after by darknet traders.
But Monero’s frequent hard forks have also become a time bomb in darknet payments, so the Dash application was born. The anonymity of Dash is achieved through currency mixing technology, which means that all tokens from several transactions are mixed together and then sent to different payees. In this way, every time the currency is mixed, the transaction originator will be traced. The difficulty of square addresses increases exponentially. As a result, Dash has become a new choice for darknet transactions.
It is worth mentioning that the value of virtual currencies that are frequently used in the dark web has also increased. Bitcoin has soared 3 million times in ten years, Dash increased by 8000% in 2017, and the price of Monero increased by 50% in 2016. Someone joked about this and said, "Usually, the cryptocurrencies used by drug traffickers will eventually become mainstream currencies." change
